After WWII Enrico Fermi asked "where are they?" In other words, if intelligent life is some byproduct of biological evolution then these ETs or IGUS (Intelligent Gathering and Utilizing Systems) should move into space and fill a galaxy. Yet we find no evidence of such, and UFO claims are far down on the signal to noise ratio.
I would say that planets with highly advanced life forms and biologically complex ecosystems are probably fairly rare. I did a study on planets comparable to Earth and my estimate is maybe there are only a few thousand in this galaxy comparable to Earth. Of course I might be wrong, but so far extrasolar planetary searches have not found a second Earth. The time stamp for Homo sapiens is only 150,000 years, where this is out of 550 million years of complex life and 3.7 of biological history. So there is the problem of finding biologically active planets. Then in this Drake equation sort of thinking it implies that intelligent life will be even rarer. So far SETI is detecting only silence out there. There is also the problem of technically capable IGUS altering their planetary environment in ways that might make their continued existence impossible. There is a lot of evidence to support that hypothesis with respect to Homo sapiens. In fabricating a synthetic world system the natural systems of the planet are exploited or contaminated and this leads to a collapse. So IGUS in the majority of cases probably do not advance much further than say we have. We have to compound this with the fact we have nuclear weaponry arrayed with as much energy equivalent to several thousand World War IIs. I think the large probability is that humanity will enter an implosion or failure mode within a few decades. If there is some role that IGUS have in this universe I really doubt it is with these Sci-Fi ideas. It might be that we humans and other IGUS around this universe, which could have an infinite spatial extent, measure by gravitational waves and say neutrino physics the earliest state of the universe. This might have a delayed choice effect, where the collective set of these measurements select the values of field parameters, say Higgs coupling etc, and in a quantum gravitational setting a vast, maybe infinite, set of IGUS might select this cosmology as the classical world out of the vast number of possible cosmologies in the landscape, or maybe Vafa's "swampland." In that way humanity might play its infinitesimal role in the Wheeler delayed choice experiment of selecting the observable cosmos as what is einselected as real. When it comes to these hyper-future ideas, say Star Trek as the canonical idea, I have grave doubts about those. I have pretty serious doubts about whether humanity, or some bio-engineered or cyborganic extension of us, will even colonize the solar system. In fact this corona virus situation might be a signal of humanity's future down slope fall into implosion. A part of it is that in some ways we have evolved so some of us have a fair amount of intelligence, but honestly the average person is really not that bright. To evolve to some higher intelligence any ET or IGUS probably has to pass through the semi-intelligent phase, or where a majority of its members are marginally intelligent. I put in an image with text of a speech t'Rump gave. This is typical of his speeches and it takes little serious judgment to say these are the missives of an imbecile. He has the nuclear football, he denies science regularly and made a muddle of the current pandemic. This moron has a 42% approval rating, which is some approximate measure IMO of the average intelligence of human beings. It is not a good sign, and much the same happened with the rise of fascism and Nazism in the last century, and if you read Dicken's "Tale of Two Cities" you get a sense of the same during the French Revolution before then. We even have supporters of this sort of inane nonsense on this list. Honestly, I see our situation as not at all good. We might not even participate in this possible cosmic Wheeler delayed choice experiment. LC [image: t'Rump's half dead brain.jpg] On Sunday, October 11, 2020 at 1:49:13 PM UTC-5 johnk...@gmail.com wrote: > On Sun, Oct 11, 2020 at 10:21 AM Lawrence Crowell < > goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote: > > >> [Me] I'm not talking about humans snuffing themselves out although I >>> admit that's possible, I'm talking about humans replacing parts of >>> themselves until there is no longer anything very human about them. Some >>> signals in the brain move as slowly as .01 meters per second, the slow >>> diffusion of hormones for example, but even the very fastest signals in the >>> brain move at only 100 meters per second and light moves at 300,000,000 >>> meters per second; and in a computer made with Nanotechnology the distances >>> the signal must travel will be far shorter because the components will be >>> much smaller. And that's without even considering Quantum Computers. There >>> is just no way biology can compete with that. >>> >> >> > I have serious doubts about a lot of these hyper-tech ideas that >> border on science fiction. >> > > These ideas are technology fiction maybe but they are not science fiction. > I'm not talking about backward time travel or faster than light spaceships, > those things are probably physically impossible and would require a major > breakthrough in science that would upend nearly everything we think we know > about how the world works, I'm just talking about an improvement in > technology. We just need to be able to place atoms where we want them to go > (and we don't even need to get close to Heisenberg's limit). Everything > else follows from that. > > > *These ideas sort of give me a sense of why there were so many of those >> 1950 science fiction and horror films about mad doctors or scientists hell >> bent on bizarre quests. I think for the average person these sorts of ideas >> probably sound little different.* >> > > That is certainly true today and that's why Cryonics is not enormously > more popular than it is. So I guess I'm not the average person. To tell > the truth, when I was a kid I usually identified more with the mad > scientist in those 1950s movies (Forbidden Planet was my favorite) than > with the purported hero, and I thought Lex Luthor had more fun than > Superman. > > *> One has to remember that while we can pursue a better understanding of >> the universe, few people want their humanity taken away or to become >> robots.* >> > > What people want is not terribly relevant in this case, I'm sure the > dinosaurs didn't want an asteroid crashing into the Yucatán 66 Million > years ago, but it happened nevertheless. > > *> For some practical reasons I also think there are limits on these >> things. * > > > That might be the most comfortable thing for some people to believe but I > see no reason to think it's actually true. Modern humans have only been > around for about half a million years and you think that's as smart as > things can get? A machine can approach our level of intelligence but never > reach it? If humanity manages to avoid destruction by Trump and other > existential threats you think the human species will remain unchanged on a > geological time scale? With the twin factors of the computer revolution > and genetic engineering I don't think the human race will remain stable > even for the remainder of this century. > > John K Clark > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/eddea201-7f15-4a97-b62b-d24fbaf414dan%40googlegroups.com.
