Colonization Of The Stars And Contact With Aliens: The Last False Hope Of The Secularists

Shea might have a point in some anthropological sense. After all,
Scientology's "theology" is based on a pretty extensive Angel/Demon
system presupposing extensive ET, and Scientology has done rather well.
They are an extreme, and religious, case of what he's talking about in
secular thought.

His arguments fall down in other ways. First, just because Earthlike
planets are probably rare doesn't mean that planets hosting life are
rare. Second, we have within the solar system a potential exemplar of
how life might arise in a lot of systems, including those clustered in
galactic cores, despite much the more intense radiation environments in
those cores: Europa. Gas giants with lots of rocky-core ice-surface
satellites are probably very common everywhere.

ET life is admittedly not the same as ET *intelligence*, and just
because intelligence arises doesn't mean it ever figures out that there
might be worlds elsewhere, possibly hosting similar life. A very thick
ice cap over your living space wouldn't seem to bode well for figuring
out that space exists at all. However, I think it's likely that
asteroid collisions might drive both evolution and scientific discovery
on Europa-like worlds, just as they have on our world.

As for colonization of the stars, I take a pretty different view. I'm
persuaded that something like Singularity will happen on our planet
eventually, and that something like that happens to all industrial
civilizations in the universe, where they survive and develop long
enough. Singularity ETI is likely to be interested in communicating
with others of its kind, and might even "travel" in the sense of
reducing an intelligence to a signal and beaming it to other
Singularity ETIs it has contacted.

A Singularity ET liberated from economic laws might harness the
material and energy resources of its system for the computations
required to solve hard eschato-cosmological problems -- in particular,
how to survive the heat-death of the universe, if possible. If these
problems are difficult enough, Singularity ETIs will be very interested
in the emergence of intelligent life elsewhere, because every nascent
civilization has the potential to add more computing power to a
collective effort. That interest might be strong enough for such
intelligences to spare some of their effort and energies to direct a
small but continuous stream of fly-by probes to other nearby systems,
to see if intelligence is emerging in them. However, it seems
effectively impossible that they could send probes capable of
decelerating themselves enough to manipulate anything within the
destination environment -- it's doubtful that they could have anything
but a destructive effect on ecosystems, through impact. In some cases,
a destructive effect in the short term (we're considering a million
years to be "short") might be computed as having a positive effect on
the probability of intelligence evolving in the long run. For the most
part, however, I think Singularity ETs would passively observe life in
other systems. For all we know, they may have discovered that the
optimal strategy is to simply allow other systems to go to Singularity,
at which point an effort to establish contact becomes worthwhile.

Near galactic cores, the story might be different. The distances might
be short enough that a kind of directed Singularity-bootstrapping
nanotech panspermia becomes practical -- sending packages to nearby
stars, even with transit times of many millennia, might be worthwhile
to them if it brings more computing power online. They are, after all,
effectively immortal (until the end of the universe, anyway), and if
they experience anything like boredom, they can probably just throttle
their subjective sense of time passage so that years become
microseconds. If that's the pattern in cores, it might be a long time
(if ever) before going after resources farther out along the spirals
makes any sense.

-michael turner
www.transcendentalbloviation.blogspot.com

On Fri, 19 Jan 2007 00:23:50 +0000 (GMT), Apollo Astronaught
wrote:

sigh Someone really should put you out of your misery, Danny.

Douglas Berry wrote:
Shall I trot out all the reasons given in the early 16th Century why
exploring the New World was impractical and would never lead to
anything useful?


Europe went to the New World for three specific reasons in that time frame:
Make money from spices (thinking they were heading toward the Orient).
Make money from gold (once they found out where they were, and that the
natives didn't have very good weapons).
Make money from tobacco and furs (once they found out that things
existed there that weren't found in Europe...but could be sold in Europe).

Pat

wrote:

But Marx was still wrong. Of course workers do create value. But it
isn't *only* workers who create value. Raw materials have value.
Capital - tools, facilities - have value. They make it more efficient
for workers to create value, so they're worth something too.

Marx talked about Capital as "dead labor". This is of course orthodox
economic theory as propounded in any standard course.

On Fri, 19 Jan 2007 04:15:54 +0000, Douglas Berry wrote:

On 18 Jan 2007 08:42:31 -0800 there was an Ancient "Sound of Trumpet"
who stoppeth one in alt.atheism
http://www.catholicexchange.com/vm/i...2&art_id=31576


One thing I have discovered (to my surprise) is how shocked some folks
get when I express my opinion that we humans are never getting off the
earth in any serious way.

Idiocy often gets a shocked reaction.

We're Staying Right Here on Earth

Oh sure, we might get a couple of people to Mars to walk around. Maybe
a long-term space station with more than a handful of astronauts in
near-Earth orbit. Maaaaaaaybe a moon station. But we're never, I think,
going to colonize the planets. And we're most emphatically never going
to go to another star. This earth is pretty much it. We must learn to
face the fact that the frontier period is past and we ain't going
anywhere.

Shall I trot out all the reasons given in the early 16th Century why
exploring the New World was impractical and would never lead to
anything useful?

Sigh. And apparently, it didn't...

--
Mark K. Bilbo a.a. #1423
EAC Department of Linguistic Subversion
------------------------------------------------------------
"You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards,
witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling
from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical,
absurd and primitive stories, and you say that *we* are the
ones that need help?" - Jon Stoll

Joe Strout wrote:

We also ought to look at timescales.
10 years for IKEA. If you have CAD/CAM specification true VN is not far
away.

I respectfully disagree. Have you looked at the size of chip factories
lately?

This is a good point. However we may not start off with a complete VN
machine. We may well send chips to the Moon even if we don't have to
send anything else.

There is one other thing which will probably be kept on Earth - At any
rate until there is interstellar travel and that is the basic genome.


- Ian Parker

In article . com,
wrote:

Joe Strout wrote:

We also ought to look at timescales.
10 years for IKEA. If you have CAD/CAM specification true VN is not far
away.

I respectfully disagree. Have you looked at the size of chip factories
lately?

This is a good point. However we may not start off with a complete VN
machine. We may well send chips to the Moon even if we don't have to
send anything else.

That's a sensible compromise advocated by John S. Lewis in Mining the
Sky: make sure your self-replicating machines have at least one critical
part (he suggests the microcontroller) which they are incapable of
producing, so that they can't get out of hand.

Best,
- Joe

Joe Strout wrote:

In short, I think that we are, for all
practical purposes, all alone.

I think so too, mainly because if there was somebody else out there,
they'd be here by now. The only plausible alternative is that they're
out there, but choosing to keep their presence hidden from us.

Or we're the most advanced civilization in the relatively nearby region
of space. Civilizations as advanced as 19th century Earth could be quite
common, and SETI would never detect them. Perhaps there are many other
intelligent species, but they live on planets lacking abundant and
accessible energy sources.


If there's somebody out there, we'll
never know it, because the odds are that intelligent physical life is
so remote from us - if it exists at all - that we can't hear it if
it is broadcasting electromagnetic signals.

No, if it exists, it's either here or right outside the nature preserve.
It would know we're here and if it wanted to communicate with us,
there'd be no missing it.

Perhaps we simply aren't interesting enough to attract their attention.


Again, I say this not due to my theological views, but because the
science is on my side.

No, it's not.

As Rare Earth demonstrates, over 20 factors all
have to line up just so in order to even have a shot at intelligent
life arising on a planet. The odds against all those factors working
out with such fine tuning are extremely slight. So the odds of life
existing in most of our galaxy are likewise extremely slight.

The odds per star system are extremely slight, but there are 100 billion
stars in our galaxy.

His assertion also assumes that Earth-like conditions are a requirement
for intelligent life.

Apollo Astronaught wrote:
On 18 Jan 2007, "Sound of Trumpet" wrote:
http://www.catholicexchange.com/vm/i...2&art_id=31576
Maybe a long-term space station with more than a handful of astronauts in
near-Earth orbit.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

You got that right! A few hundred miles above sealevel is
as far above the Earth's surface that JPL/NASA's horseless
carriages have ever been. Their "manned moon landing" back
in covered-wagon times was nothing but cold-war propaganda
for the unsuspecting masses, as all the evidence has shown...

OK, I think I need to explain basic rocketry.

Getting to LEO is the hard part. you need a powerful rocket, able to
exert more force than the earth's gravity and the drag of atmosphere.
until you hit orbit, you can't do much.

Getting from LEO to the moon is trivial.
The delta-v to LEO is nearly 10,000 m/s; this has to be delivered at
multiple G, because of the nature of trying to take off in atmosphere.
The delta-v to escape entirely from the earth's gravitational pull is
18,000 m/s; yes, that is less than double what it took just to get up
the first 200 miles. And, once you are up, you can use any G force you
want. micro-G from an ion drive will work.
We could, quite easily, make a shuttle pod to visit the moon.

The Saturn 5 delivered 120 tons to LEO. Less than 15 tons of this was
the lunar lander. the delta-v provided by this could be matched with
an ion drive that wighs less than half a ton, but that would mean a
longer life support mission. we have the life support capacity today
to do this, they did not back in the Apollo days.

You are an ignorant boob.

On Fri, 19 Jan 2007 00:23:50 UTC, Apollo Astronaught
wrote:

On 18 Jan 2007, "Sound of Trumpet" wrote:
http://www.catholicexchange.com/vm/i...2&art_id=31576
Maybe a long-term space station with more than a handful of astronauts in
near-Earth orbit.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

You got that right! A few hundred miles above sealevel is
as far above the Earth's surface that JPL/NASA's horseless
carriages have ever been.

Please resume taking your medication.