From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Jan 05 1999 - 10:19:22 MST
Billy Brown wrote:
>
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>
> > 3) The mortal civilization obeys the Prime Directive and the Powers
> > aren't home..
> Let's not forget the obvious, 'boring' possibility: There has never been a
> technological singularity, and everything is just as it appears. After all,
> the fact that we are here is pretty good evidence that there were no Big
> Bang people.
That's possibility number 3. Supposing that our intelligence is the
max, it's still sufficient for us to reproduce and reproduce and
reproduce and fill up the entire Milky Way with Orbitals and then go on
to other galaxies as fast as lightspeed will let us, in a million-year
blink of the eye. But we see no sign that other races have done this.
Latest astrophysical data suggests that planets aren't all that rare.
You can make whatever assumptions you'd like about the rarity of
intelligence. But, as I understand it, we aren't in a particularly
early stage of the Milky Way or of the Socrates Universe. Suns like
ours have grown old and died already. Our 4.5-billion-year path to
intelligence was not a noticeable sprint. So why isn't the real estate
used up? This set of assumptions yields mortal races, but the vast
majority are born during the early years of the galaxy.
You can explain mortal silence by reference to Singularity, and you can
explain Power silence by reference to unSingularity, but it's kind of
difficult to explain both.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/AI_design.temp.html
http://pobox.com/~sentience/sing_analysis.html
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.
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