"Alastair Reynolds - Feeling Rejected" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

about 1.2 million years ago, an accident
that resulted in the deaths of
5.6 10
12
sentient beings. Although undoubtedly
touching, it is not clear that a great deal is
gained from the inclusion of this some-
what taxing material.
The authors conclude their paper by
movingontoa wider discussionofthe sig-
nificance of their newly found civilization
against the known sample of other intelli-
gent alien species. Here the authors place
(in my view) undue emphasis on the posi-
tion of their civilization in the тАШcultural
HтАУR diagramтАЩ (Wonga and Grebe, 2044),
in which the total information capacity of
a transmitting culture, measured in bits, is
plotted against the light-crossing time in
light-seconds oftheir total colonized space.
On the basis of Figure 8, the authors claim
that their culture lies significantly to the
right ofthe тАШasymptotic singularity branchтАЩ,
which on the face of it would suggest that
the culture had avoided a singularity
despite occupying a total volume only
72,000 light-seconds in diameter. If true,
this would extend the total number of
known collapse-resistant cultures to eight.
The evidence, however,is verymuch less
compelling than the authors claim. Close
examination of their statistical sample
shows it to be derived from the
Third Gonolek catalogue,which is
now known to be afflicted by seri-
ous sampling errors. Visual inspec-
tion would suggest that a more
reliable sample тАФ such as that of
[omitted] тАФ would either bring
their civilization into line with the
singularity branch, or reveal it as
nomorethanamildoutlier.
In short, although the new civi-
lization undoubtedly provides a
useful new datum point, I remain
unconvinced that it merits an
entire paper, and certainly not the
multi-paper saga that the authors
clearly havein mind. Thanks tothe torrent
of data supplied by SWINE, and the