On Mon, Jan 9, 2023 at 10:10 PM Brent Meeker <meekerbr...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Most of the explanations for the ephemeral nature of intelligence that >> I've heard, like war or environmental change, are not very convincing; > > > * > Why is environmental change not convincing. * > Because despite all the hype about the disastrous effects of climate change the fact is despite local disruptions the Human race has never been more numerous, longer lived, better educated, or richer than it is right now. The world is about 0.8ºC warmer today than it was a century ago, nobody knows what the perfect temperature to maximize human happiness is, but I doubt it's exactly 0.8º less than it is right now. I think it's interesting that during the Carboniferous era the Earth was not 0.8 degrees warmer but a massive 18 degrees warmer than now, and yet life was far more abundant then than it is now. Humans are very adaptable creatures, it would take a hell of a lot of climate change to kill every single one of us, hell we survived an ice age so severe there was a 2 mile thick sheet of ice covering Manhattan, and back then we had very very primitive technology yet we still managed to get through it. Since planet Earth was created the climate has always been changing. Other than a few very brief ice ages during the last few million years the temperature has always been warmer than now and occasionally much warmer; at least that's the way things have been during the last 600 million years. > * > Even if human civilization continues another million years how do you > imagine us making a significant impact on the universe? Von Neumann > machines? * > Yes. *> It's certainly not inevitable that enough people will ever care to build > one.* > You don't need a lot of people, and I think it's inevitable that at least one individual will want to build a Von Neumann machines and that's all it would take, after all it's not as if building one would be expensive, once Drexler's style technology is developed everything will be either dirt cheap or physically impossible, and there is no reason to believe a Von Neumann machine is impossible. And even if one makes the ridiculously conservative assumption that nobody will ever make a space probe that moves faster than the ones we can make right now, just 50 million years (a blink of the eye cosmically speaking) after the launch of one probe a Von Neumann machine could be in every star in the Galaxy. And after that the Galaxy would never look the same. >> the only one that seems a little more plausible is drug abuse by beings >> that operate according to the laws of chemistry or electronic abuse by >> beings that operate according to the laws of electronics. > > > > * > Or developing artificial digital environments to the level that people > will explore all possible worlds without leaving this one.* Yeah but doing all those computations for all those simulations takes a lot of energy and yet 99.99999 ...% of the universe's photons are radiated uselessly into infinite space. That sure doesn't seem like a sign of intelligence to me. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> jad -- 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/CAJPayv3BtaFzSSL4F41VA1vbXC3%3DKniHzZKCzyzWs28tRJ%2B%2BSw%40mail.gmail.com.
