X-Message-Number: 11296
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1999 11:16:48 -0500
From: Crevier <>
Subject: Fermi's paradox 

Thanks to John de Rivaz and Robert Ettinger for commenting on my 
posting. Joe Strout also sent me his remarks in a private e-mail.

I entirely agree with John that beings who live in a simulated 
environment because the real world is too slow will not neglect the 
physical world entirely: they'll need to build and maintain the 
circuitry that runs them, which circuitry will be housed in buildings 
and run on electricity, hence the need for power generators, 
manufacturing plants and so on. John also mentions the need to evacuate 
the solar system when it stops being inhabitable, to which I would add 
the need to watch out for asteroid impacts, and for the activities of 
other intelligent entities in the real world. For example, there may be 
people around who don't want to live in a virtual reality, and who may 
be hostile. Even their peaceful undertakings,  such as playing with 
antimatter and other dangerous technologies in order to build starships, 
may be perceived as as threats by the virtual worlders. (After all, we 
are right now banning the use of nuclear power in space for very similar 
reasons.) So here is yet another reason why starships may not be as 
frequent as one would expect. 

John also points out that scientific interest and our perennial itch to 
explore will always keep us in touch with the physical world.  Roger on 
that again. In fact, we do right now carry out vigorous research into 
fields where things happen in very different time frames than our 
everyday lives,  like history, geology, climatology, paleontology, to 
say nothing of cosmology. That does not mean, however, that many 
scientists in these fields would agree to exile from their very lives in 
order to pursue  professional interests. For example, how many 
cosmologists would accept indefinite suspended animation in order to 
find out whether the universe is open or closed?

Robert Ettinger mentions, if I understand correctly,  that the appeal to 
Darwinian evolution is inappropriate because it applies to biological 
processes, which do not behave in the same way as intelligent entities. 
The reason I invoked evolutionary theory is that there is evidence that 
some of its priciples carry over to fields other than biology, such as 
economics and cultural evolution. Daniel Dennett, in 'Darwin's dangerous 
idea', does a good job of demonstrating that. See also Richard Dawkin's 
'Selfish gene,' where he develops the idea of memes, the cultural 
equivalents of genes. But Robert is right:  we should be careful when 
extrapolating Darwinism to civilizational development, because there, 
the Watchmaker is no longer blind (to quote Dawkins again), and things 
may happen differently. 

This is what I pointed out to Joe Strout, who remarked that a 
spacefaring species will develop anyways, 'because evolution always 
selects for expansion into unused niches.'  Not necessarily true, 
because evolution  never did produce, for example, a bird that could fly 
to the moon. Moon rockets are not the product of darwinian evolution: 
they result from the concerted efforts of a very large number of people. 
For these kinds of projects to happen, two things are necessary: 1) that 
a number of people larger than the critical mass decide that this is a 
valuable way to spend their time, and 2) that no other, more powerful 
group prevent them from doing so (see my point above about the ban on 
nuclear power in space). My conjecture, if true, would make these two 
conditions less likely to obtain.

Robert also remarks that non biologicals may not be conscious. That 
certainly is an unsettled question. I can only point him to such books 
as Dennett's (again) 'Consciousness Explained', with which he disagrees. 
I suppose we won't solve that one here.

A further objection of his is 'the necessity of simulating a large 
environment including other people. If these people are real, with 
subjective lives, who confers or assumes the right to create them and 
maintain them?'. I guess it's the word 'simulation' that creates a 
confusion here. There wouldn't be one simulation (that would include 
other people) for each 'real person' in the virtual world. Each person 
would correspond to one and only one set of computations, much as they 
correspond now to one and only one body. Therefore, the problem of 
controlling  the right to create and maintain one person will be similar 
to that of enforcing human rights nowadays. Likewise, the simulated 
environment will be consensual in that there will be, in general, only 
one for a very large group of people.  

One final remark. Fermi asked 'Why hasn't anyone reached us yet?', not 
'Why can't a starship be built ever?'.  I am not proposing to answer the 
latter, because I believe that interstellar travel can happen. I am just 
conjecturing about a powerful 'stay-at-home' inducement that could 
reduce the frequency of such expeditions, and thus be part of the answer 
to the first question.

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