Thursday 27 September 2012

Fragility of Intelligence

I believe that Intelligence is an unstable phenomenon. The oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere appeared within about two million years. On the Geologic time scale shrank to a meter it is less than a half a millimetre. Imagine how small will be the period on the Cosmological time scale between the time people started sending radio waves and the Technological Singularity (expected within this century) when the artificial intelligence exceeds human’s. Who knows how long it will take after the Singularity to stop spending valuable energy on radio wave dissipation up to the level of background radiation. This argument could resolve the Fermi paradox – the contradiction between the expectation of alien intelligent life and the absence of evidence of it.

Studying Nature

The humankind will survive only if it stops applying the knowledge about Nature to its mercantile and pragmatic applications.