It seems that Nick Bostrom's replacing of the Anthropic Principles with his
Observational Selection Effects and Probability, His Doctoral Thesis, makes
ETI even less likely. I, myself, suspect that ETI is likely there, but with
our limited equipment, we stand a low likelihood that any signal will be
identified as such.
in a message dated 10/27/2000 10:27:49 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
bradbury@aeiveos.com writes:
<< think I'm responding to Nick Bostrom, following some discussion
by Jason Thompson & Hal Finney, but I'm not sure given the
forwarding this went through.
>But finding a second source of intelligent life, in our relative vicinity,
>would dramatically boost the support for those theories which say that
>intelligent life is common. (My PhD thesis at
>http://www.anthropic-principle.com/phd has more on this and many other
>related topics.)
I think you may need to refine the term "intelligent life" a bit. A pretty
good case can be made that dolphins, whales, and even perhaps other
primates are as "intelligent" as we are. What they lack is a system
for recording and transmitting knowledge across generations. I think the
human ability to do this is what makes us interesting. So, you want
to really focus on the development of intelligent "technological" life.
Of interest, might also be species, that are much less intelligent, but
do develop the ability to archive information, then retreive and manipulate
it. Hive minds of insects that developed external information storage
technologies might be very interesting. I believe there was
an example of this in Permutation City. >>
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