[Q&A+] Possible Life Under Europa's Ice, Pilotless Alien Spaceships, Hawking Radiation Explained | Q&A 359
Can fish or other marine life realistically exist under the ice of Europa or Enceladus? Can we be visited by an alien spaceship but with no pilot? What is the most common misconception about Hawking radiation? And in Q&A+, which sci-fi book best describes our world in a few hundred years?
Watch the video here (with no ads) or on YouTube: https://youtu.be/aT40-ZHDZKA
Comments (11)
I find it very uncomfortable that people still believe that smarter species are in any way superior to dumber species. Every species seeks its own niche, and there are niches for dumber species just as there are niches for smarter species. It might be said that humans evolved to fill a niche that utilised intelligence, and so AI may present a specific threat to us as a species as it reduces the window for our own particular niche; but as smart as we are we have not stopped bacteria (whom most of regard as being fairly dumb) from thriving, nor even rats and mice that have taken advantage of niches humans created and have been very successful even though they are nowhere near as intelligent as humans. On thing to bear in mind is that using lots of intelligence is very energy intensive, and so there is a limit to how much intelligence has value depending on the availability of energy to feed that intelligence. The human brain consumes about 20% of the energy that the human body uses, and with a smaller brain we could better redirect that energy to other capabilities (e.g. increased rate of reproduction).
With regard to the cost of intelligence, and going back to ultra-long distance spacecraft, it is inevitable that we will have to seriously ration the intelligence these spacecraft can use because of the tight energy budgets the spacecraft will have to adhere to. It is possible that the spacecraft could have a variable intelligence, with large parts of its 'brain' switched off when it is far from a star (and so has very much tighter energy budgets), and those parts of its 'brain' gradually being reactivated as it gets closer to a star as has a more relaxed energy budget.
I totally agree that using robot spacecraft is the only way to explore huge distances in space. With regard to evolution, evolution depends on some sort of sex (even bacteria exchange plasmids, even though they do not have sex in any animal sense of the word). Thus it would make sense that we send out fleets of these spacecrafts that can exchange genetic material to help correct for genetic errors. The problem about phoning home is that after a million years what will home look line. How many species of animal actually live longer than a million years (a million years ago we are still talking about Homo Erectus but no Homo Sapiens yet). There is no reason to believe Homo Sapiens will even survive another million years, much less that there will be any continuity of the present cultures and polities that today exist in our species for that length of time.
Another issue with regard to genetic code corruption might be the creation of an immune system - i.e. if you have a fleet of craft, some of those craft must be dedicated to destroying other craft that it suspects to have corrupted genetic code before that corrupted genetic code starts infecting the next generation of craft. On the wider scale, if these fleets of craft do slowly evolve, then it is likely that when these separately evolved species then encounter each other this immune response is likely to start trying to destroy members of the other species which is detects as a corrupted version of its own species.
Since September 25 qa+ I haven't gotten one in my podcast feed (I subscribed through patreon). What am I doing wrong?
I do get the overtime...
By the way, regarding the predictions: The funniest aspect of Foundation by Isaac Asimov is that there are no computers whatsoever. The author didn't think computers would be used in the future.
In one of Asimov's essays, he says that robots are a type of computer. His failure of prediction was thinking that mobile embodied robots would be far more important than a disembodied "positronic brain" (aka data centre).
If Europa has hydrothermal vents, I should think there's plenty of life. Water, various organic compounds, sources of energy, and TIME. What more do you need?
An ecosystem similar to our hydrothermal vents, absolutely agree. Enough energy for Europan whales with complicated brains, no. Still hoping to live long enough to find out! Europan tube worms would be super cool.
The Bobiverse series is GREAT!! Hoping for more!