Re: seti@home MIGHT NOT WORK

Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Sat, 10 Jul 1999 18:31 PDT

> "John Clark" <jonkc@worldnet.att.net> said:
>
> The cosmos does not look like it has been engineered

You can't claim that -- see some of the "unexplained" phenomena I listed in msg 4030 (URL attached).

> so if SETI works
> that means intelligence can not effect the universe on a cosmological scale.
> I think it can so it won't. Probably.
>
Worse, if SETI works and the civilization is a non-SI, that would argue strongly that:
(a) hard-diamondoid molecular nanotech (vs. soft-wet bio-nanotech)

is *not* possible.
or
(b) technolgocial civilizations somehow do find a way to

      stop on the slippery slope of evolution (i.e. pre-singularity)
      and stay there. 

or
(c) The neo-luddites left behind by M-brain departures get

lonely once in a while and want to talk to somebody.

If (a) is true, then life becomes a lot less interesting.

The only way I can see (b) being true is if the civilization civilization has hard evidence that climbing the singularity slope is almost uniformly fatal (either they tried it before and failed or have seen lots of others crash and burn). This is not good news for us because, I would put pretty good money on our climbing that slope.

If (c) is the case, then I think we can expect a long set of lectures about why the M-brain path is a bad one. [Now we know where the Mormons came from and why they are ahead in SETI@home :-)]

Robert



SETI messages with significant discussion:
  http://www.lucifer.com/exi-lists/extropians/3991.html
  http://www.lucifer.com/exi-lists/extropians/4030.html
  http://www.lucifer.com/exi-lists/extropians/4054.html
and for background:
http://www.lucifer.com/exi-lists/extropians/3945.html

If you can deal with PDF, the abstract for my poster at the upcoming Bioastronomy conference is at:
http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~meech/bioast/program/LEINT.1.9.pdf