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eli_sennesh comments on 2013 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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Category error: neither jet engines nor nuclear weapons capture available/free mass-energy as living (ie: self-reproducing) bodies. Evolution never got to those because it simply doesn't care about them: nuclear bombs can't have grandchildren.
You can use both jet engines and nuclear weapons to increase your relative fitness.
There are no living nuclear reactors, either, despite the vast potential of energy.
There are organisms that use gamma radiation as an energy source. If we lived in an environment richer in naturally occurring radioisotopes, I think I'd expect to see more of this sort of thing -- maybe not up to the point of criticality, but maybe so.
Not much point in speculating, really; living on a planet that's better than four billion years old and of middling metallicity puts something of a damper on the basic biological potential of that pathway.
And yet humanity did it, on a much smaller time scale. This is what I'm saying, we are better than evolution at some stuff.
Which living beings created by evolution have done -- also known as us!
This would be stretching the definition of evolution beyond its breaking point.