[ExI] Extraterrestrial liberty and colonising the universe

[Dennis May]

My colleague Stuart lectures at the British Interplanetary Society on 
colonizing the universe and
 what this might mean for liberty:

http://youtu.be/mrUWkfeJABY

-- 
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University
 
*****
 
Not bad.  We need to learn more lessons from nature however.
The Fermi Paradox is not solved in this video.
 
Why aren't we a thousand miles deep in grasshoppers?
A: disease, parasites, predators, cannibalism, resources to survive/replicate.
 
Locust grasshoppers turn to cannibalism when water runs low.
 
Given time to evolve - grasshoppers and their diseases, parasites,
and predators will evolve new relationships and capabilities.  So
whatever started out is not what will exist a short time later
during the process of spreading into the universe.

Getting there first gives an advantage in some ways but it also
creates the opportunity for predators to thrive off of the first
arrivals.  

Given the large amount of time available you would expect many
waves of immigrants to have passed through each bringing with
them diseases, parasites, predators, and prey - just as we have
on Earth today.  In each case we never get the thousand mile
deep grasshopper situation.  Local blooms of one kind or another
of many types of creatures but nothing that lasts.

Dennis May    
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20130621/bbcea2f6/attachment.html>