From: Russell Wallace (russell.wallace@gmail.com)
Date: Tue May 02 2006 - 19:16:53 MDT
[quote of a Geoffrey Miller article which has the depressing ring of truth
to it]
This, too, may be happening already. Christian and Muslim
> fundamentalists and anti-consumerism activists already
> understand exactly what the Great Temptation is, and how to
> avoid it. They insulate themselves from our creative-class
> dreamworlds and our EverQuest economics. They wait patiently for
> our fitness-faking narcissism to go extinct. Those practical-
> minded breeders will inherit the Earth as like-minded aliens may
> have inherited a few other planets. When they finally achieve
> contact, it will not be a meeting of novel-readers and game-
> players. It will be a meeting of dead-serious super-parents who
> congratulate each other on surviving not just the Bomb, but the
> Xbox.
>
But if the rest is true - which it may be - there may be no meeting.
Religious fundamentalist communities do maintain their evolutionary fitness,
but they don't build too many spaceships. Once the geek genes are weeded out
of the population, it's not clear to me how the vast gulf between survival
on the surface of a planet and becoming a spacefaring species independent of
a life-sustaining planetary environment would ever be bridged. Maybe the
other intelligent species in our part of the universe are huddled on their
homeworlds waiting for us to come and lend a helping hand, or their stars to
autoclave their biospheres, whichever comes first.
We have a chance, but the clock is ticking.
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