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.

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