From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue Apr 29 2003 - 21:23:32 MDT
Mitch writes
> Lee observed:
> > But then Damien's point still stands:
> > nobody's out there watching us now!
> > Not even some restrained types following
> > a Prime Directive. Restraining yourself
> > from overrunning everything in sight is
> > not competitive...
> Lee, unless Kurzweil, and the rest of the cavalcade of AI gurus
> are correct; the practicality of sending Bracewell probes, however
> molecular in size, will be, as Sir Arthur once stated: The Labor
> of Centuries. Because interstellar travel is possible, does not
> necessarily make it economically viable, or politically correct.
Though you may be right ("it would be the Labor of Centuries"),
pace Singularity, the time it takes to colonize a galaxy is
miniscule by geological standards.
So the probability that someone is listening and will hear us
in the tiny fraction of time between our first radio emissions
and the arrival of our probes (that go close to the speed of
light) is also miniscule.
> This might serve true even for imaginary SIAI's running corporations
> and planets in the next 300 years. Rather, we may go to the next 1000
> closest stars (we being Mr. Roboto) and say "Aw screw it! This is enough
> raw materials for the next 75 millennia, and durn it, there ain't nobody
> else home in the galaxy" (50-100 billion galaxies to go).
I guess the motives we are considering are different: you sound
here like they just want to find out if there *is* anyone else.
I imagine our intellectual heirs will never have enough raw materials,
will always be thinking of new things to compute and new modes of
enjoyment, and will as a matter of course bring life everywhere they
can. Is this what you mean by being not "politically correct"?
> My hunch (unfalsifiable) is that the nature of space-time, as we and
> robot jr. will come to understand it, will be vastly different from
> what we are now able to detect. Articles about multiple universes
> will seem passe.'
Well, that's been the pattern so far. In each century our ideas have
changed so much that the most farsighted dreams of the preceding
century seem lame. So I suppose that "converting every bit of matter
in the universe to more compute power" may suffer the same fate. Somehow.
Lee
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