From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Tue Aug 26 2003 - 09:56:43 MDT
On Tue, 26 Aug 2003, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> I think it is an important paper anyway, since it acts to make the
> astrobiology community more awareness of the postbiological
> possibilities. As Robert has pointed out, that is a very hard sell
> right now.
I think it may be important to note that Steven Dick has expertise
focused in the historic aspects of SETI research. So I would not
expect to see much in the way of novel proposals. The interesting
part of the paper is to see transhumanist ideas, e.g. citations of
Brin, Moravec, Kurzweil, etc. slowly creeping into SETI thinking.
He doesn't point out the work by Lineweaver regarding the probability
that most "Earths" are older than ours or consider the relationship
to transhumanism, but past and forthcoming work by Cirkovic and some
of the work by Bostrom has/will deal with those oversights.
The value of the paper is that it is getting to goals 5, 6 & 7 of
the astrobiology roadmap [1] which is of high interest to most
extropians. (Interestingly, Steven Dick is, I believe, partially
responsible for defining the roadmap -- so he has some throw weight
within the community.)
Robert
1. http://astrobiology.arc.nasa.gov/roadmap/
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