 Aribeth says: there is a "Great Filter" along the path between simple dead stuff and explosive life. The vast vast majority of stuff that starts along this path never makes it. In fact, so far nothing among the billion trillion stars in our whole past universe has made it all the way along this path.... [O]ne or more of these steps is much more improbable than it otherwise looks. If it is one of our past steps, such as the development of single-cell life, then we shouldn't expect to see such independently evolved life anywhere within billions of light years from us. But if it is a step between here and a choice to explode that is very improbable, we should fear for our future.... Optimism (as defined here) regarding our future is directly pitted against optimism regarding the ease of previous evolutionary steps. To the extent those successes were easy, our future failure to explode is almost certain... Humanity seems to have a bright future, i.e., a non-trivial chance of expanding to fill the universe with lasting life. But the fact that space near us seems dead now tells us that any given piece of dead matter faces an astronomically low chance of begating such a future. There thus exists a great filter between death and expanding lasting life, and humanity faces the ominous question: how far along this filter are we? [i]Combining standard stories of biologists, astronomers, physicists, and social scientists would lead us to expect a much smaller filter than we observe. Thus one of these stories must be wrong. To find out who is wrong, and to inform our choice... That is a remarkably intelligent website for a humanoid to produce. As to the article, it too borders on insight unweighted with humanoid biopsychological debris. When the Squirrel project is completed we may, in the interest of science, preserve some of these borderline human minds and see whether it is possible to push them beyond their natural limits to gain an inkling of the 96 per cent of the universe which is not visible to them. A long shot, I know, but the study of complex emergence from simple elements does involve consideration of every possibility, even the impossible ones. The paper is now found at http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html An article just appeared in MIT Tech Review: http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20569/ Thx for MIT article. |
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