On Wed, 22 Mar 2000, Technotranscendence wrote:
> Michael's point being?
I think he was pointing out that we have a stable situation currently
and why the global-warming camp is a bit excessive. As Daniel points
out it may be a separate thread. I'm sure people are aware that
from a nanotech standpoint putting the CO2 into the atmosphere is
good. However that doesn't diminish the problems it may produce.
The question is how to tax the Chinese to provide money for people in
places like the Maldives and Bahamas to literally "uplift" themselves.
> The actual instabilities now being theorized are much greater than
> was once thought.
Precisely. So it remains unclear whether the extinction events rollback
the evolutionary clocks, drive the development vectors in different
directions (e.g. a freeze-tolerant bacteria branch and an environmental
extreme archea branch), or would function to accelerate overall
evolution by generating more genetic nano-machines and faster
ways of recombining them to generate diversity.
> My only reason for bringing up this work was to
> show that life has survived through some pretty serious sh*t here on Earth,
> which gives me hope it has done so elsewhere.
Interestingly, last weeks issue of Nature has two relevant articles.
"Delayed biological recovery from extinctions throughout the fossil record",
James W. Kirchner & Anne Weil, Nature 404:177-180
URL: http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v404/n6774/full/404177a0_fs.html
and
"Palaeontology: Life's downs and ups", Douglas Erwin, Nature 404:129-130
URL: http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v404/n6774/full/404129a0_fs.html
[Login's required for URLs.]
The basic results suggest that evolutionary recovery of diversity from
extinction events has a lag of ~10 million years. The event takes
species back to a level where certain generalists survive, then as they
evolve into the unfilled niches, they in turn create new niches
that other species may diversify into. Another way of looking at
this is that diversity breeds diversity or complexity promotes
complexity.
> This still doesn't mean there are lots of sentients out there, and I fear
> the Great Silence attests to their nonexistence.
>
If communication between intelligent species breeds similarity
by providing for similar knowledge bases with regard to the
physical laws, what is known & knowable, optimal computing
architectures, etc. then it would be unecological and perhaps immoral
*to* communicate. Short-circuiting a natural developmental path by
uplifting a sentient species prematurely may simply be a wrong
thing to do. The reasons most humans allow their children to
discover that Santa Claus may not exist or that we don't teach
children prematurely about various aspects of sex is that there
are some things that it is better to discover oneself.
>
> Prove me wrong! Please!
I'm working on it. Patience please, its a very uphill battle.
Robert
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