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The future answers don't need to be unique and convoluted. Offhand, there's Baxter's suggestion in "Manifold: Space" that epic-scale collapses of multi-star sys
by stavrianos 17y ago
The future answers don't need to be unique and convoluted. Offhand, there's Baxter's suggestion in "Manifold: Space" that epic-scale collapses of multi-star systems might happen more often than we think, with sterilizing effects on big chunks of space. Egan used a variation of this in "Diaspora".
- jeremyawon 17y agothe scenarios Baxter and Egan write about only push the Great Filter up to the moment of being able to create self-replicating probes (the most basic form of explosive colonization). i think that's actually the point after which filters have to contend with a diversity of "the psychology of the intelligences that evolve" (rather than at the emergence of biology, since biology is localized and subject to regularities in astrophysics such as supernovae). how far are we from being able to produce such probes, and could our psychology become so idiosyncratic between now and then that we wouldn't deploy them?
- eru 17y agoI guess if we'd throw all our resources at it, the probes would not be far off. Hey, if we transported enough garbage up to Mars, now, some Microbes would probably survive, adapt and flourish.