Tags: fermi

Salvage (Upsideclown)

A tale of the Fermi paradox featuring data preservation via tardigrade as a means of transmitting information beyond the great filter.

Greetings, E.T. (Please Don’t Murder Us.) - The New York Times

Steven Johnson dives deep into the METI project, starting with the Arecibo message and covering Lincos, the Drake equation, and the Fermi paradox.

He also wrote about what he left out of the article and mentions that he’s writing a book on long-term decision making.

In a sense, the METI debate runs parallel to other existential decisions that we will be confronting in the coming decades, as our technological and scientific powers increase. Should we create superintelligent machines that exceed our own intellectual capabilities by such a wide margin that we cease to understand how their intelligence works? Should we ‘‘cure’’ death, as many technologists are proposing? Like METI, these are potentially among the most momentous decisions human beings will ever make, and yet the number of people actively participating in those decisions — or even aware such decisions are being made — is minuscule.

Tapeworm logic by Charles Stross

The Fermi paradox as applied to tapeworms.

‘Sfunny; just yesterday I was revisiting this classic tapeworm tale on Fray.

The Fermi Paradox, Self-Replicating Probes, and the Interstellar Transportation Bandwidth

Re-examining Von Neumann probes, reconciling their apparent scarcity with the Fermi paradox.