From: Billy Brown (bbrown@conemsco.com)
Date: Tue Jan 05 1999 - 12:04:00 MST
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:
1) 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?
2) 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.
3) 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.
4) 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
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