X-Message-Number: 14468 From: "Brett Bellmore" <> Subject: Re: CryoNet #14461 - #14467 Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 05:49:55 -0400 My personal explaination for the Fermi paradox, put forward rather tentatively, is this: From the moment a species enters the information age, there exists a competative advantage to thinking faster than the other guy. Once such a species has the technology to accellerate thought processes, it inevitably uses them, entering a positive feedback loop, "the singularity", which rapidly takes them to the point of thinking about as fast as the laws of physics permits. At least hundreds of thousands of times faster, quite likely millions of times faster. Given the nature of technological advance in our culture, it seems likely that this transition will take place some time before a culture is capable of "conventional" interstellar travel. So such travel by species resembling ourselves would be a real rarity, something which could take place only during a very narrow window of cultural development, and under the most dire constraint, such as the threat of species extinction due to some astronomical event. Now, what are the consequences of this for interstellar travel, assuming that the speed of light is a real limit? A trip which might formerly have taken several years at relativistic speeds now takes a subjective several MILLION years! This would probably discourage interstellar exploration and colonization to some extent by itself. If such colonization did take place, it wouldn't be by great leaps across distances of lightyears, but instead a slow diffusion into the cometary zone and from body to body across the interstellar "voids", which after all aren't really empty. A second factor: So far as we know, lower temperatures are more friendly to high speed, low power computing. In the "life zone", high speed intelligences would require active cooling. In the course of any interstellar exploration/colonization, such intelligences would cross, and spend quite enormous subjective periods in, volumes of space where conditions are naturally more conducive to such a life-style. Why would they bother re-entering the more hostile zones immediately surrounding stars, except for brief scientific exploration? It would be like us attempting to colonize Mercury, while dwelling in a solar system full of thousands of Earth-like planets! So, I'm presuming that the galaxy has indeed already been colonized, but that advanced cultures capable of such ventures avoid places WE would be comfortable like the plague! Nor do they have much incentive to engage us in conversations which would take subjective millions of years simply to initiate. This theory could actually be tested, in the relatively short run, by a sample return mission to a new comet, which hasn't already been subject to repeated passes by the Sun. Such a sample might very well contain the remains of advanced nano-technology adapted to cryogenic temperatures, abandoned by it's information based inhabitants. Much as when we desert the neighborhood of an active volcano we don't bother to pack up our homes and return the enviroment to a natural state. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=14468