From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Tue Mar 25 2008 - 07:12:19 PDT
>From today's Daily Galaxy:
DIY Monolith Technology
The 2001 monolith is a science-fiction icon. It can represent technology,
God, alien influence or intense monkey violence, depending on what exactly
you got out of Kubrick's masterpiece. But will we ever see one?
Rather than go to all the bother of developing a hyperintelligent computer
probe ourselves, the easiest route is the "Christmas" strategy: just wait
for someone to give us what we want. This assumes the existence of aliens,
but let's be honest: nobody involved in the search doubts that for a second.
The fact it's always called a "search" is one clue - the unspoken belief
that it's definitely out there and we just have to find it. You can
attribute this to hope, loneliness, or faith; but the most convincing
reasons are a combination of the sheer size of the universe and the fact
that, once you remove the "Invisible Sky Beard" factor from our genesis, it
seems unlikely it should only happen here.
But why build monoliths at all? Because of the universe's speed limit: if
you can't get to other stars (because you'd be inconveniently dead of old
age before you made it one-hundredth of the way), the only other option is
to build a robot to go for you. Should we observe such a probe it would
bring good news and bad . The good - there's an incredibly advanced alien
civilization saying "Hi there, we're here!" The bad is them saying "Yeah,
we can't beat the speed of light either. You're pretty much stuck there."
Rather a mournful picture of the universe, islands of intelligence stranded
by the ridiculous distances between them. As we reported previously, such
systems would likely be Bracewell probes - self-replicating systems able to
cover as much universe as possible in search of intelligence. Clarke's
monolith never shows any replicative ability, but the sheer number of them
in 3001 would be strong evidence that they can.
The thing is: if human scientists waited for other people to do things for
them, we'd still be delaying investigations into fire and non-cave habitats.
Many of the onyx-object's capabilities are within sight of our own
technology.
Full article here:
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/03/monolith-techno.html
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