From: Amara D. Angelica (amara@kurzweilai.net)
Date: Tue Mar 26 2002 - 00:49:24 MST
Robert J. Bradbury [bradbury@aeiveos.com]
> But then I thought, wait a minute, what
> if the probe ends up crashing into some planet with
> some primordial soup and ends up evolving into a Klingon
> like species that someday in the future decides to
> use their point source singularity weapons on the
> Matrioshka Brain around the sun into which humanity
> has evolved and into which I just happen to be uploaded.
Sending out DNA could possibly expose us to risk long before that. This
relates to the "active SETI" issue:
http://www.setileague.org/editor/earthxmt.htm
http://www.seti-inst.edu/iaa-position-paper.html
One possibility is that the DNA might provide clues to biophoton (See "Body
Talk," New Scientist, Feb. 23, 2002, pp. 30-33) emission signatures that
would enable a hostile civilization to remotely sense life on Earth and
perhaps even determine its evolutionary level or basic thought processes,
if, as Hameroff speculates, biophotons control consciousness in
microtubules. RF emissions are of course much stronger, but they may not be
part of a given civilization's search regimen or may be swamped by radio
noise from other sources. Although biophoton emissions are extremely weak,
it's possible that an advanced civilization, aware that biophotons are basic
to intercellular communications, would have sophisticated life
pattern-recognition systems that could detect such signatures by integration
of quantum-coherent biophoton emissions from all life forms for target
spectral-distribution and statistical windows.
For an even more speculative approach, also see "Detecting Biodynamic
Signals"
http://www.borderlands.com/archives/arch/detectin.htm.
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