From: Steve Witham (sw@tiac.net)
Date: Sat Jul 26 2003 - 12:06:39 MDT
Hi, it's fnerd, I stumbled across this thread looking for
something else in the archive, and metafoxes are an old
hobby-horse of mine...
>Since the field is full of rabbits eating grass, good grass
>is hard to find, and you can't grow using that strategy. Eating
>the rabbits, in contrast, seems to allow fast growth.
Grass = interstellar dust, Rabbits = stars & planets?
>Accepting your assumptions, a fox that can become a meta-fox is
>no more of a threat to any given meta-fox than another meta-fox is.
>So why doesn't that meta-fox run in and eat any meta-fox it sees
>eating a fox?
My assumption is that a metafox can invisibly eat a fox,
but trying to eat rabbits (planets) is such a large-scale
activity that it makes you visible (i.e. a fox).
I also assume metafoxes are eating matter and/or sunlight,
just in a low-key way (desultory diet of grass).
(One point of view on this is that property rights in large
things that last a long time, are hard to enforce among
nano things that run really fast.)
The Q for me is, why *eat* the fox? If you don't need his
mass & energy, why cause him to stop growing, or cause him to
become invisible (meta)? Why silence him before he's
advanced enough to be a threat to you? (Presumably there's
an arms race and primitive things aren't threatening.)
One idea is, foxes provide new information useful in your
war against the other metafoxes, and you want to prevent
the other metafoxes from getting the information. So, you
persuade or corrupt the fox into merger or destruction.
Another idea is that metafoxes have layered internal
ecologies, like virus- & bug-ridden protocol stacks, and
the lowest layers would be susceptible to fox infection,
so metafoxes' immune systems go after them. Or, metafoxes
collectively form an ecosystem and/or culture with
corruption & succeptibility at all levels. But then, why
wouldn't there be places with completely debugged metafoxes not
susceptible to fox infection? Wouldn't they outcompete buggy
metafoxes? Maybe the answer to that is that internal bugs and
foxes are pretty much the same problem. When would you decide
that you had purged all bugs and it was safe to remove the immune
system? After all, a corruption at a high level (like a
hacker, terrorist or unscrupulous corporation) can install
bugs at a lower level. Maybe that's how metafoxes digest
foxes.
To summarize something I emailed to Robin privately,
there's also a question why *we* are still around.
If we're not ripe for the picking, then there's a
question why we don't see other civilizations that
happened to get stuck at the I-Love-Lucy stage,
broadcasting radio signals but nothing bigger.
One answer to that is that we are indeed ready to be
silenced, but that the nearest metafoxes either haven't
woken up yet, have had to travel some distance to get
to us, or have started but not finished silencing us.
Another answer is that I-Love-Lucy's are like having
fox noises all around when you're hunting for foxes,
so you silence them to get rid of the distraction.
--Steve
"And you know, language is a virus from space,
and hearing your name
is better
than seeing your face." --Laurie Anderson
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