From: Byrne Hobart (sometimesfunnyalwaysright@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Sep 25 2007 - 16:41:29 MDT
> if thier advance were hiperbolic, it will reach any possible speed. For example, eart life took 2 billion years to create eucariotic life.
At some point.
But the speed issue isn't the main idea. I'm just noting that if
there's another intelligence out there, it's so wildly different from
us that getting a signal isn't nearly as hard as translating it, and
we're going to have lots of trouble deciding which species is or isn't
intelligent. In fact, we might end up with 'chained' relationships --
so the humans talk to the 30-foot slugs who talk to the 300-foot
sentient dust clouds who talk to the conscious waves of Jupiter. Or,
if there aren't enough connecting pairs of civilizations, two could
just end up talking past each other.
Given how diverse evolving, reproducing organization (as a broader
category than life) is, it's safe to assume that this is more common
than an encounter would be: that we're obliviously sharing the
universe with other oblivious civilizations, because there are so many
scales on which order can exist.
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