RE: Big Bang demiurges
Billy Brown (bbrown@conemsco.com)
Tue, 5 Jan 1999 13:04:00 -0600
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> 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.
Taking current knowledge conventional theory in biology and cosmology as
starting points:
- Chemical-based life can't evolve until you have enough supernovae to
produce planets with a decent abundance of heavy elements. That means no
life until maybe 5 -6 billion years ago, right?
- Life appears easily, but it takes billions of years to get beyond the
microbe stage. Worlds with a 5-6 billion year history and no multicellular
life could easily be the norm.
- We have no basis for determining how fast evolution occurred on Earth vs.
other worlds - there are pretty good arguments for the view that we live in
a very accelerated environment that would be very rare.
- If light speed limits are real, all we are really assuming is that we are
not in the light cone of another Singularity. Given the above points, that
is only a few hundred million light years - a small fraction of the
universe.
Billy Brown, MCSE+I
bbrown@conemsco.com