[p2p-research] Thinking about science fiction bias

[Ryan Lanham]

So far, Einstein's theories have proved remarkably stable.  There is little
science since his death over 50 years ago that rattles much of what he said.

One interesting argument Einstein made is that the speed of light is
effectively the speed limit of the universe.  And so far, that seems to
hold.  I like pseudo or pop physics discussions.  And while I'm not in any
way knowledgeable about technical details, I once spent some time
understanding special relativity and some related topics.  It's the sort of
thing I'm curious about.  I suspect that is true of most sci-fi writers as
well.  They think about these things.  So it is interesting to speculate
about their biases.

I was reading a blog on the new Hubble Space Telescope pictures and saw one
of a beautiful cloudy galaxy.  I liked it so much I put it on my computer as
a background photo.  It is clear in this photo that there are many (I
presume millions if not billions) of stars in this galaxy.  Given the great
distance between our stars in the Milky Way and Einstein's speed limit, it
seems unlikely one would move around much.

Now I'm not a religious or even a spiritual person.  I don't believe in
divinities or anything else that isn't experienced and probed by a
reasonably broad assortment of curious and skeptical types.  So, I have to
rule out gods for travelling between the thousands of galaxies that show up
in the background of my lovely little galactic picture, and I have to rule
out life as we know it moving about.  But why not extend life?  Life lasting
millions of years could allow for travel.

Of course the sort of circuitry we have with DNA replication is far too
breakable to last that long in one consciousness, but a single consciousness
could exist as a more stable and self-repairing machine.

It's not that great of an insight but it occurred to me that science fiction
is highly biased toward life as we know it playing a continuing and
central.  A life of cells and electro-chemical processes.  There is no need
for life to be that way, and it would seem highly unlikely to be so if we
ever encountered it outside our own world--save for a few nearby germs and
simple organisms that might hitch a ride on a comet or in the basins of some
volcanic moon.  If I encountered an alien, I'd expect him to be the
combination of a personal factory and robot...not a conventional flesh
creature at all.

Now I don't live with the sci-fi corpus, so I'm sure there are a thousand or
more counter-examples to my little attempt at insight.  I'm sure Philip K.
Dick or someone else wrote ten books on bots as a civilization.  But I still
think there is a P2P point.

I wonder if we are moving toward being our works.  I wonder if the division
between transhumanism and P2P is really shrinking--the commons of the future
is our own robotic consciousness.  If that were they case, the resource
issues tend to fade away.  We don't need food, sex, water or even light.
Our modes of energy production and storage could be remarkably simple.
Personally I like being human, but I don't rule out the fact that a robot
could enjoy being a robot given sufficient capacity to learn,
self-replicate, repair and to do things we could likely never do...like
travel amongst the stars.
 I've been engaged at some level with AI thinking for a long time.  I
remember the Vejur (Voyager) star trek movie...all good fun.  But what if we
simply ruled out the carbon-based forms.  What if the future of a stable and
healthy planet is the self-replicating machine that doesn't need us or any
other carbon life form?  Maybe carbon is one way to bootstrap a longer term
existance.  Maybe it's a booster rocket and the payload runs on a different
fuel.
-- 
Ryan
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