You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

solipsist comments on Open thread, September 8-14, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: polymathwannabe 08 September 2014 12:31PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (295)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: solipsist 08 September 2014 11:16:32PM *  3 points [-]

I love this idea! A few thoughts:

  1. What could the alien civilizations do? Suppose SETI decoded "Hi from the Andromeda Galaxy! BTW, nanobots might consume your planet in 23 years, so consider fleeing for your lives." Is there anything humans could do?

  2. The costs might be high. Suppose our message saves an alien civilization one thousand light-years away, but delays a positive singularity by three days. By the time our colonizers reach the alien planet, the opportunity cost would be a three-light-day deep shell of a thousand light-year sphere. Most of the volume of a sphere is close to the surface, so this cost is enormous. Giving the aliens an escape ark when we colonize their planet would be quintillions of times less expensive. Of course, a paperclipper would do no such thing.

  3. It may be presumptuous to warn about AI. Perhaps the correct message to say is something like "If you think of a clever experiment to measure dark energy density, don't do it."

Comment author: James_Miller 09 September 2014 12:48:07AM 4 points [-]
  1. It depends on your stage of development. You might build a defense, flee at close to the speed of light and take advantage of the universe's expansion to get into a separate Hubble volume from mankind, accelerate your AI program, or prepare for the possibility of annihilation.

  2. Good point, and the resources we put into signaling could instead be used to research friendly AI.

  3. The warming should be honest and give our best estimates.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 09 September 2014 06:13:31PM 3 points [-]
  1. Quite.

  2. The outer thee days of a 1000 Ly sphere account for 0.0025% of its volume.