X-Message-Number: 21632 From: "Joseph W. Morgan" <> Subject: The Fermi Paradox and the Technological Singularity Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2003 09:02:44 -0700 This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------=_NextPart_000_0007_01C3071B.9ADA1200 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" In "Musings on the Singularity" (Cryonet 21607), Francois argues that the absence of obvious interstellar colonization and visible engineering works on the stellar or galactic scale suggests that alien civilizations have not experienced a technological singularity and therefore may not exist. Given the same observations, others argue that technological singularities explain the Fermi Paradox. The reasoning being that post-human entities be they machine, biological, or hybrids are so superior to humans that we cannot even imagine what they are doing or thinking. Picture an ant trying to understand tensor calculus. Picture gods as the products of alien technological singularities. Therefore, our vision of the future as fleets of spaceships colonizing the galaxy and construction projects on the scale of Dyson spheres may not be accurate. Francois is right about future shock. The universe may be stranger than we are capable of imagining. A hint of that can be found in the May 2003 issue of Scientific American. "Parallel Universes" by Max Tegmark is a truly mind-boggling article. Joseph W. Morgan ------=_NextPart_000_0007_01C3071B.9ADA1200 Content-Type: text/html; [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=21632