From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sat Feb 15 2003 - 09:04:11 MST
On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, Damien Broderick wrote:
> Robert J. Bradbury indulged his idee fixe :)
Ah, but when Timothy Martin, VP of Tech Transfer Initiatives
at the NanoBusiness Alliance knows about JBrains and MBrains
(and I don't believe he is a ExI List subscriber), then one
has to acknowledge that the memes are a spreading. [He made
a point of mentioning them to me at the recent IBF nanotech
investor conference.]
> What, you reckon the nearest post-Spike Culture nipped over to the in situ
> HPMS not long ago and set up their hide, from which convenient position they
> spy upon us as we plunge toward the transition?
I'd probably lean in this direction. If survey ships (or micro-sats)
detect "controlled" fire then one might have early warning of signs
of a technological civilization under development. If one has been
around for a few hundred million years, then "exploring" for yet another
form of "wild-life" has to have gotten pretty boring. The interesting
events will be when "wild-life" becomes sentient and subsequently when
they make the transition to relatively virtual entitites. Of course
this is also the time at which they potentially become a threat to
the "Galactic Club".
> Or did they drive the star
> over our way, starting a few hundred or thousands of years back?
Perhaps, but it seems easier to simply select a star that is likely
to be in the right place at the right time. Unless the transitions
are really rare events, they probably have statistics on how long
the transitions are likely to take, so they can time their observations
to coincide with high information content periods.
Now, Amara's comments extracting data from the paper seem to suggest
it is a fairly metal rich dwarf star (though I don't believe they
measured many metals of value from a nanotech perspective) so that
would suggest that star lifting is not taking place. I think the
current theories predict that dwarf stars are probably low in excess
non-stellar material (planets, etc.). So picking a dwarf star as
an observational base remains a questionable strategy (no material from
which to construct large mirrors). But if its a partially enshrouded
star then classifying it as a dwarf is probably a stretch. Astronomical
theory is still locked into the paradigm that the universe is most likely
"dead" and interpretations of the data reflect that bias.
Robert
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