[ExI] Fermi Paradox and Transcension

BillK pharos at gmail.com
Wed Sep 5 22:01:56 UTC 2012


On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 10:23 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> It depends on their technology and society, I doubt there is any general
> statement that can be made. For Fermi question purposes it is enough to note
> that there could well be 1% remnants that could expand greatly - consider a
> near-singularity culture where people have nanoassemblers and libraries of
> blueprints. In order for this argument to work as a patch for the attractor
> argument you need to show that it is likely that *no* remnants ever can
> spread. And I am pretty confident that if you have copyable minds and a bit
> of nanotech you could definitely spam the universe.
>
>

If they are using mind uploading (and copying) and nanotech, they are
not really opting out much, are they? :)

Once your mind is uploaded and operating at computronium speed, then
spamming the universe would just seem silly. If you fire off a rocket,
then after a subjective thousand years in your computronium nest the
rocket appears to have moved about one mile. It will be subjective
millions of years before the rocket gets anywhere.


>
> Yes, but he has not proven (or even made plausible) that STEM is such an
> inevitable point.
>
>

True. The proof comes next week.  ;)


> To work as an explanation it needs to be plausible that it is inevitable on
> a civilisation scale but also on the individual scale. It is the later that
> I find a very bold and unsupported claim. Why would *all* alien space-Amish
> want STEM? Why would *all* alien explorers decide it is better to live in
> black holes before launching exploration projects? Why would *all* alien
> artists decide that pretentious art projects that take eons to unfold are
> too much work?
>

We don't yet know why. But the silence tells us there IS a reason.

'Individuals' may not exist for much longer. In a computronium civ,
who knows how it will be structured?

If individuals 'opt-out', then they probably won't have the resources
and tech they need. Starships will require pretty huge resources. The
logic doesn't seem to work. They can't have it both ways.

BillK



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