We’re rare, we’re stupid, we’re looking for the wrong things, we’re fucked. We’re pondscum, stuck in a tiny subset of the real, higher dimensional universe. We’ve passed a couple of great filters already but the advent of super intelligence is going to open up horizons unimaginable to apes.
Do you continue to explore the back of your closed eyelids with excruciating slowness and lack of detail when, once opened, you realise a whole world is waiting out there to interact with? And I don’t mean meditation, the mysteries of the mind, I mean your eyelids. That you can barely even detect without the knowledge that other beings out there also posses eyelids and that’s what you’ve been staring at.
I like Banks idea of subliming. The ultimate goal of physical civilisation. Considered a backwards curiosity by the super-intelligence denizens of higher dimensionality. Why the fuck would you continue to expand out into the cold dark when all the action is happening up there. Of course, that doesn’t explain the one in a quadrillion life-form that sticks around to earn all of the lower-d achievements. But see my earlier points. We’re too dumb, different and disconnected to notice information that’s staring us in the face and we’re too boring to bother with by those that notice us.
Also, panspermia. We’re probably leaking eukaryotes and fungus all over the place. Ejected material has had enough time to float around the galaxy infecting other rocks, even if this is the only originating point. But even that is unlikely. Probably we are just another infection from some other (potentially inter-galactic) source, stuck in some far off cranny of little interest to the hyper-intelligent mushroom-trees of Zog.
Personal prediction is something that contains all of the above. Spooky, action-at-a-distance engineered directly into the substrate of hyper-intelligent mind or GTFO. Then we can talk.
(I misread “We’re leaking” as “we’re probably from…leaked all over the place”)
anyhow. we could be from or RNA, or virus’, or something else entirely that catalyzes (in a carbon rich environment) RNA formation? (I may have thought a ton about this many years back while studying with one of the academics responsible for panspermia theory… and enjoying the finest herbal supplements)
Why build planet-size anything when the real action is in the small things? Small spaces, small units of time, everything gets smaller.
I kind of agree that large is inefficient and unnecessary. Look at the history of computers: from giant to tiny and tinier. From slow to fast and faster. Personally, I have a feeling really advanced life drops all that dumb physical stuff that slows you down as soon as they can, and moves into the infinite spaces between:
This is, of course, a variant on the Fermi paradox: We don’t see clues to widespread, large-scale engineering, and consequently we must conclude that we’re alone. But the possibly flawed assumption here is when we say that highly visible construction projects are an inevitable outcome of intelligence. It could be that it’s the engineering of the small, rather than the large, that is inevitable. This follows from the laws of inertia (smaller machines are faster, and require less energy to function) as well as the speed of light (small computers have faster internal communication). It may be – and this is, of course, speculation – that advanced societies are building small technology and have little incentive or need to rearrange the stars in their neighborhoods, for instance. They may prefer to build nanobots instead.
That’s sort of what we do in Stross’ Accelerando. Break down all the unneeded planets (after everyone is virtualized they don’t need regular planet-bound bodies any more) to use as Computronium.
Although we often consider Pluto the end of the solar system, Voyager 1 is more than three times farther than that and yet still within the Sun’s domain. (2012)
It is the farthest spacecraft from Earth and, as of 2013, the only one in interstellar space. Nearly forty years out, the radio signals from Voyager take over 18 hours to reach Earth. Voyager’s RTG energy source will give out around 2025. Voyager, deaf, dumb, and blind, will reach the next nearby star in 40,000 more years.
If Voyager was aimed at the nearest star to us, Proxima Centauri, it would take over 73,000 years to arrive.
The most … appropriate song on the golden record attached to Voyager. If there was, or is, anything out there to hear it.
Since both Voyagers will circle the center of the Milky Way Galaxy essentially forever, there is plenty of time for the records to be found — if there’s anyone out there to do the finding. We cannot know how much of the records they would understand. Surely the greetings will be incomprehensible, but their intent may not be. (We thought it would be impolite not to say hello.) The hypothetical aliens are bound to be very different from us — independently evolved on another world. Are we really sure they could understand anything at all of our message? Every time I feel these concerns stirring, though, I reassure myself. Whatever the incomprehensibilities of the Voyager record, any alien ship that finds it will have another standard by which to judge us. Each Voyager is itself a message. In their exploratory intent, in the lofty ambition of their objectives, in their utter lack of intent to do harm, and in the brilliance of their design and performance, these robots speak eloquently for us.
But being much more advanced scientists and engineers than we – otherwise they would never be able to find and retrieve the small, silent spacecraft in interstellar space – perhaps the aliens would have no difficulty understanding what is encoded on these golden records. Perhaps they would recognize the tentativeness of our society, the mismatch between our technology and our wisdom. Have we destroyed ourselves since launching Voyager, they might wonder, or have we gone on to greater things?
Or, perhaps, the records will never be intercepted. Perhaps no one in 5 billion years will ever come upon them. 5 billion years is a long time. In 5 billion years, all humans will have become extinct or evolved into other beings, none of our artifacts will have survived on Earth. The continents will have become unrecognizably altered or destroyed. And the evolution of the Sun will have burned the Earth to a crisp, or reduced it to a whirl of atoms.
And far from home, untouched by these remote events, the Voyagers, bearing the memories of a world that is no more, will fly on.
