From: Billy Brown (bbrown@conemsco.com)
Date: Tue Mar 09 1999 - 08:42:57 MST
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.
Billy Brown, MCSE+I
bbrown@conemsco.com
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