Actually what was written is "Wiki is not generally recognized as a source of conclusive, or even credible, evidence...."
Not generally recognized by whom?

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Life happens while you're busy making other plans. J. Lennon

As anyone with an internet connection can edit Wikipedia I would say it's not the best source of evidence

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Perhaps not the best, but still better than "hardly credible." I've seen several references to Wikipedia in threads on this forum, and I've used Wikipedia as a resource when attempting to discover what ailed Kaptain K, and (with cross-reference and verification) found it to be a fairly reliable source of information. I always try to cite multiple sources for my information, but Wikipedia is often one of them. My point is this: we shouldn't reference an information source when it serves our purposes, then dismiss it when it doesn't.

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Life happens while you're busy making other plans. J. Lennon

I think if you want to know what film some actress has appeared in in the last three years, Wikipedia is an admirably reliable source. But if you want to base a theory on cutting-edge science, you're probably better off with a peer-reviewed journal.

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Nothing beautiful was ever made from gravel.

More properly, Wikipedia might be a reliable source, depending on the sources Wiki is using. Like any other webpage, it is only as good as the sources it cites, and may be worse.

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Friendly Rabid Atheists (mostly)

Well, some of his categories are a bit open ended, so perhaps the ones I think he has missed are actually there without being mentioned explicitly.

Brin mentioned Transcendence, as a reason that Senior civilisations might lose interest in interstellar communication; another related idea is post-intelligence, as described by Karl Schroeder and (in more detail) by Milan Cirkovic. An intelligent species might decide that intelligent life is too risky, stressful or expensive in terms of effort, and redesign itself to become a particularly successful but non-intelligent creature (something like a crocodile or a shark). I doubt that all intelligent species would do that, but they might.

Another idea concerning the ultimate fate of intelligent species is that they could improve their capacity for logical thought over time, approaching some kind of idea of perfection, until eventually they exist simply as artificial minds, beings of pure logic. Such beings might consistently realise that there is, in truth, no absolute goal for intelligent life, and simply shut down, on a temporary or permanent basis. If hyperintelligent beings solve all the problems of existence to their own satisfaction, then they need not continue to exist.

I am not sure that Brin has missed the next idea, either, but it is a problem associated with the economics of expansion. If a civilisation starts to expand rapidly, each new colony would use all the easily available resources of a system rapidly simply in an effort to beat its neighbours to the next star. A wave of explotation could sweep across a galaxy leaving behind depleted systems without viable colonies. This wildfire colonisation idea was suggested by Robin Hanson among others.

And then there is light-speed paranoia. Once a civilisation has expanded to a large number of separate stars, each colony will follow an essentially isolated cultural path, assuming that FTL travel is impossible. Stars are so far apart that messages take years or decades to pass between the separate components of an interstellar civilisation. This means that military intelligence about threats is always decades out of date. Even if a civilisation is not paranoid before it starts to colonise, once it realises that it can never know what its neighbours are doing, it soon will be. Paranoid colonies get into an arms race, escalating from antimatter weapons to relativistic kinetic missiles to Nicoll-Dyson lasers - the civilisation wipes itself out inevitably.

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New Orion's Arm Site . The Starlark . Against a Diamond Sky (OA Novella Collection) . OA Flickr set

All nice ideas for SCI-FI stories I suppose.

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