From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Sun Apr 27 2003 - 12:24:36 MDT
Damien from CalTech queried:
<<Where'd the obsession with complexity come from? >>
It all started as a small child when my 1st great teacher said...
<<Spin your bits all you want and it won't tell
you what's going on *over there*. Well, to some extent: you can make big
telescopes and such. But ultimately you can't beat going over and taking a
close look. Maybe the complexity you generate at home is more interesting
than finding new varieites of rock and beetle and stellar instability. OTOH,
the real has a certain cachet from being able to lethally surprise you.>>
We ride the horses we are put on, we play the hand we're dealt. Right now, it
is usually easier to make scientific and technological answers with
computing, then it is to spend billions and send spacecraft elsewhere. Yes,
we do indeed require both, however, medical advances using combinational
chemistry have produced some useful finds. Jef's question was, whether an
advanced civilization would find it more production to use materials at hand
(solar system) then send interstellar spacecraft on a 100 year journey.
Complexity would suggest, at this point, that its easier for advanced
civilizations to observe remotely, and sift thru data; then some arduous,
energy expensive journey cross the stars.
<<And you can make it a solid sphere, with a probe in every system to monitor
it
for changes. Possibly not too exciting in the average red dwarf system (but
you never know for sure) but good for those potential life-producers and the
stars which go boom. Signals schmignals; if there were advanced life out
there there should be something watching us now... which would have been
parked here since before the dinosaurs bought it.
-xx- Damien X-) >>
Not necessarilly so! Because of Gamma Ray Bursters, bouncing boulders of
asteroids, planetismals, traveling neutron stars and energized black holes,
the early cosmos and our galaxy, could easily have had life wiped out and
recreated 20 times in a 12.7 billion year old universe. Us carbonaceous
thingies, may not have had a decent chance until this chipper, Goldilocks
era, where "everything is just right."
Therefore we may be one of the 1st to wake up, rather then some wise and
ancient space clouds, or arthropods. Brain-life may be, not increasingly
rare, but increasingly common, over the next few billion years. This era
neighbors worth talking to, might be vanishingly rare, but in the amazing
year 5 Billion, we may be the ones who are demanded thus: "Q! Release my
ship!" or more likely, "Burch, Release my ship!"
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