[ExI] Past and current extropy topics

Keith Henson hkeithhenson at gmail.com
Thu Nov 17 00:20:18 UTC 2016


https://www.academia.edu/777381/Evolutionary_psychology_memes_and_the_origin_of_war

An earlier version was up on kuro5hin.org.  Unfortunately when that
web site went down for good, the version was lost.  If any of you
happen to have saved a copy, I would appreciate you sending me one.
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/4/17/194059/296
Best wishes,

Keith


On Wed, Nov 16, 2016 at 1:03 PM, William Flynn Wallace
<foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Evolutionary psychology is another topic.  It's interesting that a 10
> year old paper I wrote is still seeing a lot of downloads.
>
> Would you please provide a link for your paper?  Anything on psychology I
> would be interested in.  bill w
>
> On Wed, Nov 16, 2016 at 2:25 PM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> If you want a summary of what was discussed back in the early days of
>> the list, it's hard to beat Charles Stross's Accelerando.  He was on
>> the list, might still be for all I know.
>>
>> Computronium, Matrioshka brain, planet disintegrating, it's all there.
>> Even the exchanges between Hans Maravec and me about the merits of
>> cryonics vs authors being reconstructed from their works was turned
>> into a plot element toward the end.
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain
>>
>> The current topic is that we might have seen one of them.  Tabby's
>> star radiates no excess IR in our direction, and the light from this
>> star has dimmed by 15 percent in the last 100 years, not counting the
>> huge dips Kepler saw.
>>
>> Are we looking at something natural or are we looking at an alien
>> megastructure?  A few months before the first paper on KIC8462852, I
>> published a design that just happened to radiate the waste heat from a
>> power satellite solar north/south.  Observers looking edge on at a
>> system full of these would not see the IR.  If you make the case that
>> aliens are dimming the star, what are they doing with the energy?
>> Even making the case that the power satellite band is only blocking 1%
>> of the star's light, that's a lot of energy.  What could they be doing
>> with it?  At 3% per year growth in energy, use, how far does that put
>> them ahead of us?
>>
>> Perhaps aliens have another way to cope with waste heat.  In theory
>> you could dump it down a black hole.  We don't think the universe is
>> filled with Dyson spheres because we don't see a lot of IR.  But it
>> aliens have a way to get rid of waste heat besides radiating it, that
>> could be the answers to the missing mass problem.
>>
>> If this isn't enough, there is a group that claims to have seen
>> spectral shifts in the Sloan data for a couple of hundred stars in
>> classes similar to that of the Sun.  They make a case that the cause
>> is big lasers and that it might be attempts to communicate in ways
>> that make it cheap on the receiver end.
>>
>> I have argued that the natural course for intelligence is to speed up,
>> which has the effect of inflating the distances between stars beyond
>> reason.  Still, if this is the background cause for what we see out
>> there, why are there no exceptions?  I.e., why are they not here?  Is
>> the physics that restrictive?
>>
>> It's a topic which seems to have little interest here but the whole
>> business of moving into space  was, long ago, an extropian topic.  I
>> think there are only two people who are on this list and power
>> satellite economics.  Now there is a chance that (as a solution to
>> energy and carbon) it might be done.
>>
>> Evolutionary psychology is another topic.  It's interesting that a 10
>> year old paper I wrote is still seeing a lot of downloads.  Could a
>> political political party be based on EP?
>>
>> Finally, are we living in the base reality or a simulation?  This
>> isn't exactly an extropian question though it has been discussed here.
>>
>>
>> Best wishes,
>>
>> Keith
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>
>
>
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