ANNOTATION:
The Metasystem Transition Subsequent to the Formation of the Global Brain

Don Stockbauer

donstockbauer [at] hotmail.com

REPLY: Further thoughts on the subject

From the naturalness that life forms are produced by the 
metasystem transition, intelligent species should be rather 
common throughout the Universe.  Any of them is surely going to 
discover cybernetics before they achieve spacefaring, for 
cybernetics would be a prerequisite for it.  So systems thinkers
will naturally assume that systems thinkers on 
other planets think like they themselves think, which is 
that communication via radio frequencies is far less work than 
crossing space physically.  A side benefit of this is that 
supreme effort is put into maintaining the ecology of the home 
planet, for it will have to function forever with no input from 
other stellar systems.  What eventually happens is what Douglas 
Hofstadter has called superrationality, how do you act when you 
know yourself to be rational, and you assume others to be 
likewise.  Thus a system locks-in, that of the intelligences of 
a galaxy communicating and not putting forth the effort to make 
space voyages, a "Galactic Brain".  Whether this goes to yet the 
next level is hard to imagine, that of galaxies forming 
a "Universal Brain".  I suppose we shall see if all this is 
correct in the not too distant future, given the rate that a 
civilization progresses once it begins to think and act 
cybernetically.

REPLY: More thoughts on this subject

From the naturalness that life forms are produced by the 
metasystem transition, intelligent species should be rather 
common throughout the Universe.  Any of them is surely going to 
discover cybernetics before they achieve spacefaring, for 
cybernetics would be a prerequisite for it.  So systems thinkers
will naturally assume that systems thinkers on 
other planets think like they themselves think, which is 
that communication via radio frequencies is far less work than 
crossing space physically.  A side benefit of this is that 
supreme effort is put into maintaining the ecology of the home 
planet, for it will have to function forever with no input from 
other stellar systems.  What eventually happens is what Douglas 
Hofstadter has called superrationality, how do you act when you 
know yourself to be rational, and you assume others to be 
likewise.  Thus a system locks-in, that of the intelligences of 
a galaxy communicating and not putting forth the effort to make 
space voyages, a "Galactic Brain".  Whether this goes to yet the 
next level is hard to imagine, that of galaxies forming 
a "Universal Brain".  I suppose we shall see if all this is 
correct in the not too distant future, given the rate that a 
civilization progresses once it begins to think and act 
cybernetically.

REPLY: Why haven't we detected ET?

(Sorry about the above duplication---someone needs to fix the 
error one gets when submitting annotations and a "CGI" error 
message is generated.  It fools one into resubmitting text and 
thus the duplication.  But enough defensive griping.)

Why haven't we even gotten a dial tone from ET?  One thought is 
that as space-communicating  civilizations become more and more 
powerful with each metasystem transition they undergo, they 
become content to merely blast out their accomplishments 
isotropically from a space-based transmitter with some huge 
amount of power so that the Universe at large can enjoy 
listening to them.  However, even at that power level by the 
time it reaches us it will be quite faint.  Thus at our current 
level of SETI sophistication we have no chance of detecting it.  
Perhaps even the Allen array won't touch it. So ever upward with 
the constructivist building blocks.

Another thought is that they have the capability to detect us 
from either our radio transmissions, or from the way we're 
altering our atmosphere through remote sensing, and they will be 
sending a calling card a la the movie "Contact".

All this is pretty academic, however, if we're wiped out by an 
Earth-impactor.  It seems to me that an impactor deflection 
system needs to come first so that ET will have a living 
civilization to converse with.      

REPLY: Omnidirectional ETI signals not detectable at interstellar distances

I need to correct myself.  Any signal sent omnidirectionally 
will not be detectable at interstellar distances from the 
transmitter.  So according to the constructivist tenants of 
cybernetics, I need to study the whole matter further.  

REPLY: Omnidirectional ETI signals not detectable at interstellar distances

I need to correct myself.  Any signal sent omnidirectionally 
will not be detectable at interstellar distances from the 
transmitter.  So according to the constructivist tenants of 
cybernetics, I need to study the whole matter further.