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From: snodgras@crash.cts.com (John Snodgrass)
Subject: Re: Anti-life
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Date: Tue, 4 Oct 1994 17:18:41 GMT
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      Does an ant perceive the tree he's crawling across as alive? 
We imagine ET life as an extrapolation of recent human civilization 
to a space context, a la Star Trek, neglecting differences in scale. 
But consider this: 100 years ago, our society would have been undetectable 
from space. 100 years from now, it may again be undetectable. That's 
not much of a window. I don't buy into the self-destruction theory. 
My view is that humans will continue to grow until we have used every 
resource in the solar system, including sucking all the matter and 
energy out of our sun. 

      That is alot of growth, but at the exponential rate at which life 
grows, I doubt it will take that long on a geological time scale. During
that time we may seek resources in nearby stars and perhaps then will
discover similar processes to ourselves occurring. But the notion
of some empire of sparsely settled worlds spread over 100s of light years
doesn't make sense in terms of the growth-efficiency imperative life
seems to obey. That's a mechanistic and distorted view of how organisms
actually behave. Humans will consume the resources here first, will 
exploit this environment. I.e. we will continue to be our own universe (unless 
interfered with). Continue to be too busy building and fighting amoung 
our own various societies to worry about sending probably fruitless 
expeditions vast distances for no good reason. IOWs, I suspect this: 
the reason we don't perceive alot of noisy interstellar traffic: it's no
use. Perhaps closer to the center of the galaxy  or inside dense star
clusters where interstellar distances are much shorter, it's a different 
story. But there could be energy efficient civilizations of a magnitude
we cannot even imagine sitting right next to us -- they could have
already totally englobed stars. After all, astro-physicists see the 
universe as things that glow in the dark. Life is by nature conservative
of energy.


      JES
