[extropy-chat] The Drake Equation and Spatial Proximity

Robert Bradbury robert.bradbury at gmail.com
Tue Oct 24 14:52:17 UTC 2006


On 10/23/06, Brian Atkins <brian at posthuman.com> wrote:
>
> I wrote:
> > It has little to do with the P.D.  It has much more to do with the fact
> > that > it is a waste of time and energy to attempt "talking" to a pre
> KT-I
> > civilization when you can wait 10-50 years and talk to something much
> more
> > "interesting".
>
> But that's not a very nice stance is it? During such a waiting period many
> many
> millions/billions of intelligences in that new civ will die.


True.  And of course you could set up sims with approximations starting from
observations of the 2000, or 1900, or 1800, or ... Earth and run them
forward to say 2050 to determine the *precise* point and method of contact
required to save the greatest number of "conscious" entities [1].  Now of
course the further back you go the more computational capacity and energy
would be required to do this.  At some point you have to ask "What is a
single nematode (for we are as less then nematodes to KT-II+ civilizations)
really worth?  And besides, you are going to have to either delete or in the
best case suspend all of those sims that you ran to try and determine the
"best" intervention point.

As I've said before in the past -- *if* the goal is to produce the greatest
diversity in the Universe (explore as much of the phase space as possible)
-- then prime directive type arguments do have merit.  Do KT-II
civilizations view it as a *right* of pre-KT-I civilizations to make (or not
make) the transition on their own?

Just as there are folks around today who want to help out wild animals, I
> expect
> there would be folks in a many post-singularity civs who want to "save the
> sentients" from involuntary death and other indignities throughout the
> rest of
> the universe. All it would take is one of them from one post-S civ
> designing and
> launching one self replicating probe that would then spread throughout all
> galaxies over time to survey systems and then introduce itself and its
> potentialities to the local intelligences.


But it is unnecessary.  We've been figuring it out on our own.  Dyson wrote
the Dyson shell paper in 1960.  Kardashev the KT-I/II/III paper in 1963.
People like Harris, Dennett & Dawkins point out how we have to dig ourselves
out of our genetic & societal predispositions for belief in "magic" -- in
contrast to the SETI hope that "magical" scientific intervention will coerce
large numbers into altering their beliefs.  Indeed -- to really eliminate
the beliefs one probably has to send in the nanorobots to restructure those
neural pathways -- otherwise one has nothing but new beliefs on top of old
beliefs.

Perhaps (and here is where I can see the flames coming...) there is nothing
so very special about our "intelligence" or our "consciousness" -- after all
it is simply ions moving into or out of cells (current flows) in unique
patterns.  So what if we lose one, a million or even all of these instances?
[2]

Robert

1. If of course you consider a species that produces and slaughters tens or
hundreds of millions of semi-conscious species (cows, pigs, sheep, etc.)
annually as consisting of "intelligence" worth saving.  And then of course
there are the intelligences (whales) which we slaughted wholesale and the
intelligences (dolphins) that we are rather careless about killing as a side
effect of harvesting the less conscious/intelligent fish species.
2. Yes, I know you *care* about *your* ion pattern flows and about those of
you children, parents, brothers, sisters, community, country and maybe your
football team or humanity as a whole -- but those thougs are simply more ion
pattern flows as well.
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