figuring out what aliens value appears quite important
My instant answer to this question is that it is not of practical importance, except insofar as we may already be inside an alien sphere of influence.
You’re talking primarily about scenarios of alien encounter in which it’s a meeting between a human-descended superintelligence and an alien-descended superintelligence. But by definition, the human-descended superintelligence is going to be better than you, at inferring the likely distribution of alien life and alien values in the cosmos.
Apart from the fact that such works may contain valid observations that the current literature overlooks, they may also promote awareness of the extent to which current ideas about alien life are non-empirical guesswork and potentially quite wrong.
Freitas opens his chapter 25 with the proposition that
Many billions of intelligent races may exist in the Milky Way alone at the present time
which is a very Carl Sagan, birth-of-SETI perspective, and one which is still held by many many people. On the other hand, our local avantgarde believe that intelligence in the universe is dominated by aggressively expansionist superintelligences that may be trading with other branches of the universal wavefunction. Maybe that’s a very current-year outlook, but even Bing can point out just how many assumptions it’s making.
My instant answer to this question is that it is not of practical importance, except insofar as we may already be inside an alien sphere of influence.
You’re talking primarily about scenarios of alien encounter in which it’s a meeting between a human-descended superintelligence and an alien-descended superintelligence. But by definition, the human-descended superintelligence is going to be better than you, at inferring the likely distribution of alien life and alien values in the cosmos.
But since you’re interested, I suggest you also look up “Xenology” by Robert Freitas, which is a big obscure work from the 1970s by someone who went on to become one of the major theorists of mechanical nanotechnology. It has weird stuff like eleven metalaws of first contact, devised in 1970 by an Austrian space lawyer.
Apart from the fact that such works may contain valid observations that the current literature overlooks, they may also promote awareness of the extent to which current ideas about alien life are non-empirical guesswork and potentially quite wrong.
Freitas opens his chapter 25 with the proposition that
which is a very Carl Sagan, birth-of-SETI perspective, and one which is still held by many many people. On the other hand, our local avantgarde believe that intelligence in the universe is dominated by aggressively expansionist superintelligences that may be trading with other branches of the universal wavefunction. Maybe that’s a very current-year outlook, but even Bing can point out just how many assumptions it’s making.