Re: poly: The singleton hypothesis

From: Robin Hanson <hanson@econ.berkeley.edu>
Date: Sun Apr 26 1998 - 14:54:09 PDT

At 10:39 AM 4/26/98 -0700, you wrote:
>Some people suggest that the reason we see no other civilizations is
>because almost all of them have chosen non- or slow-expansion policies.
>This becomes easier to accept if they are all singletons than if there
>is diversity among some of them.

They'd have to be *very* slow-expansion policies.

Yes, if each star can support 10^20 entities, and we see 10^20 stars,
then instead of explaining why none of the possible 10^40 entities have
expanded, you just have to explain why none of the 10^20 stars have.

This can be part, but far from the whole, of an explantion of why aliens
aren't in Times Square right now and aren't using more than 1% of the
light from the nearest hundred stars.

Robin Hanson
hanson@econ.berkeley.edu http://hanson.berkeley.edu/
RWJF Health Policy Scholar, Sch. of Public Health 510-643-1884
140 Warren Hall, UC Berkeley, CA 94720-7360 FAX: 510-643-8614
Received on Sun Apr 26 21:57:33 1998

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