On 3 Jun 2000, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> Spudboy100@aol.com writes:
>
> > Aha! So we Biotify the solar system and then much of the rest of the milky
> > way galaxy, so that maybe life (brain-life) evolves?
>
> Exactly. What I want is more diversity - brain-life would be a nice
> bonus, but I would be happy if we could get just a few biospheres as
> strange as the Earth's.
Ah, but we haven't resolved the question of *when* a simulation
of a biosphere may in fact be more efficient than the biosphere
itself. Compress all the redundant data in physical bodies, encode
lots of biochemistry in compact object-processes and run the whole
thing on a big computer. I bet sim-life beats nat-life in terms
of optimal use of matter and energy. The only question becomes
how importantchaos is to evolution and whether you can effectively
insert that into the simulation.
> > Planet Mercury would as Sir Arthur C. Clarke noted in Rendevouz
> > with Rama, that "with Mercury, the lack of minerals, for humanity,
> > could be fore-stalled a thousand years".
>
> Which makes it ideal for testing out a technobiosphere. Unfortunately
> I think Robert wants it too for some of his Matrioshka brains... :-)
Actually, I want it all, but I'm willing to share if rational arguments
for that are made. Lately though, I've been working on a scheme for
the rapid dismantlement of Jupiter. I may even be able to do Jupiter
faster than I could do Mercury. If so, I'm willing to donate it
for technobio-experimentation for a few thousand years.
It is worth noting that given singularity nanotech growth rates,
Clarke's statement is incorrect. We run out of materials in a
much shorter time than a thousand years unless we do star-lifting.
Of course if Amara would stop studying all that silly dust (I mean
after all, who wants to run around the entire solar system collecting
it all to do something useful with it???) and focus instead on finding
the nearest brown dwarfs so we could do some serious targeting for our
interstellar intellinanobot computronium conversion project, I'd
be willing to leave the solar system and all the funky planets to the
stay-at-home luddites. That may be what we end up having to do anyway
if most people don't soon develop a strong desire to self-evolve.
Robert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:12:25 MDT