[ExI] Silence in the sky-but why?

[Tomaz Kristan]

BillK,

> 2) They might get control of their pleasure centres and exit to nirvana.

Their nirvana might end soon. Either by our (or somebody else)
intervention, either by a GRB nearby. Even if you are in a nirvana, you
must take care of your neighborhood if you want your nirvana to last.

Your neighborhood is the Universe.






On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 5:51 PM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 3:44 PM, spike wrote:
> > We must recognize that as mind boggling as the thought may be, it is a
> > possible explanation for the silent sky: we really are the first ones
> here.
> > If true, this generates a line of thought even more astonishing.  If we
> are
> > the first tech enabled species in the galaxy, then this whole thing is
> ours,
> > all of it, but there is a catch.  We need to hurry.  Reasoning: we model
> > intelligence as an ever upward climb towards more and better, but it is
> not
> > necessarily so.  Humanity is accumulating knowledge at a high rate, but
> our
> > collective intelligence may or may not increase in the long run.  I can
> > easily imagine mechanisms which would cause average intelligence to
> > decrease.
> >
> > We may be at, or nearing, or possibly even past, the peak average
> > intelligence of our species, depending on how it is measured, and that
> last
> > phrase is very important.  I know we have these IQ tests and performance
> is
> > going up.  But we may be fooling ourselves.
> >
> > We tend to wait around for nano-santa to show up, but he may not.  Robust
> > nanotech might happen and not kill us, but it is speculative.  We have a
> > number of technologies we conceive, as a class could be called PS^2B^2,
> for
> > Pie in the Sky in the Sweet By and By.  But if we really ponder, we have
> a
> > technology I call P^2DN^2 for Potatoes on the Plate in the Dirty Now and
> > Now.   An example of the latter would be the primitive MBrain nodes I
> > sketched in a post a few days ago.
> >
> >
>
> That is another alternative to the fate of intelligent civilizations.
>
> 1) They might keep going upwards and decide to do something else than
> spam the galaxy.
>
> 2) They might get control of their pleasure centres and exit to nirvana.
>
> 3) Intelligence might peak and then dwindle away as it ceased to be an
> evolutionary factor.
>
> Your suggestion 3) has support in that people are delegating more
> intelligence to their devices nowadays than ever before. One article
> commented that we used to casually remember dozens of phone numbers,
> but we have lost that ability as our phones do the remembering. We
> used to do mental arithmetic to add up bills, calculate percentages,
> etc., but not now. We used to read maps and plan journeys, but now we
> just key into the GPS system. And so on....
>
> People think spending hours updating their status and reading and
> commenting on their friend's status is a significant activity.
>
> Actually, in some ways it might be. I note that Obama thinks that
> because hundreds of terrorists have tweeted and posted Youtube videos
> claiming the Assad military gassed civilians, that constitutes real
> evidence.
> Can a few thousand 'likes' really start a war? What a strange world we
> live in.
>
> BillK
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