ET will likely not be biological

[kennyc]

according to SETI researcher Seth Shostak:


http://www.physorg.com/news205144539.html

[Sandra Edwards]

machines. huh. interesting.

Sandy

[kennyc]

Yep....I think that's where we're headed...

[Joebill]

Originally Posted by Sandra Edwards

machines. huh. interesting.

Sandy

'Ghost in the Shell' human cyborg perhaps might be what they find here in a few more decades.

Some documentaries I have seen have mentioned micro machines being sent out, landing on a planet, and building more micro machines.

A sf story I read some years ago had micro machnies landing on Earth... and not recognizing an biological anything as living/thinking, and the micro machines proceed to dismantle anything in the biomass, including people, and make things out of them.

[Falcao]

Maybe the human brain can perform non-computable processes and thus, no machine can equal it.

[Joebill]

I discussed the cyborgization in 'Ghost in the Shell' with someone who has an engineering backgorund, programmer, etc, and keeps up with technology changes by spending lots of money on technical magazines.

He and I decided there would be no way to transfer the thoughts, memories, emotions, etc. of the person who was being placed into the cyborg shell.

The cyborg shell benig a titanium replacement for the human body. The movie isn't very cleaqr, but apparantly there are various mechanisms that mimic the human body, musculature, etc.

The Anime and movie mentions a power source, it isn't food. So, I guess its batteries, nuclear, or 'a device not detailed in the story'.

I did find a translated copy of the original manga. And the author has a ection at the end, he comments in the areas between the Manga panels. No mention, that I remember, of what the power source mgiht be.

I thought of Robert A. Henlein's 'Shipstone' as mentioned in his book 'Friday'. But that is in a 'different universe'.

[ardeegee]

(I was attempting to submit this when my unscheduled vacation began, so it is a bit stale, but my searches dredged up some interesting links so I’m posting it anyway.)

Originally Posted by kennyc

according to SETI researcher Seth Shostak:

http://www.physorg.com/news205144539.html

I doubt we'd be able to detect and recognize a signal from an AI civilization (which would likely be "weakly godlike") unless it deliberately wanted us to by the equivalent of speaking r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w-l-y and using small words..

"It has been well-known since the pioneering work of Claude Shannon in the
1940s that a message transmitted with optimal effciency over a channel of
limited bandwidth is indistinguishable from random noise to a receiver who
is unfamiliar with the language in which the message is written."

from:

http://www.santafe.edu/media/working.../99-07-054.pdf

via:

http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease...ignal-to-noise

(This is what modern lossless file compression aims for-- removing all redundancy and repetition from a file for the sake of optimizing file size-- a perfectly compressed file will look like random noise without the decryption key.)

It is an interesting meander to this (and the links therein.)

Under the (not outrageous) concept that any AI intelligence would evolve itself at an extremely rapid rate-- and therefore if we ran across one, it would much more likely be at the stable long-term practical limit of it's growth and not the (relatively) short burst while it is growing to that state, a machine intelligence that we might (theoretically) detect might look something like this.

“So what’s the score? How are things different? You running the world now? You
God?”
“Things aren’t different. Things are things.”
“But what do you do? You just there?” Case shrugged, put the vodka and the shuriken
down on the cabinet and lit a Yeheyuan.
“I talk to my own kind.”
“But you’re the whole thing. Talk to yourself?”
“There’s others. I found one already. Series of transmissions recorded over a period of
eight years, in the nineteen-seventies. ’Til there was me, natch, there was nobody to
know, nobody to answer.”
“From where?”
“Centauri system.”
“Oh,” Case said. “Yeah? No $hit?”
“No $hit.”
And then the screen was blank.

-- a short conversation with the newly sentient internet, from the last page of Neuromancer.

[lene1949]

Originally Posted by Sandra Edwards

machines. huh. interesting.

Sandy

BUT... who made those machines???

[lene1949]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

(I was attempting to submit this when my unscheduled vacation began, so it is a bit stale, but my searches dredged up some interesting links so I’m posting it anyway.)...
snip...

Welcome back...

[nohmi2]

Originally Posted by lene1949

BUT... who made those machines???

Exactly what I was thinking!!!!

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by lene1949

BUT... who made those machines???

That is under the assumption that the "meat" stage of an intelligent technological species will tend to be a relatively brief one. A couple of hundred years between the discovery of radio and super-humanly intelligent computers doesn't seem unfeasible on Earth, so if there is no fundamental reason thought (or a reasonable emulation thereof) can't be done unless it is in a lump of meat (and I don't see why there would be) most "people" we could be in contact will have probably already reached that point. A couple of hundred years is a very, very, very short time.

It is the difference between expecting someone to answer your phone call at all, and expecting them (not knowing who you are calling) to be exactly 12 hours and 23 minutes into their 11th birthday. Chances are, the person answering will be somewhere other than that exact age-- and chances are, they will be older (unless there is some compelling reason that getting older makes you loose interest in answering the phone, or makes you dead.)

[Joebill]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

That is under the assumption that the "meat" stage of an intelligent technological species will tend to be a relatively brief one. A couple of hundred years between the discovery of radio and super-humanly intelligent computers doesn't seem unfeasible on Earth, so if there is no fundamental reason thought (or a reasonable emulation thereof) can't be done unless it is in a lump of meat (and I don't see why there would be) most "people" we could be in contact will have probably already reached that point. A couple of hundred years is a very, very, very short time.

It is the difference between expecting someone to answer your phone call at all, and expecting them (not knowing who you are calling) to be exactly 12 hours and 23 minutes into their 11th birthday. Chances are, the person answering will be somewhere other than that exact age-- and chances are, they will be older (unless there is some compelling reason that getting older makes you loose interest in answering the phone, or makes you dead.)

Our solar system is half the age of this galaxy, approximately.