So, let's suppose that . . .
Apr. 26th, 2011 07:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xiphiasSuppose that all the extremist Christian-dominionist fundies get Raptured, the Ayn-Randians "Go Galt", and the tech-supremacists are Singularitied.
Wouldn't that be nice?
Wouldn't that be nice?
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Date: 2011-04-26 11:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2011-04-26 01:58 pm (UTC)Perhaps everyone uploads their minds to a computer, perhaps everybody manages to become Beings Of Pure Thought in some other way, perhaps everyone finds access to some other form of existence. But, in some way, some sort of technological Good Thing happens which ends humanity in its current form.
One reason for this theory is that it's a "nicer" solution to one part of the Fermi Paradox. The "Fermi Paradox" is that there are a LOT of stars out there, and a LOT of them have planets that can support something approximating Life As We Know It, and life probably has a tendency to gain complexity, and as life gains complexity, one thing that it can gain is greater control of its environment, which includes intelligence, which would tend to potentially lead to sapience, and societies, and technology.
Maybe this would be a very, very rare and unlikely event, but there are so many stars out there, and so many chances for this to happen, that you'd expect there to be a LOT of technology-using cultures out there, and many of them would be at our tech level or higher, and many of them would also be curious about life on other planets, too, and at least some of them would have individuals who would try to send out messages to other planets, the way that some humans do --
Where is everybody? There are SO many places that could have life, that you'd figure that at least ONE culture would have tried to contact us by now.
So, one possibility is that the amount of time that a species exists at a technology level where they COULD send out a message to another planet is so incredibly short, on the scale that we're talking, that it changes the odds. If a species just doesn't last more than, oh, a couple hundred to a couple thousand years after it develops to the point where it COULD send out a message, then that's going to DRASTICALLY drop the chances of actually making contact with someone else.
One way THAT might work is that, once a species gets enough technology, it tends to drive itself to extinction, through, I dunno, war, environmental disaster, or whatever.
But what if a species tends to get a HAPPY end, instead of destruction? And that's the appeal of the idea of the Singularity -- or, as I've heard it sarcastically called, the Geek Rapture.
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Date: 2011-04-26 12:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-26 01:06 pm (UTC)(Well not so much the techies, but definitely the other two.)
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Date: 2011-04-26 06:33 pm (UTC)I like Xiphias' "good ridence to them" view point.