Over at Aeon, an essay on the likelihood of the universe (or at least, a large chunk of it) being taken over by self replicating spacecraft.
It starts with this provocative paragraph:
Some time late this century, someone will push a button, unleashing a life force on the cosmos. Within 1,000 years, every star you can see at night will host intelligent life. In less than a million years, that life will saturate the entire Milky Way; in 20 million years – the local group of galaxies. In the fullness of cosmic time, thousands of superclusters of galaxies will be saturated in a forever-expanding sphere of influence, centred on Earth.I think that start date is definitely way too early, given the bumbling around it is taking to even get back to the Moon. But still...
A completely ridiculous idea since it requires machines maintaining machines maintaining machines in infinite regression. We know what the lowest maintenance nanotechnology is and will ever be. It’s called the seed. These Kurzweil fantasies are an attempt to get by without the massive advantages of the Carbon attitude.
ReplyDeleteWe can’t even maintain high paid industrial level economic life without lots of flat rail and or canals. And any hard working machine won’t last 24 hours without a maintenance department. People who buy into this stuff are isolated from real work. Fractional reserve leads to millions of bludgers living in a kind of virtual reality.
Intelligent panspermia is absolutely baked into the way the universe operates. Moons grow to planets grow gas giants (no such thing really) grow to stars grow to bigger stars. So planet earth will one day be too large for intelligent life. We have to migrate or go extinct. When we do migrate we will have to take the farm with us in a hollowed asteroid. Minimum size Phobos. We can’t do anything without permaculture and stone masonry. We have to forget the stainless steel visions of Kurzweil and the Star Trek writing team.
ReplyDeleteThe fellow who proved that planets create new matter was a geologist born in Campbelltown Sydney. Only a humble Anglo Saxon Romano Celt so not allowed to overturn junk synagogue physics.
While establishing Mars as a mining colony must be pretty easy, since we have done so in the past, still we need to terraform this planet before we delude ourselves that we are able to terraform another. We ought to be looking at centuries long rail building projects and Millenia long canal building. We need to rehydrate the continents. Sealed on the convex parts of any hill, check dams where it’s concave. Ponds everywhere. Paddocks made of living fences. and the commons restored between these paddocks. Modern technology, once these water features are in place, will allow for us to make it rain more over land than over the sea.
ReplyDeleteSWALES on the convex parts of the hills I mean. Most farming needs to be silvopasture. We need to wean off monocrops and get used to what we can get from grass and trees
ReplyDelete