From: Rafal Smigrodzki (rafal@smigrodzki.org)
Date: Tue Aug 05 2003 - 13:07:11 MDT
Robert Bradbury wrote:
>
> Would you (as a pilgrim for example) have attempted to colonize
> the United States if you knew the native american population
> were armed with nuclear weapons to defend themselves?
### Do you say you *know* that there are well-armed civs ready to shoot to
kill, right outside the Solar system? If not, then the analogy fails.
---------------------------
>
> The space beyond 50 AU from the sun could have thousands of weapons
> primed and ready to bomb the solar system with small black holes
> generated "on demand"; or hurl neutronium into the sun to
> turn it into a supernova; or make up your favorite sci-fi
> destruction scenario. If there is even a *remote* possibility
> that there are civilizations out there billions of years older
> than we are it makes sense to make sure whatever we intend to
> do is ok with them before we engage in activity that might even
> slightly piss them off. To not do so, I believe as the British
> might put it, would make you a "bloody fool".
### No, I do not think I would be fool, much less a bloody one, for applying
common sense to this issue - if you allow yourself to make arbitrary
assumptions about reality (e.g. there are civs ready to kill, but not
willing to warn, but not willing to kill preventatively, more advanced yet
dependent on our scientific contributions, invisible but omnipresent,
capable of preventing self-replicating rape of galaxies from their sources,
but afraid of our billions-of-years-behind von Neumann probes, etc.), you
can justify any arbitrary course of action. So, making arbitrary assumptions
about reality is not the way to make good decisions.
This is why we believe only what reality forces us to believe in, and act
accordingly. I believe my chair has legs because I see them and I can
painfully bump against them. In other words, the inborn priors (evolved
structure of brain) and data acquired over my lifetime converge, through a
process of recursive, self-referential Bayesian network inference, on the
belief that my chair has legs. There is no sufficient, convergent body of
theory and sensory data allowing similar degree of confidence in matters of
interstellar politics. No visible galactic civs, no warnings, no contact,
means we can go and take what we want, until reality tells us otherwise.
Just like a child who *has* to bump against things to acquire the correct
representation of chairs and other things.
Rafal
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