Aspies For Freedom

Joined: 09 Jul 2004
Posts: 1067
Location: One stoplight town, in the middle of nowhere (aka France)

PostPosted: Tue Nov 13, 2007 5:47 pm    Post subject: The plan for autism explains the S.E.T.I. conundrum? Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post
The search for intelligent life kicked off due to various calculations (including by that famous autistic science writer, Isaac Azimov) that indicated that, even using the most conservative estimates, there should be 100K technical civilizations in our Galaxy at any one time, and that we should now be receiving hundreds of radio waves from past technical activity on other planets.

It isn't happening! This suggests two possibilities; that we are unique in achieving our level of technology (highly improbable) or else, all those previous calculations are flawed.

One candidate is that all those I've seen have assumed that, once our current status has been reached, then any such society will survive at least a thousand years, but history tells a different story! All our previous cycles of civilization, even the most enduring, have never lasted much more than a thousand years in total, including the run up to technology.

Suppose the psychodynamics of any intelligent race ensures this is always true, and that the period cannot vary, irrespective of the technological level? What, even if repeated dark ages are inevitable with the same old frequency, could possibly prevent a future civilization which could build upon the discoveries of the previous, thus ensuring a steady repeat of radio waves into the cosmos?

One thing is the discovery of genetics!

Supposing it's inevitable that the "people" oriented types who always aspire to control society, to the exclusive advantage of their own kind, are automatically at odds with the "thing" oriented people who produce all the developments in science and technology, and would eliminate them at the first opportunity?

One obstacle to such an intent is that eugenics inevitably becomes a dirty word, as it quickly becomes apparent that those who think themselves qualified to decide who's fit to survive, never see their own kind as candidates, nor do they measure "fitness" in terms of the candidates contribution to the common weal (in fact they are only interested in what's good for them, and stuff the gullible majority, who exist only to be exploited) so openly attacking the irritatingly unmanageable free thinkers who produce the technology, could well cause the majority to turn against them.

Clearly, deviousness is required (no problem there!) and a way will be found! What then will be the result? Well, the exterminators would indubitably follow the usual path of increasingly undisciplined self indulgence, which would plummet society into the next dark age, as per the usual schedule. Then you'd expect another civilization to evolve, as usual, except, hold on!; you've just eliminated the genotype of that section of society which is the only one capable of invention and scientific progress...so who's going to invent the wheel (etc.) this time round? History shows all such developments came from a tiny fraction of a percent of the population of that age, indicating that most people just haven't got what it takes; science comes from people who think in a different way, who, as a result, are never considered "normal"!

But is it so easy to kill off the natural scientists, without the population at large noticing? One way would be to start mass education, which is a means of making most people a lot more capable than they would be if left to their own devices, and then manipulating the system so that "science" becomes increasingly a job title for those who are not necessarily the most able, but rather those who display the intent to satisfy the requirements of the establishment, by working hard to acquire the status which is imparted by a PhD.

This would inevitably marginalise the true scientists, a process which could be accelerated by over-emphasizing issues like "social skills", until such time as the public image of a "scientists" has changed, from some weird loner with amazing insights, into a smartly dressed professional, who's "just like me, only smarter" and who achieves by working hard. All that would remain then, would be to construe weirdness as a defect, stir it in with other, genuine, defects, and work to create in the publics eye some kind of chimera so complicated that it would seem the only possible cure is to terminate any fetus which carries the "defective" genes which cause this collective dysfunctionality. Does this process seem at all familiar?

Discuss!

An interesting insight into our possible short term future! The question is how do we work to ensure that we deny this as a possibility for our race? Does anybody think that enough aspies would come together to be able to afford to emigrate to mars?

So...are we Aliens by that logic or what?

=p

I skimmed the article.

It is more probably that our ancestors migrated here from Mars .... and now we'd better find another habitable planet to destroy ....

Sorry, not buying it.
If you're posing this as a solution to the Fermi paradox, it's WAY too anthropocentric.

Also, contrary to a lot of science fiction, there is no way that we can pick up the "accidental" broadcasts from another planet. The best that we're hoping for right now are "directed" signals(in the form of lasers or masers or focused radio signals). We are also focusing most of our attention on the parts of the spectrum that we suspect would be used for this sort of thing, but ignoring most of the spectrum that we could be looking at. Plus, add in the fact that SETI centers in general have HORRIBLE communication(the people who have the big computers can't get any data from the southern hemisphere, and the people at the Parkes observatory don't have nearly as much computing power availible) and it seems quite reasonable that we haven't picked up anything yet.

It's a good idea, but it does fall down on a couple of points:

A) It is rather anthropocentric as been pointed out, it's highly unlikely the alien mindset would be remotely like ours. Our very evolution has guided the way our mind works (ie. our natural fear response allows us to percieve POTENTIAL threats in the environment, but the same response means we tend to anthropomorphicise forces in our environment lending to gods and myths)

B) While any single civilisation may only last 100 years, theres is usually multiple civilisations existing in concert which will retain much of the knowledge lost to the dying civilisation; for instance during the Dark Age in britain which virtually outlawed scientific progress the rest of the world was still advancing and little of importance was lost merely potential for development was wasted (ie. the genius of that era)

Obviously this may in the future become a serious issue as weapon tech reaches a stage where one civilisations collapse could annhilate all life on earth at the click of a button.

C) Civilisation has been through the decadence/decay cycle many times but we've still moved forward and never once came to a complete standstill. People don't electivly wipe out the smart members of society, they may want to wipe out Autistic spectrum, but theres plenty of non autistic scientists out there who'll fill in for us. Granted it might take a little longer to come up with stuff really outside the box.

That said I'm not sure that we'll make weapns a great deal more powerful than nuclear weapons, split atoms into a fission reaction is pretty much THEY most powerful force in the universe, on a par with a hypothetical anti-matter explosion, and not even the biggest nuke could wipe out the whole planet absolutely.

Well, we haven't made any that big--but that doesn't neccesarily mean that someone else hasn't.

Bah, too long to read....  :S

Current thermonuclear weapon efficiency is around 7% afaik, for a simple single-stage pure fission bomb, rising somewhat for hybrid fission ignited fusion weapons, deuterium/tritium fuel cores etc.

Antimatter/matter annihilation produces 100% matter/energy conversion efficiency, much energy can be lost as gamma rays, and other particles not directly harnessable.

Still, controlled, economical antimatter reactors would represent an amazing advance in clean power production, an antimatter weapon though could wreak havoc, due to the incredible energy density.

The inherent hazards though, continuous magnetic confinement of antiparticles, would require a self-sustaining reaction IMO, and continuous generation of antimatter, to provide power for the containment fields etc.

If the safeties ever failed, and they will, should it ever become feasible to provide energy through antimatter, there is going to be one hell of a big kaboom wherever it happens, not to mention a big ass burst of high energy gamma radiation.

Shit happens, its as certain as death, taxes and high beer prices under a new labour government

That said, I would love my own antimatter generator, what could I do with that, I just wonder....

(Lestat is currently open to all donations of large sums of money/spare particle accelerator parts)

And the with the playback button, another Zorg innovation..it's even easier