Peter Usagi's List: Legends of Eden

• he Great Silence may indicate that advanced civilizations aren't really interested in taking interstellar vacations, preferring to stay at home where the action is.

   
• "vast majority of life in the Galaxy is very likely to be machine-based." As we already noted, the power generated by a Dyson sphere could be very useful to a cybernetic intelligence.
• we likely live in a "post-biological universe," in which digital existence has largely trumped the biological. He makes the case that we may become (or spawn) a postbiological species — one that has "evolved beyond flesh-and-blood intelligence to artificial intelligence" and is a "product of cultural rather than biological evolution." He believes that this possibility hasn't been given the attention it deserves, nor has it been carried to its logical conclusion.

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• This theory, called the Great Filter, was put forth by GMU's Robin Hanson. His idea offers a rather elegant, if not disturbing, solution to the Fermi Paradox. Hanson suggests that there's some kind of evolutionary hurdle that's preventing life from advancing to the stage where it can go interstellar. There's something out there, says Hanson, that's preventing "dead matter" from giving rise, in time, to "expanding lasting life."

   

  Given the news from NASA's Kepler team last week, we spoke to Robin Hanson about their discovery and how it relates to his hypothesis – and what it might mean for human civilization moving forward.

   

  "If our descendants survive for a million years, there's a good chance they'll change our galaxy in quite visible ways," Hanson told io9. At the same time, however, he reminds us that even though there are a vast number of planets out there where alien life might possibly have arisen, alien life has not visibly changed our galaxy. "Thus the chance that any one planet gives rise to a galaxy-changing civilization must be very low," Hanson says. "So a great filter must lie between dead planets and galaxy-changing civilizations — either many unlikely steps are required, or there are a few very difficult steps."
• The biggest nightmare is the idea that all sufficiently advanced civilizations destroy themselves before reaching the stage where they can start traveling through the Galaxy.
• Indeed, the idea that the Milky Way is teeming with rocky, habitable planets blows the Rare Earth Hypothesis right out of the water. Our planet is clearly not unique or special, in the cosmological scale of things.
• For all we know, Bostrom argues, the chance of intelligence evolving could be extremely small, which would explain why we haven't yet spotted any extraterrestrial civilizations.
• Indeed, this is this concern that has led Bostrom to think and write extensively on the subject of existential risks.
• It's also conceivable that our conceptions of futuristic star-hopping civilizations are completely wrong. If anything, we may be guilty of anthropomorphizing aliens, and projecting our own goals onto them. Perhaps advanced life, for whatever reason, has no interest in colonizing the Galaxy or making its presence known to us.
• All in all, we'll have mixed feelings if and when we discover life on another planet. On the one hand, it'll be nice to know we're not alone in the cosmos. But on the other hand, life on other planets would be evidence that the biggest barrier to interplanetary colonization is still ahead of us — and that we're more likely to wipe ourselves out before we get that far.

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