Why would such an advanced species "trade" ?
They would just mine planets directly via robots.
Hopefully if they were nice aliens they would only mine uninhabited, lifeless planets.
They would just mine planets directly via robots.
Hopefully if they were nice aliens they would only mine uninhabited, lifeless planets.
They could be millions or billions of times more intelligent than us. And imagine a mind the size of the Earth, or the size of Jupiter, with the energy of their entire star.
The fact that the human brain is limited to fitting through the birth canal is a great example. With c-sections that isn't particularly relevant, and computers/AI aren't limited in size or energy requirements at all (or at least not anywhere near the same constraints that humans have.) So imagine if brains that constraint was removed and you made brains dozens, hundreds, or even millions of times larger.
You could build a computer the size of a planet, though it would require a ridiculous amount of technological ability. The energy of a star doesn't mean literally as hot as a star, but something like thousands of solar panels to efficiently collect as much of the energy as possible for powering the enormous computer. It was just an example of what the limits of technology might be.
A bright future for mankind, but less great for womankind. We may need to figure out how to use elephants as surrogate mothers.
B) We are still evolving. The big overwhelming FACT of civilization didn't halt our evolution, it just changed the nature of the selection pressures. Whereas raw, physical survivability was once the prime selection factor, civilization has made reproductive desirability, social cooperation, and parenting ability (all inter-related but nonidentical) the larger selection pressures on human genomes.
C) The big new adaptation that made us humans what we are was only maybe intelligence. It was probably extelligence: the ability to store knowledge in the social group rather than the individual. That way, you can build your collective knowledge over time.
D) You would have to be a stupidly, suicidally cancerous civilization to go around converting whole planets into tools.
Modern computers are millions of times faster than the human brain, and can in theory be made much more energy efficient and compact and probably cheaper.
Yes we are still evolving, though at a ridiculously slow pace. And the traits that are currently spreading aren't exactly good. The genes responsible for sociopathy are becoming more frequent since we don't live in small communities anymore. Intelligence is being strongly selected against at the moment as counter-intuitive as that seems. Less intelligent individuals tend to reproduce far more frequently for whatever reason.
"Extelligence" doesn't really explain much. Sure a mind on it's own might not accomplish much, but we still have to explain what it is about human minds that allow them to think and learn in the first place. Can apes be taught language? If they were would they gain higher level intelligence or does it take more than that? I bet it isn't that simple.
>You would have to be a stupidly, suicidally cancerous civilization to go around converting whole planets into tools.
I don't know where your preference comes from but I would love to see the planets get converted into giant computers and minds. We should optimize the universe for our values, rather than preserving the random state it was put in by nature.
Congratulations! You're the first person outside /r/hpmor to make my Chemical Shed List for Irresponsibly-Applied Phlebotinum! When shit gets real, I will take you out behind the chemical sheds and shoot you.
People like the so-called random state things were put in by nature. Saturn, for instance, is pretty the way it is. Hell, think about it this way: what if I suggested that your house you actually live in is simply suboptimal as a house, and should instead be converted into a huge brain I can use for thinking? After all, it's just another step in my optimizing the universe for my values, which apparently include adolescent dick-waving and solving lots of math problems rather than a human civilization with people to talk to.
Well, you shouldn't want to do that, because after all, you need a place to live. More broadly, even if you've "gone virtual" (as you indicate some desire to do in occasional hard-SF threads), you're still a human being, and you're supposed to have sentimental attachments. Sentimental attachments are, after all, what make us human in the first place.
This whole "planet-sized X" thing, for all X other than planets, is basically just another adolescent power fantasy. Consider that if Ultimate Power, or some semblance thereof, seems to be your goal in life, there may in fact be something wrong with you. I can't actually think of anything a human being wants other than raw power that is served by wrecking entire planets.
Real life is not a scifi novel, not even the finer grade of scifi novel.
>"Extelligence" doesn't really explain much. Sure a mind on it's own might not accomplish much, but we still have to explain what it is about human minds that allow them to think and learn in the first place. Can apes be taught language? If they were would they gain higher level intelligence or does it take more than that? I bet it isn't that simple.
Actually, gorillas have been taught simple sign-language before and can form coherent sentences. Chimpanzees have been observed learning and passing down more advanced tool-using skills than we thought they were capable of. Human children, raised without exposure to language and culture, don't naturally turn out as civilized "human beings" of the kind we expect to meet.
The Big Secret is culture.
I have no idea what kind of goals and desires a futuristic civilization will have. I can imagine a lot of possible goals that could be possibly benefit from giant computers and other mega-projects. But even short of that, you could still just say why not?
The universe is our sandbox. The sand isn't intelligent, it doesn't care what shape it's in. And it wasn't put in it's current shape for any particular reason. But we can build beautiful castles in it that we appreciate. We can play and have fun in it, and it won't matter to the sand one way or the other, but it will matter to us. And at the end of the day the tide will probably wipe it all away anyways.
Apes still have massively reduced brain sizes and are missing many of the adaptions humans had. As far as I am aware teaching them language was only partially successful and they still are nowhere near human level. And it still tells us absolutely nothing about how the brain actually works.
> civilization has made reproductive desirability, social cooperation, and parenting ability (all inter-related but nonidentical) the larger selection pressures on human genomes
Looking at the people that have the biggest families, it's hard to say what, exactly, is being selected for. They seem to like children.
> You would have to be a stupidly, suicidally cancerous civilization to go around converting whole planets into tools.
We've been converting the earth into a tool.
And, look at that, it's killing us.
Admittedly, since we've known that overexploiting the Earth's resources would do that for something like 50 years now, I don't so much blame humanity in general as the narrow but powerful subset who decided it was better to overexploit and destroy civilization than to make a bit less money.
It hasn't really started killing us yet -- the population is expanding. This civilization may and probably will collapse, like the Romans, but I'm not sure exactly how a civilization could grow exponentially forever, so it's kind of inevitable.
In other words, we are a newborn intelligent species, and newborns generally find that everyone around them is older.