> "Michael S. Lorrey" <mike@lorrey.com> wrote:
>
> You are both wrongly assuming that all technological civilizations would
> have similar exponent courves in technological/population development.
I'm not making this assumption. Dyson argued 40 years ago, even if we slowed ourselves down to a 1% annual growth rate, we still reach a power consumption level of the entire solar output in only 3000 years! Another SETI researcher made the point it is difficult to imagine a society that could maintain a 0.000000...% growth rate for thousands (or millions) of years (either you have an accident or you decay away *or* you eventually evolve to your environmental limits).
I would also argue that by definition "technological civilizations" get on pretty exponential growth paths. Humans didn't have exponential growth (in fact we were barely surviving as a species) *until* we developed the technologies that allowed us to manipulate the environment in ways more sophisticated than our genetic program allowed.
I believe you have to make a concrete case that a developing technological species/civilization would consciously *choose* to terminate its growth. That means that you have to negate the fundamental self-preservation and/or reproductive instincts necessary for life. As I've discussed in other threads -- if you want to be immortal, you have to eliminate reproduction -- if you want to reproduce, you have to choose to die (or prevent the development of technologies that enable personal immortality). There *are* hard limits to growth. There may be a few examples of Vulcans in the galaxy, but they should not be in the majority (the majority would seem to be those species that take as much as they can and hold it the longest). The exception to that would appear to be cultures that follow a trans-humanist (trans-Natural-ist?) path where they mentally/genetically engineer out the drives that nature builds in.
> You are assuming that EVERY society will want to transcend, rather than
> just staying at a comfortable early 21st century level.
The environmental movement has been trying for 30-40 years to "stop" our growth without much success. The primary reason is hasn't worked is that we can siphon off a fraction of our productivity growth and technological capacities and apply these to solving the environmental problems. It is pretty clear at this point that we can develop the technologies to expand to the limits allowed on the planet and then off the planet. That realization should occur in any other technological civilization as well (if you wait long enough).
Dr. Hekimi (the discover of the clk gene in nemetodes), once made the comment to me -- "if man can imagine it and it is possible, sooner or later he will do it". That seems very to true me, it seems to arise from the nature of competition and the direct or indirect advantages one derives from creating something new, different or better.
If evolving to the limit of physics *is* feasible, and "life" is designed to "evolve", can you make a case for the cessation of evolution?
> You are also wrongly assuming that following a singularity by some
> percentage of the population that the rest of the population just
> dissapears.
No, not really. It doesn't matter in my mind whether
(1) Bill Gates turns himself into an M-Brain and turns off the
sun on the rest of us.
(2) We all (every single individual who wants it) turns themselves
into a unified collective M-brain and
(a) Takes the Hydrogen in Jupiter and leaves the solar system,
leaving behind the luddites who didn't want to join us.
(b) Dismantles every single aggregate of atoms in the solar
system (other planets, asteroids, earth (and the luddites
on it), the sun, etc.) for reformation into an optimal
computational architecture.
The point would be that in in both (1) and (2) you still get an M-Brain
and M-Brains seem to have lifetimes of the order of the longevity of
the universe. In 2a the luddites probably have a maximum lifetime
of a few billion years (until the sun becomes a red-giant), unless
they decide to move the planet or "manage" the sun (then they aren't
luddites any more). Since the M-Brains are now at the top of the
evolutionary ladder (biggest, most intelligent, longest lived, able
to anticipate and avoid any potential hazards, etc.) they have to become
the most populous "species". [Survival of the fittest.]
M-brains don't *have* to harvest or dismantle any of the
luddites or their star (there is plenty of other material around
from which to construct and power themselves at the time of the
singularity). Whether they chose to behave that way may depend a
lot on the path by which they develop -- a self-evolving
AI with no "moral" code probably would consume us
There is one objection to all of this and that is that the waters of the singularity slope are so rough that virtually *all* civilizations capsize trying to navigate them. However you have to invoke a grey goo type scenario that so totally destroys the civilization that it never recovers to approach the singularity river ever again.
Robert