From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Thu Apr 24 2003 - 10:43:51 MDT
Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
>...
>Since our data on either the likelihood of spontaneous life emergence, or
>the future of average sentient interest development, or the actual
>cumulative extinction risk for a civilization of our type, are woefully
>inadequate, the optimist and the pessimist will reach their conclusions
>according to their predilections, while the Bayesian will not conclude
>anything at all, aside from the need to search for new knowledge and to
>carefully incorporate it in his reasoning.
>
>Rafal
>
Not entirely. The Bayesian while rejecting premature certainty, might
well decide that certain activities were unwise. E.g., broadcasting our
position loudly. It might be prudent to restrict the noise level
generated by our civilization considerably, as one reason for there not
being a large influx of tourists might be predators making the
passageways dangerous. Such predators would necessarily have a much
higher level of technology than we do, so we would be easy prey,
presuming that they liked our habitat.
OTOH, I consider it more probably that people living in long-lasting
civilizations are just too comfortable to leave, and that the ones that
move into macro-life colonies find that re-adapting to life on a planet
is an apalling idea. That past a certain point physical population
tends to dwindle, so there is less point in colonization (we may have
reached that point). And that people tend to migrate into
computers...so we should be looking for signs of computronium.
But the first possibility remains a possibility. And finding
computronium wouldn't disprove it.
N.B.: Another plausible scenario is that many of the intelligent
entities are less mobile than we are. But these don't present any
obvious threat to be guarded against. And his doesn't indicate that any
of the other possibilites is impossible. Space is deep.
-- -- Charles Hixson Gnu software that is free, The best is yet to be.
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