At 12:26 PM Tuesday 6/21/2005, Warren Ockrassa wrote:
On Jun 21, 2005, at 9:55 AM, Kevin Street wrote:
Suppose every civilization that could communicate becomes a homebody
because it likes gossip that takes less than eight million subjective
years for a response (the subjective time to talk with someone on
Alpha Centuri)?
That's a very interesting idea, but it assumes that every civilization
eventually becomes AI in nature. What about all the carbon based souls out
there?
Quick aside. Alpha Centauri is
slightly over
four lightyears away. Assuming a conversation by radio, it would only be
eight years' round trip, not eight million. Radio waves propagate at
lightspeed. Relativistic mechanics don't enter the picture at all.
Methinks you missed his point, which was that to a machine-based
intelligence operating one million times as fast as an organic
intelligence, having to wait eight years for a reply would be like the
organic intelligence having to wait eight million years, IOW, it would be
as if we were just now receiving am answer to a question sent to alpha Cen
by a member of the species which was a common ancestor to both humans and
chimpanzees (assuming that the latest chronology I recall hearing about is
more-or-less correct). It's hard to imaging any question which that
ancestor would have asked whose answer would still be relevant to modern
humans.
That's one reason SETI is compelling. If we came across a radio signal
from a planet, say, 25 LY away, the conversation would be very slow, but
there'd be reasonable hope for at least *one* question to be asked and
answered in a single human lifespan. (More practically, send a massive
packet of information as well as questions and wait for the multiple
replies, but you get the idea. ;)
Again (although I have not read _Accelerando_ yet, but other writers have
played with similar ideas, frex Robert Forward in _Dragon's Egg_, where the
beings living on the surface of a neutron star IIRC also lived and
progressed about one million times faster than humans, so within a day or
so of humans having discovered the existence of primitive intelligent
beings those beings had progressed far beyond the level of humans in
knowledge) the assumption apparently is that machine-based intelligences
will win out over organic ones because they are capable of so much quicker
thought and progress than organic ones.
-- Ronn! :)
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