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.
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.
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