From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Wed Jun 12 2002 - 19:02:15 MDT
On Monday, June 10, 2002 8:20 AM Mark Walker mail@markalanwalker.com
wrote:
> You are invited to look at five online papers for the Journal of
Evolution
> and Technology's
> June symposium. Max More has
> kindly agreed to allow comments on the papers
> to be posted to the Extropian list. (If you decide to post a comment
to the
> list it would be helpful if you could start the subject line with
'Practical
> Cosmology'). The paper titles are as follows,
Sorry to be a Johnny-come-lately to this affair. Great papers by the
way -- meaning they provoke thought though not necessarily agreement in
my feeble brain.
> 5. Social Complexity and Flamboyant Display in Competition: More
Thoughts on
> the Fermi Paradox
> ( http://www.transhumanist.com/Kansa-Fermi.htm )
> by Eric Kansa
This one was interesting, though I'm always a bit suspicious of
evolutionary explanations. See my "Testing Evolutionary Explanations"
at http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/Testing.html for reasons why and
how to relieve my suspicions.:)
One thing I did find a bit disagreeable here is there seems to be a
linear notion of civilizations working here. Alien civilizations are
taken to be either the same as ours, more advanced, or less advanced --
as if there's a linear scale all of them fit neatly into. If we
consider living things on Earth and look at some other trait -- not
intelligence or socialization -- we usually see a diversity of solutions
to the problem at hand. Granted, there is convergent evolution -- bat
and bird wings are similar in many ways, but look at insect wings or
seed pods on some plants -- but there is so much divergence. Even in
the area of societies, there seems to be also a great deal of diversity.
Ant colonies, dog packs, and the Extropians list are vastly different,
though similar in some respects -- and this is all among life forms that
diverged on one planet within the span of a few hundred million years or
less. I imagine alien societies -- if social organization is really
needed for a spacefaring intelligence -- would be even more diverse.
Still, this doesn't answer the problem of the Fermin Paradox. I suspect
we will not have a convincing answer for a long time to come. Damien
brought up Stanislaw Lem and I will too. His novels _Solaris_, _His
Master's Voice_, and _Fiasco_ all illustrate the problems with
encountering the truly alien insofar as a science fiction writer can
approach the truly alien.
This kind of leads back to the differences problem. An advanced
spacefaring alien civilization might not just be more technologically
advanced, so leave less of a waste signal for us to detect, but it might
also use vastly different means of communication. If, e.g., they used
neutrinos to communicate -- and I'm just making this up -- how would we
know about it? Our neutrino detection gear is not looking for that sort
of thing. (This still doesn't answer the law of large numbers thingy.
I mean if any number of aliens use some form of EMF, then surely enough
of them would have done so for us to detect an inkling by now. On the
other hand, humans have no program to broadcast their presence now.)
Even this is not enough. Lem's _His Master's Voice_ is very interesting
in this respect. Once the alien signal is found in the novel, no one
can figure out what it means. It's kind of like a dog eavesdropping on
human conversation. The dog would know there're two people talking, but
the content would be mostly meaningless. Now imagine the same
conversation being millions of years old and only hearing one side of
it. (Granted, we have yet to hear even that, though in the novel, the
"message" is only found by accident in what's thought to be totally
random data.)
My two cents!
Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/MyWorksBySubject.html
Here's a photo of me from behind:
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/pic004.jpg
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