From: BillK (bill@wkidston.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Thu Aug 07 2003 - 13:44:01 MDT
On Wed Aug 06, 2003 11:31 pm Lee Corbin wrote:
>
> You wrote earlier
>
>> It seems probable to me that an advanced civilization will be a
>> K-strategy, monoculture population with no need or desire for rapid
>> reproduction. (They may send out probes for curiosity's sake, but no
>> expansion).
>
> No way. Advanced civilization will resemble---from the
> outside---The Blob, all absorbing and all engulfing.
> The term "reproduction" that I used was meant quite
> abstractly---literally turning remote matter into
> intelligence something like one already is. Not genes
> and DNA.
>
>> The other alternative, of course, is as Lee originally
>> suggested, that we are actually the first intelligent
>> species in our light cone.
>
> Isn't that where all the evidence points at present?
> Actually, I want to thank Rafal for bringing up in
> a different post
>
>> ### Have you read "Burning the Cosmic Commons:
>> Evolutionary Strategies for Interstellar
>> Colonization" by Robin Hanson?
>
> There are quite a number of productive places in that
> essay to take off from
>
> http://hanson.gmu.edu/filluniv.pdf
>
Well, I have no idea really what the structures and driving forces of a
post-singularity civilization will be. And I probably wouldn't
understand them if they tried to explain them to me.
I am still open to the idea that the Great Silence is because they
choose not to be expansionist - at least, not expansionist into the
physical universe that we can see with our instruments.
But maybe we are the first! Somebody has to be, after all.
As an aside, Robin's excellent analysis assumes a space-capable
civilization whose main objective is expansion and colonisation. Like a
Star Trek type of civ. It doesn't help with the problem of WHY a
post-singularity civilization composed almost entirely of old, immortal
beings already in possession of virtually unlimited resources would want
to expand.
BillK
__________________________________________________________________________
Join Freeserve http://www.freeserve.com/time/
Winner of the 2003 Internet Service Providers' Association awards for Best Unmetered ISP and Best Consumer Application.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Aug 07 2003 - 13:56:03 MDT