From: Michael Wiik (mwiik@messagenet.com)
Date: Wed Nov 03 1999 - 10:21:53 MST
I'm at a loss to imagine how communication can exist between powers.
If evil powers exist, how can you protect yourself from viruses/trojan
horses possibly encoded into a message? Here and now, I doubt most
people check their mail for letterbombs, but in this case the price of
failure is only one human life and maybe collateral damage. Once we're
powers, we might have a whole legacy to look after, and the price of
failure might not be just mere death but an infinity of hellish torture
(spanning multiple universes) for multiple copies of ourselves and loved
ones spawned for some evil darkside-extropian mind experiment (see
archives).
So say you're a power cruising thru space and you come across a derelict
spaceship sending distress signals (or maybe a planet full of miserable
peasants praying for salvation). How do you know that it isn't a trap?
Wouldn't it be prudent to just ignore it, and possibly move away from it
at near-light speed, dropping antimatter space-mines behind you all the
way?
Even if you reduced the message/derelict/planet to its constituent
atoms, how can you ensure it isn't a clever trap constructed by some
much more advanced but evil power?
Maybe the Earth's core isn't full of deadly nanoweapons to ensnare
powers that come to visit, but it could be, and isn't that enough?
-Mike
-- ====================================================================== Michael Wiik Principal Messagenet Communications Research Washington DC Area Internet and WWW Consultants http://messagenet.com mwiik@messagenet.com ======================================================================
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