Sunday, April 06, 2008

Robot aliens? Space opera gets it right

And for once I find myself in general agreement with Seth Shostak.
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6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good Lord in Heaven! Seth Shostak, of the SETI Institute, one of our arch-anti-ufo pseudo-skeptics and Mac Tonnies, the anti-AAUPS, agree that ET's if they come (or may already be here?) will most likely to be mechanoid AI's?? Call out the eldritch Old Ones, gang, we're goin' to party like it's 19999 AD!

What next? Has hell frozen over yet? HAH!

2:11 AM
Mac said...

Yeah, I know. What can I say? The guy's probably right.

2:20 AM
Anonymous said...

_Possibly_ right. I still, for some reason I can't pin down, advocate for the biological vs. artificial/ mecha AI's. Maybe biology is somehow less scary than omnipotent sentient machines. Of course, either _could_ be perhaps whatever they wanted, within the limits of their physics knowledge, and mecha vs bio does NOT indicate whether one or both could be "good" or "bad", as both, to us, or either, could have its own agenda, and/or make itself appear to us as we might find different, but tolerably humanoid, in a way.

Hey! Maybe that's what they do anyway--to fit within our scifi, postmodern, eiditic, cultural and psychological needs and subconcious expectations for some degree of familiarity without scaring the hell out of us, appearing so strange it could make us hostile. We might not able to tell either what they really look like, or even if they are bio, mecha, some combination, or something else completely different. Yeeesh! Makes my brainpan hurt just to consider they may only appear as we somehow most expect them to, regardless of what they truly _might_ be. Or want; if anything.

Now _that's_ scary...!? *^O

3:25 AM
Anonymous said...

Remember what the dormouse said...
Feed Your Head! Oh, wait, that's not the appropriate comment. I meant, what was it Charles Fort once speculated about? "We are property," or something like that?

I was wondering what this USDA meat grading stamp was that appeared last night after yet another tedious abduction scenario unfolded in my dreams...or was it a dream!?!? Heh. 8^}

2:36 PM
Anonymous said...

Shostak, Bohemian Grove member. I trust nothing he says.

7:29 PM
Anonymous said...

Shostak, Bohemian Grove member. I trust nothing he says.

Proof? I'd like to know.

He could be right, but he's basing his assumptions on homocentric technical bias. I don't believe there's a universal constant for different 'technical' societies.

4:54 PM

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