Mr Monkeybat

If human population growth was to slow down to the extent that it only doubled every century by the year 12,000 AD the weight of all those people would equal the weight of the entire Milkyway galaxy stars and all. Almost all wild west films are set within a few decades of each other because no mater how romantic they are frontiers don't last they fill in. Unless these Oort habitats happened to start somewhere nearby in during the last few centuries they will NOT be sparse. All oort cloud objects will be consumed of all usable resources, even deuterium fuel might be getting scarce. It does not matter if these habitats are made of carbon fibre there is no free carbon left, its all in habitats. As the last Oort objects are used up they would be looking for any usable resource there goes Pluto and the moons of Neptune and Saturn, lets use those methane lakes on Titan to make some more carbon fiber. The Iron in these asteroids might not be as light as carbon fiber but beggars cant be choosers. If you keep an eye on solar flares cosmic rays are a greater danger than solar radiation and much stronger outside of the Suns magnetic field in the Oort cloud. A creature that builds a technical civilization would need to be a land dwelling creature in an oxygen rich atmosphere. Any Goldilocks zone planets with much less gravity than Earth or no magnetic field would likely get its atmosphere striped away, so any space faring alien would likely come from a planet very similar to Earth. Hey look at that a giant ready made habitat just exterminate any life you are allergic to and plant your own. Contrary to H.G.Wells War of the Worlds viruses and bacteria are no threat to species they are not adapted to, the more distantly related the species the harder it is to catch a zoonosis of it. Maybe the gravity on Earth is a bit low but hey jumping is fun anyway. Any conservative robots would be outnumbered by faster replicating robots and be defeated in any robot-robot war. The most virulent robots will inherit the galaxy.

Right so Zillions of aliens over billions of years make the exact same decision not to interfere with with the Earth and its solar system. Are they all clones or something? Made with some ultra impossibly reliable cloning process that avoids all new mutations and possible evolution. Going to exactly the same prime directive indoctrination camps. The distances between theoretical oort cloud objects are immense and made up of small lumps of mostly ice, why would the not want to make use of the more concentrated mineral resources of the asteroid belt and moons solar power included. And why do we still have long period comets if that's their primary resource. You cant just ignore exponential growth their has to be a good reason for this apparent ceiling on their population.

Philosophers often like like to set up a dichotomy between "free will" and determinism. But i think that any meaningful use the terms "free will" and "choice" requires determinism. To me if I make a choice of my my own free will then I make an assessment of the consequences of my actions based on my past experiences and innate preferences this choice is all part of a deterministic chain of events and judging the outcome of my actions also requires deterministic consequences of my actions. Theoretically someone who knows me well enough will be able to predict the decisions I make but so what? Being random is not making any real kind of choice its just going to the casino, randomness is the enemy of free will and the ability to choose. If there is some randomness in my head making me unpredictable that's not a decision that's just a pair of dice making you do stupid things.

Do you mean fallow for the last 5 billion years of the solar systems geographic history, I would count that under the "extremely rare" answer to Fermi's paradox. Wouldn't your second scenario require some kind of billion year galactic dictatorship making sure that everyone stayed invisible and did not use any of the solar systems resources? And doesn't remaining invisible in a vacuum violate thermodynamics.

Exponential growth is pretty typical of all life that is introduced to a new habitat it can thrive in, until that habitat fills up. Historically the threat of war has only made people more keen to find new lands far away from old enemies to settle. Humans with good interstellar travel would be make the Milky Way look like a giant agar plate introduced to its first spore of bacteria. The answer to Fermi's Paradox is a simple binary, either civilization is extremely rare. Or such civilizations never manage to escape their solar systems. The future looks like Asimov, Terminator, or Mad Max but not but not Star Trek, any potential latex forheadians would have to be human descended.

Even service jobs are under threat there will soon be bar tending robots that can recognize all the bottles and precisely pour any cocktail you want. For the a capital cost the same price as a bartenders annual salary.

I have said this before on similar threads but once you have people living in habitats in the oort cloud or self replicating robots traveling between stars, then natural selection will lead to those that reproduce most quickly becoming the dominant strain. Exponential growth exponential growth can make something as big as a galaxy look small quick consume all mineral resources within a dozen millenia if the speed of light did not get the way.

Time dilation does not make it any quicker or slower for the astronaut than if you had simply ignored Einstein and calculated the travel time with Newtons physics. Even if you include the Earths reference frame Relativity does not make interstellar travel any more or less practical because the amount of energy, and reaction mass required to reach speeds where time dilation etc are significant is immense. I doubt you can hybernate humans for more than a few years without reducing there lifespan so even on a sleeper ship I don't think maned interstellar travel is practical unless you have an antimatter powered ship like the one in the pandorapedia. At such speeds though the tiniest speck of space dust becomes a major problem, probably need some kind of powerful laser to detect and vaporize incoming space dust or some kind of magnetized plasma bubble cushion or something. Its a long shot but considering all the difficulties and expense of any conventional method of reaching stars even if you have antimatter. Perhaps you best hope is that those people researching aclubiere warp mange to pull something out the hat. Or how about macro quantum tunneling at light speed, quantum tunnel through that space dust haha.

A simple solution would be not to connect the robot to the internet. The energy consumed by a robot doing the work of a human is likely to be significantly less than the energy the average worker consumes in their commute to work, although the depletion of richer fossil fuel reserves has led to the use of poorer sources using more labor intensive extraction techniques such as fracking etc. Why cant the cleaning robot be cleaned by another cleaning robot? A robot that costs as much as a small car but does as much work as a human covers its expense with the saved salary within a year, plus it can work 24 hour shifts 365 days a year minus maintenance time. The price of such appliances has decreased due to increasing automation in the factories, also of course outsourcing to China but even China is investing more in automation these days to stay competitive with robots in other countries. Advances in 3d printing such as sintered metal could also make such precise machinery as robot arms easier and cheaper to make.

If we look at an individual chromosome half each sperm has a 50% chance of carrying it like the flip of a coin. If you flip 2 coins there is a 25% chance of getting 2 heads in a row a 25% chance of getting 2 tails in a row and a 50% chance of getting both. After 3 coin flips the chance of getting only one side decrease to 25% and the chance of getting both increase to 75%. The probability of getting just one side of the coin continues to half with each successive coin fiip. Number of coin flips/sperm, Chance of just getting one side of coin/chromosome: 1, 1 in 1 2, 1 in 2 3, 1 in 4 4; 1 in 8 5, 1 in 16 11, 1 in 1,024 21, 1 in 1,048,576 31, 1 in 1,073,741,824 Of course dogs have 78 chromosome pairs so so if you are not testing for a singe gene but want to catch every single chromosome the chance of one chromosome being missing increases, and this is where my knowledge on statistics get a little more fuzzy.There is also the factor that a large proportion of sperm are defective and may have missing chromosomes.

Panspermia could just about make Europan calamari edible. But interstellar panspermia seems fairly unlikely. And it would still make alien life as more distantly related than star fish. Which would make hybridizing pretty much impossible. No one has managed to hybridize with Chimps even. This has got to be one of the most annoying flaws in the Star Trek franchise.

You would be more likely to hybridize with a mushroom. A true alien would have a DNA structure that is different to all life on Earth. Alien viruses would also be completely harmless because they would not have the keys to our cell proteins. You will also likely find alien life mutually indigestible as your stomach enzymes are incompatible with their proteins and vice versa, alien proteins could likely give you allergies though. The more recent a common ancestor the more likely you are to catch a disease off the creature or hybridize with them, true alien life has NO common ancestor! Their is a 50% chance that alien life has DNA and proteins that spiral in the opposite direction, and a 95% chance that the DNA to RNA translation is different as it is arbitrary and that is if its using the same chemistry.

If inter stellar travel becomes practical evolution will favor those who reproduce most rapidly and exponentially so I would say the most likely reason is settlement. If there is no warp drives to be had the most likely encounter is some kind of Daedalus style robotic probe which takes up residence in the asteroid belt making copies of itself. How aggressive it is against potential competitors like humans depends on how long natural selection has been operating on it.

So when people say "impossible", i should read "very hard" thanks for clearing that up because generally I reserve the word impossible for things like free energy devices. When you say "The mind for one doesn't automatically correlate to a physical entity just because you/we can't imagine/understand otherwise." Sounds to me like your talking about a soul. I wont hold that against you I am open to positive results from psi experiments or evidence of souls or reincarnation if good proof could be found. But if you are it would make the debate much clearer if you admitted that was the direction you where coming from. An argument goes nowhere if you don't establish its precepts. If you create a copyable neural net of evolving software algorithm. You would only need to school the first few AI's you could copy the rest you need from the first templates.

Another decade and it will become obsolete as rapid DNA reading devices become cheap and plentiful.

The nuclear thermometric battery of a Voyager is expected to last till 2020 curiosities is expected to last 14 years. So any probe launched on a giant conventional rocket would be dead long before the million year arrival date. Something larger with a more exotic energy and propulsion source like nuclear fusion is needed. So with current technology, no, if fusion power becomes cheap ask again.

It obviously takes fewer people to program an army of robots than an army of laborers that is why it is economical. Soon robocars will make taxi, bus, and truck drivers obsolete. Fruit pickers will go the way of the rest of the agricultural laborers and remaining factory workers will dwindle. So far what we have seen with the shrinking of factory work force and computerized offices, is that bureaucracy can expend to fill any volume already most people are employed in pointless make work jobs, and people spend longer amounts of time in education to get qualifications for simple tasks..

Lets get this strait although they are too timid to say the S word, those who are arguing that there is something that humans do that a machine cannot do, are presumably arguing that we have a mystical soul correct? Otherwise we are just a neural network machine which a sufficiently powerful computer and software can emulate.

Those who insist that computers could never think must explain what is the extra special source that makes that makes the brain something other than a neural network machine? What is it that biology can do that engineering cannot?

Guns kill people by making holes in them. Allot of people get shot without noticing until they find out that the blood on the floor is their own. Guns make holes in people because the force/energy is concentrated, the total amount of energy impacting the shootee is actually less than the recoil experienced by the shooter due exhaust gasses and energy lost to air resistance. Sorry if action films have given you a different impression of stuntmen being yanked by wires.

stealth planes have flat facets to avoid deflect signals away from radar stations. Does this mean that a stealth plane has to be careful in its manuevers to avoid lining one of its facets up square with an enemy radar.

Unless its a quantum computer any piece of information processing hardware can be emulated on a sufficiently powerful Turing machine.

The structure and organisation of the EU seems similar to the USSR it will fall apart in a similar manner.

Would not a more accurate definition of a trap be something that is hard to escape from. Few traps are impossible to escape from, and if you target is stupid enough you could even use an easy to escape trap.

Although there is all sorts of interesting fluid dynamics going on around a fired bullet if the weapon is pointed exactly horizontal so is the tip of the bullet so the air pressure above the bullet is the same as that bellow the bullet leading to no net effect on the bullets vertical motion.