X-Message-Number: 11220
Date: Wed, 03 Feb 1999 11:22:10 -0800
From: Peter Merel <>
Subject: No Room At The Bottom

Kennita Watson writes,
 
>> It just doesn't seem all that hard to build Drexlerian assemblers. 
>> It's plain that every intelligent civilization will upload itself 
>> into nanite form just a few millenia after inventing the wheel.
>> 
>ROTFLAHMS :-)  Like we have the *foggiest* idea what such a 
>civilization would do!

We know the difference between savagery and civilization. That
difference is the preservation and nurture of living information. 
Whether it's in books or in seeds, there is plainly an evolutionary 
advantage in keeping and developing it, because having access to it 
can save your skin when push comes to shove.

A highly advanced civilization may do many things, but it will not
rationally resort to savagery. Finding proto-sentients on a damp pebble, 
it would be only logical to isolate them until their cultural potential
flowered into a peer civilization. To assimilate them, either by 
dismantling their habitat or training them in the standard galactic
technologies, risks destroying a cultural potential to evolve one 
day invaluable new technologies. To do that would not be civilized. 

Peter Merel

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