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That's a very young-civilization perspective. 100 years seems like a long time to us because it's approximately 1% of the age of our civilization. But it's po

by wheels 8y ago

That's a very young-civilization perspective. 100 years seems like a long time to us because it's approximately 1% of the age of our civilization. But it's possible that civilizations that are hundreds of millions of years old exist. To such civilizations 100 years would be a flash in the pan. Also keep in mind than until recently on earth we used transmission mechanisms for long-on-earth distances that were closer to the order of magnitude of 100-year transmission time (a few months) than to present transmission time (a few milliseconds).

fauigerzigerk 8y ago
>But it's possible that civilizations that are hundreds of millions of years old exist. To such civilizations 100 years would be a flash in the pan. I don't know if it is possible for a civilization to connect the past to the present over such long periods of time. The individuals in each generation would have to pick up, use and pass on all the information that came before. Our capacity to take past information into account, individually and collectively, is very limited, even if it gets stored somewhere. We can see that in many debates on here where arguments of the past are repeated many times over without younger participants having any awareness of what's been said before. We can compensate for that to some degree by continuously retelling old stories. But relearning old stuff necessarily competes with new information for our limited mental capacity and so old information inevitable degrades over time. Even religions, where there is a strong emotional incentive to retell old stories, are struggling mightily with even understanding what the original authors meant by the words they used and how to apply any of it to the current situation. I think for a civilization to retain its collective memory over much longer periods of time requires completely different individuals. It requires individuals that are able to grow their mental capacity at the same pace as the amount of accumulated information grows. If you consider the combinatoric explosion, this is unimaginable in a biological organism based on evolution and ultimately even in an AI.
- Amygaz 8y ago
  I also want to add that age-wise we might be pretty old. Our galaxy (13B) solar system (5B), our planet(4.5B)are pretty old considering the Big Bang happened 14B year ago. Definitely in civilization time that leaves a lot of room for a few milion years here and there, but still, we could be the oldest and most advanced (at the same time I do hope there is a civilization out there less eccentric and egocentric as ours...)
codebje 8y ago
100 years doesn't seem like a long time to me because of the age of our civilisation or species, it seems like a long time to me because of the lifespan of our species. I certainly can't communicate at all on a 200 year RTT, as I'll be dead and forgotten before I get an answer. If it's communication, that implies a two-way exchange of ideas. The galactic equivalent of blogging would be like all such communications: typically of more interest to the sender than the receiver. If we assume a long-lived species that can receive a response within its lifetime, we must also assume that during the intervening time little enough of the context has changed that the answer is still relevant. That means a species and a civilisation that has extremely little change over hundreds of years. This is what I mean by an extraordinarily static civilisation. (But if it's so static, what could possibly be said that has material bearing on anything? :-)

by wheels 8y ago

fauigerzigerk 8y ago

>But it's possible that civilizations that are hundreds of millions of years old exist. To such civilizations 100 years would be a flash in the pan. I don't know if it is possible for a civilization to connect the past to the present over such long periods of time. The individuals in each generation would have to pick up, use and pass on all the information that came before. Our capacity to take past information into account, individually and collectively, is very limited, even if it gets stored somewhere. We can see that in many debates on here where arguments of the past are repeated many times over without younger participants having any awareness of what's been said before. We can compensate for that to some degree by continuously retelling old stories. But relearning old stuff necessarily competes with new information for our limited mental capacity and so old information inevitable degrades over time. Even religions, where there is a strong emotional incentive to retell old stories, are struggling mightily with even understanding what the original authors meant by the words they used and how to apply any of it to the current situation. I think for a civilization to retain its collective memory over much longer periods of time requires completely different individuals. It requires individuals that are able to grow their mental capacity at the same pace as the amount of accumulated information grows. If you consider the combinatoric explosion, this is unimaginable in a biological organism based on evolution and ultimately even in an AI.

Amygaz 8y ago
I also want to add that age-wise we might be pretty old. Our galaxy (13B) solar system (5B), our planet(4.5B)are pretty old considering the Big Bang happened 14B year ago. Definitely in civilization time that leaves a lot of room for a few milion years here and there, but still, we could be the oldest and most advanced (at the same time I do hope there is a civilization out there less eccentric and egocentric as ours...)

codebje 8y ago

100 years doesn't seem like a long time to me because of the age of our civilisation or species, it seems like a long time to me because of the lifespan of our species. I certainly can't communicate at all on a 200 year RTT, as I'll be dead and forgotten before I get an answer. If it's communication, that implies a two-way exchange of ideas. The galactic equivalent of blogging would be like all such communications: typically of more interest to the sender than the receiver. If we assume a long-lived species that can receive a response within its lifetime, we must also assume that during the intervening time little enough of the context has changed that the answer is still relevant. That means a species and a civilisation that has extremely little change over hundreds of years. This is what I mean by an extraordinarily static civilisation. (But if it's so static, what could possibly be said that has material bearing on anything? :-)