On Sun, Apr 19, 2015 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List < [email protected]> wrote:
> This makes it even more important that we don’t blow it on our own little > world. Or perhaps it is evidence that *we are going to blow it* just like > every other species has on every other star that has developed > intelligence. Our current race towards global war certainly seems to > indicate that the second hypothesis has merit. Maybe, but the peak danger of a global war being so terrible it caused the extinction of the entire human race happened in the 1960s and we survived that, the danger is still not zero but it's a lot less. I hope the explanation for the Fermi Paradox is just that we're the first in the observable universe; after all in a finite universe, and the observable universe is finite, somebody has to be first. But if we're not the first then some calamity must happen to any civilization when it reaches a certain level, but I don't think it's war. I wonder how a intelligent conscious being would react if it had full access to its emotional control panel. Regardless of how well our life is going who among us would for eternity opt out of becoming just a little bit happier if all it took was turning a knob? And after you turn it a little bit and see how much better you feel why not turn it again, perhaps a little more this time. Maybe drug addiction is the first signs of that very dangerous positive feedback loop. During most of human existence this was a non-issue but then about 8000 BC alcoholic beverages were invented, but they were so dilute you'd really have to work at it to get into trouble. Then about 500 years ago distilled alcoholic beverages were invented and it became much easier to become a alcoholic. Today we have many drugs that are far more powerful than alcohol. What happens if this trend continues exponentially? > Perhaps at some level of intelligence other things become more important > than consuming more and more energy Perhaps a eternal orgasm will become more important than consuming more and more energy, and more important than anything else, and more important than everything else put together. Perhaps the world does't end in a bang or a whimper but a groan of mindless pleasure. > Perhaps at some level of intelligence growth in energy consumption no > longer appeals. Why assume that a super advanced civilization would go down > the route of creating Dyson spheres around every star in its galaxy, which > is what the study was surveying for. I don't worry about ET using less energy but I do worry about him not havinf any intellectual curiosity and if ET exists he sure doesn't seem very interested in the universe he lives in. And it's not like it would difficult, ET doesn't even need to travel to the stars, ET just needs to send one Von Neumann probe to one star. Even assuming ET can't send space probes any faster than we can ( a ridiculously conservative assumption) then almost instantly from a cosmic perspective (less than 50 million years) the entire Galaxy would be unrecognizable. It's not as if this would take some huge commitment on the part of ET's civilization, in fact even a individual could easily do it. If Von Neumann probes are possible at all, and I can't think why they wouldn't be, then they're going to be dirt cheap, you buying a bag of peanuts would be a greater drag on your financial resources. Even if many or even most ETs think that sending out a von Neumann probe would be a bad idea there will always be somebody who disagrees. And it only takes one. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
