The Fermi Paradox is getting a fair bit of blogtime on the sites my RSS feed pulls in - for instance, there's a discussion on Jamais Cascio's blog (which Stross has a funny comment on about panspermia).

Anyway... one of the main points discussed is whether or not the Singularity would have an effect on the so-called Great Filter. (Simply put - if post-Singularity civilisations simply give up on exploring or talking to outer space and spend all their time wanking in the Matrix instead, which is why we don't see any signs of advanced alien races.)

This of course led to some discussion about AI - and this splendid piece by one Jacob Davies:

...the human brain already contains one Turing-compliant AI. That's you. It also contains a virtual-reality suite capable of simulating anything you can imagine. That's your mind. At present, it's simulating (as best it can) the world around you, but it's capable of a lot more than that, as dreaming or hallucinations can demonstrate. It can even do both at once, as with daydreaming. Similarly your AI suite is capable of quite-accurately modelling other personalities, which is what it does when you think about what your mother would like for her birthday or whether your boss is about to fire you for reading blogs at work.

In fact, as experience with computers will tell you, there doesn't seem much innate reason why this exceptionally flexible system is limited to running one personality and one model of reality. There are obvious and significant differences between brains and computers, but for capacity I think this kind of analogy is fair: computers usually have a lot of wasted capacity, and if they can do one thing, they can usually do that thing ten times at once, or a thousand. At the very least, they can do it twice, each at half the speed.

Not to mention, there are long periods when your brain is doing virtually nothing, just ticking over. So why don't we have access to a controllable VR suite? (The closest is perhaps lucid dreaming.) Why are we not able to imagine other personalities to converse with? (Except a small section of the population, for whom this phenomenon seems to cause extreme distress.) Why can we only remember 7 things? Why do some people lack the empathy required not to hurt other people? Why are some people smarter than other people when their minds are so similar? Why are other animals not able to communicate with us, or even with each other at more than a very basic level? Why do our brains start out so apparently blank, when other animals can function at birth?

To me these are mysteries of just the same kind as the Fermi paradox. What you would expect - given our existence and experience - seems not to be the case.

Noted mostly 'cos I think it's cool - which is why most of us blog stuff, I guess.

Charlie Stross opens up an interesting debate on current theories attempting to resolve the Fermi Paradox. Do look at the comments.

I posted about this recently - the first attempt at zero-G dance.

Here's some footage of that first step. It's brief - since they were in a Vomit Comet, they only had 20-30 seconds of freefall - but the potential for something truly lovely is there.

Kathleen McDonagh dancing in Zero-G - accompanied by the music of composer James Raymond.

Zero-G sex - only four positions work and missionary is 'impossible'.

...'cos of Quantum.

" Back on February 7th 1971 (Earth time), Ed Mitchell was speeding much faster than a rifle bullet, on track between the Earth and Moon. That’s when the strangest thing happened…

Mitchell had piloted Apollo 14’s Lunar Module down to the Fra Mauro region of the Moon, become the sixth human to do science in the dust, and gotten himself and Cdr. Alan Shepard back off the regolith and onto their bus ride back home.

Now he was bored. “We were just systems engineers on a perfectly functioning spacecraft.” So he looked out the window. The Command Module was pointing “up” – which is to say perpendicular to the plane of the Solar System – and spinning slowly, about once every two minutes. “Barbecue Mode”, it’s called; to evenly heat the vehicle. Ed was floating, watching the Earth, Moon, Sun and starfield pan by.

And then, without warning: an overwhelming feeing of bliss, timelessness, connected-ness… He suddenly and deeply felt the understanding of his constituent atoms as having been born in the fires of ancient supernovas. He saw Earth and it’s people and all it’s other species and systems as a unified integrated synergistic whole. He felt good; ecstatic actually…

He was not the first – nor the last – to have this specific epiphany...

After decades of studying this, Ed Mitchell is pretty certain that the feeling of interconnectedness / oneness with the Universe is a consequence of quantum physics. Now Mitchell and the others assembled here want, specifically to induce or produce the Overview Effect in as many of Earth’s citizens as possible. "

All I can say is:
MeMeMeMeMeMeMeMe!!!!!!!!