Yesterday Ive seen a documentary about aliens featuring Michio Kaku (as the host). So I sat there on my girlfriends couch and thought to myself That guy probably got an IQ of 150 and yet he talks so much bullshit? I usually turn off documentaries like that within 5 seconds because the stupidity shown in them is just unbearable but yesterday I was in a more non-attached mood and so I watched the entire thing. First he was talking about interstellar space travel in huge space ships like its logical or a given that civilizations will build them. He totally ignores other profound technological developments that could easily obsolete the entire notion of space travel within a few decades. Then of course he also totally ignores the fact that by that time we might not have any incentive to travel at all. We suppose that we will be curious, that we will need new habitats or that we will still require baryon matter from other planets for our survival which most likely wont be the case because we will also develop in profound ways. Then of course he also ignores that Tom Campbell might be right with his theory and interpretation of quantum mechanics and that traveling around the universe is totally pointless as it might not even fundamentally exist and that it might just be rendered on demand. After that he talked about aliens in general. Why do we expect there to be aliens? Because we believe that there is this huge cosmos full of fundamentally real planets on which various life forms might have developed. From a physical standpoint this of course is quite logical and plausible. Once you look at Fermis paradox from a meta level though it doesnt have to be a paradox at all. If I run a billion instances of The Sims looking for a setup resulting in spiritual growth I wont make them meet aliens ... it would be totally counterproductive. Our reality might in fact just be an instance of an naturally evolved simulation or rather virtual reality with quantum mechanics acting as a probabilistic game engine. Then he talked about hostile aliens. Fear and competition based societies wont exist long enough in order to get here. Carl Sagan speculated about this once: The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star. (Of course he was also assuming that there are billions of fundamentally real planets out there hosting millions of alien civilizations.) Then he talked about SETI. Now IMHO SETI is one of the most stupid institutions on earth. Inevitably the more advanced civilization will find the less advanced civilization just like a Navy Seal will find a blind girl in the woods and not the other way around. It makes no sense to look for anything as we dont even know what to look for and as there might not even be anything fundamentally real out there. The question should be Why havent we been contacted long ago? and that can easily be explained using a bigger picture understanding. Because interaction with omnipotent entities just isnt productive from an evolutionary standpoint. Then he talked about alien UFOS. Heck, even I can think of more advanced ways to travel and/or communicate ... but of course we expect aliens to fly around in some huge mechanical device containing robots or biological beings which can overcome thousands of light years but who failed to solve the substrate independence problem we have been aware of for decades. Then he talked about how aliens might communicate with each other. He suggested that they still have biological brains with some electrodes (like The Borg) sticking out of them when I can read papers about a more advanced forms of communication already today. Of course the entire academic world ignores the possibility that we (or some AGI system) will realize that Asian/native American philosophies were right all the time and that our physical reality is not fundamental and that traveling around within it is a waste of time and that a physical technological singularity doesnt change anything fundamentally. Once Super Mario finds out that Super Mario Land is not fundamentally real he will not decide to build huge space ships in order to visit a million randomly generated levels? We are ignoring so many consistent models and possibilities which all do a way better job explaining our reality and we prefer to anthropomorphically extrapolate from within our narrow personal expertise. I often feel like I am surrounded by people from the stone age explaining to me how great our future will be once we build 60 floor caves? I am still waiting for a single genuinely interesting and consistent documentary about our potential future ...
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 14:11:29 +0000
Trending Topics
© 2015