Bok globules and the wait-and-see strategy

[lake]

Bok globules and the wait-and-see strategy

Avoiding the Contact-by-Chance Scenario

"Contact, Norea? Intelligence requires intelligence, and you are first required to show some."

"Genesis probes are used in missions aiming to offer terrestrial life new evolutionary pathways on potentially habitable but hitherto barren exoplanets. These missions are designed to establish an ecosphere of unicellular lifeforms on potentially habitable but hitherto barren exoplanets. A Genesis probe is a wafer-sized interstellar probe, of which several of them are launched comprising a swarm targeting a selected star system. Bear in mind that a Genesis probe is a slow craft and that they are only one part of a major system."



"The study of non-terrestrial interstellar probes requires to avoid any assumption about the intent and motivation of any exo-civilization seeking to settle other planetary systems. We know nothing about the engineers of those probes, therefore making assumptions about the logic behind them is futile. The requirement to study those probes without taking into consideration the motivation of the creators of those probes is fullfilled by considering the probes exotic logical systems - ELS's - operating under classic metabiological algorithms"

"Our best bet so far is the indirect detection of exo-civilizations by searching for technosignatures from distant sources outside the solar systems. However, this also means that we need to accept the assumption that the technology of those exo-civilizations is somehow akin to ours in what concerns the basic principles upon which that technology is based. This, clearly, need not be the case. The other approach is direct detection of material evidence for an exo-civilization's visit to Sol-3 or our solar system. Denebian probes fall into this category, while Giselian beacons fall into the first category."

"Biological civilizations have finite lifetimes, thus an eventual balance should be achieved between the settlement of currently empty worlds and the death of biological civilizations on previously settled worlds. This also means that if civilizations have a finite duration, then it is possible that Sol-3 was settled some time in the distant past and all traces of that settlement have been erased by geological evolution (this is the so-called Cambrian Probes Hypothesis)."

"Some researchers hold the idea that that expansion proceeds via short-range Geneseis-type probes which travel to a nearby system and seed it. This is done via Cambrian-type probes. Once life emerges on that planet evolution would proceed as programed giving rise to human-like beings able to engineer new probes and launching additional probes to an unsettled nearby system. In this approach, humans are the result of the Cambrian seeding probes and they are expected to engineer and launch probes to the nearby Alpha Centauri star-system. Though this approach seems to be a slow settling one from a biological species' perspective, we need to bear in mind that the original exo-civilization is metabiological, therefore settling time is not an issue for them."

"The settlement strategy based on hopping from one star system to the next assumes that there are always plenty of neighboring systems within range. But what happens once the colonization front reaches the Local Void? In this case short-range Genesis-type probes wouldn't do the job and a new type of probes with a more advanced technology would be needed. This could be done if every new settled planet is seeded with increasingly more intelligent and evolved lifeforms, but it is hard to find a solution on how to achieve this starting with an original Genesis-type fixed design, unless some sort of super-AI could emerge during the settling process."

"My objection is that, for what we know, purely informational or synthetic robotic lifeforms are not expected to arise from the evolutionary process and, in any case, they are not the starting point of intelligence. Rather, they are products of additional cultural and technological evolution. In other words, synthetic, robotic lifeforms are produced by biologically evolved intelligences and not the other way around. Quite a different thing is whether the biologically evolved intelligence that created the Denebian probe is long ago gone by the time the probe reaches our solar system. But if that's the case, my view is the biologically evolved intelligence already took that scenario under consideration and perhaps the probe encodes all the necessary elements to replicate life and recreate it in the target planet. There's no need to ask about motivation and intent, for we are biological beings ourselves and we perfectly know what the motivation behind our acts are, namely: survival of the species."

"Should be a slow, graded, step-by-step process. Probes should remain at the edge of the target star-system; probes must wait for the contacted civilization to always make the first move, and the reply must carefully match the technological level of the contacted civilization."

https://forgottenlanguages-full.forgott ... ategy.html