From: Rafal Smigrodzki (rafal@smigrodzki.org)
Date: Thu Apr 24 2003 - 16:45:47 MDT
owner-extropians@extropy.org wrote:
> 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.
### Well, if you use additional data, this caution might be unwarranted. We
can assume that future space telescopes will be orders of magnitude more
sensitive than current ones, and a dangerous space-faring civilization will
be able to read license-plates here, not to mention detecting a biosphere.
That they are not here yet, after at least 700 million years of our
biosphere being detectable, means that most likely the density of dangerous
predatory civilizations is very low, and our feeble light-speed radio won't
alarm anybody within the time that it will take us to develop our own
expansion wave.
Radiate away, the bad guys are not there.
Rafal
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