Re: Hiveminds and the Great Filter

Pat Fallon (pfallon@ptd.net)
Wed, 10 Mar 1999 10:32:44 -0500

Billy Brown wrote:

> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> > The worst part is, the blasted answer is probably obvious. I've got the
> > feeling that this whole problem was set up DELIBERATELY, as a means of
> > communication, so that there's only one *possible* answer, which is
> > immediately obvious to the first transhuman on the planet. I'm smart
> > enough to hear Them screaming the answer in my ear, but not
> > smart enough to understand it.
>
> Why do you assume there is someone out there?
>
> IMHO, the most economical explanation of our observations is simply that the
> average time required for a life-bearing world to produce a technological
> civilization is much longer than the average time that pre-technological
> life can survive in a single location. Given what we know about stellar
> lifespans and the frequency of cataclysmic events (nearby subernovae, GRBs,
> close encounters with other stars or black holes, etc), this isn't all that
> big of a stretch. We have to make some pessimistic assumptions about the
> natural rate of evolution, but that's a subject with plenty of big unknowns.
>
> We can also tip the statistics a bit in our favor by noting that the
> concentration of heavy elements in the universe has been slowly increasing
> ever since the big bang. Earthlike planets could not have formed in the
> early universe, and planets with an Earthlike chemical composition have
> probably only existed recently.

The assumption that the Big Bang theory is correct, and therefore imposes a time limit, looms large in these discussions. IMHO there are many problems with the BB [I've started a page with links to them at http://www.mmsweb.com/eykiw/bb/bb.htm].

As John Kierein summarizes:
"Stars in our galaxy and globular clusters are thought to be older than 14 billion years and there seem to be similar stars that are seen in galaxies that are many billions of light years away from us and thus apparently formed closer to the time of the big bang.

Even our earth is thought to be 5 billion years old, and is expected to exist for another 5 billion years before the sun expands and swallows it up. The atoms and molecules of the earth are thought to have been generated in previous stars that went through several cycles of supernovae. Even though supernovae are thought to last only fraction of our sun's lifetime, it is highly improbable that there is sufficient time for these cycles to have occurred since a big bang.

Similarly, our galaxy is rotating at a speed that only permits from 45 to 60 rotations since the big bang, which (according to Mitchell) is not a long enough time for it to achieve its spiral shape. Many spiral galaxies are seen at a large distance and therefore from a time closer to the big bang which would indicate they would have had time for even fewer rotations. Recent Hubble Photo shows spiral galaxies within 5% of big bang time leaving time for only 2 or 3 rotations at our galaxy's rotation rate. The galaxies in this photo don't seem to be crowded closer together as one would expect if they were really so close to the big bang.

There are some very large chains of galaxies spread throughout the universe. It is believed these large structures, like the "great wall", would require many hundreds of billions of years to form.

The temperature of intergalactic space was predicted by Guillaume, Eddington, Regener, Nernst, Herzberg, Finlay-Freundlich and Max Born based on a universe in dynamical equilibrium without expansion. They predicted the 2.7 degree K background temperature prior to and better than models based on the Big Bang. See "History of the 2.7 K Temperature Prior to Penzias and Wilson" by A. K. T. Assis and M. C. D. Neves in Aperion Vol.2, Nr. 3, page 79f, July 1995.

There are many other discrepancies in redshift observations that are much better explained by non-doppler shifts. Hubble, of course, didn't agree that the redshift was doppler (see his book
"The Observational Approach to Cosmology" or Alan Sandage's discussion of Hubble's beliefs). There were several difficulties with this interpretation that he pointed out. Not the least of which is that if it were doppler, then not only should each photon be stretched out by the doppler effect, but also the distance between each photon. Because the photon flux is reduced, this causes the object undergoing a doppler redshift to appear less bright than a corresponding object undergoing a
non-doppler redshift. Hubble knew his observations were not in agreement with this brightness correction. He also knew that a simpler, non-curved-space cosmology resulted from a non-doppler interpretation, and he felt that simpler was better. He didn't know what causes the photons to lose energy
as they travel through space, but he felt that it is some "new principle of nature" that I think is the Compton effect.

As big bang theorists attempt to solve the age problem by making the time to the big bang longer, they exacerbate the quasar problem. Quasars become even farther away and intrinsically brighter. Yet their temperature remains that of ordinary stars as exhibited by emission spectra of metallic ions that can only exist at a limited range of temperature. They are known to be about stellar size since they vary in brightness on a scale of a few minutes to seconds. How do they stay so bright at
such a low temperature in such a small volume? They can't. They must have an intrinsic non-doppler redshift and be nearby to be explained.

If quasars are nearby, they may even exhibit proper motion in the sky as the Earth travels around the
sun. Such a proper motion has been seen. See Quasar Absolute Proper Motion [
http://hometown.aol.com/spacetimer/page/index.htm] for a table that includes such proper motion observations."

One alternative to the BB would be a universe infinite in time and space, the plazma universe theory proposed by Alfgen

>
>
> Billy Brown, MCSE+I
> bbrown@conemsco.com