[UA] Re: The Metal Eaters (was Steampunk)

[Cassady Toles]

On 23 Jul 2001 19:37:46 -0000, ua at lists.uchicago.edu wrote:

  Intelligence may take a long time to develop or might not at all.  It took
us hundreds of millions of years, and even if you account for the things
reproducing in hours instead of years, you still have a long time before you
should expect civilizations among the things.  It'd be easier to build an
intelligent machine from scratch, in this case, than to evolve one.
  
Assuming the devices are capable of evolution, lets look at this in a
humanocentric perspective.  The age of mammals is less than one-hundred
fifty thousand years, so let's base our numbers on that (I say to do so,
because these are the moral equivalent of something like a dog or pig, not
primordial soup that took hundreds of millions.

figure two-hundred thousand years and ten years per generation (not entirely
accurate, other primates have shorter ones, but humans have a longer one,
I'm assuming it averages out to that gives you evolution to human
intelligence in 20,000 generations.  Three generations per day would do that
in 6,666 days and sixteen hours.  That's still eighteen years.  By geometric
progression, they'd have consumed every piece of metal on earth long before
that and started eating each other.  

Mankind would be living in glass houses adhered together with caulking,
riding horses and swimming...

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I am the messiah in the bottom of a bottle of Jack Daniel's.  Drink of me
and
no peace." -- Cobra Baghdad www.peoplehateme.com
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