Shostak: Squishies vs. Robots

Summarizing, there will probably be squishy societies out there, with their slimy internal organs, but these will over time have been replaced by their inventions: thinking machines - artificial constructions.

This is what holds the future. And this is what will be able to travel the huge distances, what with speed-of-light limitations and all. So we had better get busy building our own replacements.

The only problem here is that we don't know yet how to make them conscious. Furthermore, if there is anything to "reincarnation", we may well be needing to figure out how to create the sockets into which we can plug ourselves so we can have a home, robotic though it may be.

And when our robots learn how to build more of themselves, we need to have created in them the need to build these sockets into which we could plug ourselves.

Why would they want to do that? Because we built them to want to. Somehow.

This is what it has always been about. Somehow, in the beginning of the struggle here in our solar system, squishies were built by the robots who arrived here. We can't imagine why.

On the other hand, they could have simply "evolved". But with the robots overseeing it all, that seems unlikely to have been an accident of nature, as had been advocated by science until recently. In fact, the basic statistics of evolution make that accident a virtual impossibility. That has been known, but downplayed, for a long time.

We offer a page devoted to this key point:

APPENDIX 2: Challenges to Darwinism: Panspermia and Theories of Guided Evolution