-----Original Message-----
From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com>
To: extropians@extropy.com <extropians@extropy.com>
Date: 06 January 1999 19:21
Subject: Re: Big Bang demiurges (was: Re: El Aleph)
>Samael wrote:
>>
>> From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com>
>> >
>> >That's possibility number 3. Supposing that our intelligence is the
>> >max, it's still sufficient for us to reproduce and reproduce and
>> >reproduce and fill up the entire Milky Way with Orbitals and then go on
>> >to other galaxies as fast as lightspeed will let us, in a million-year
>> >blink of the eye. But we see no sign that other races have done this.
>>
>> Would they necessarily bother?
>>
>> Might they not instead decide to concentrate their energies on making
their
>> home planet more habitable and increasing their local quality of life
rather
>> than heading out into the rest of the galaxy?
>
>I wouldn't.
>Do you expect me to believe that every single member of twenty billion
>intelligent races would?
I don't expect you to believe anything your preconceptions won't allow you to.
Imagine you are a uperior being. As far above man as man is above ants.
Why would you go looking for other civilisations to interact with, when they would be made up of (effectivley) ants with nothing to offer you? You may use some (as yet unknown) method of communication with similar intelligences, or you might decide that sicne you now have a Grand Unified Theory of Everything, there's nothing these other people could teach you and you'd be as well off running your own ineffable experiments that don't require you to spend aeons travelling between remarkably similar star systems.
Samael