In a message dated 7/6/00 2:09:54 AM Pacific Daylight Time, asa@nada.kth.se
writes:
<< Tipler et al. actually once proved some powerful theorems about open
universes, showing that it was not possible to close them by
rearranging the matter inside. >>
In his Theory of Immortality, though, he does give an example of how very
tiny amounts of energy, over a very long time can rearrange matter in order
to close the universe in two directions. That example was using a
butterfly's energy to move the earth from one side of it's orbit around the
sun to the other side-in about 500 million years!
<<Sure, but that is not good evidence for Tiplers position. If he had
made a plausible sketch of such a system or showed some theorem that
implied the existence of high-energy complex systems he would be on
much steadier ground. Now he is just assuming that it must be
possible, a bit like a space program assuming that before landing we
will have come up with a way of landing softly...>>
Well, what Tipler left out, Hans Moravec put in, with his Neutron Star
computers-or neutronium computations-however one wants to state this. One of
the great failures over the last 55 years has been the failure to produce a
successful, commercial, fusion power plant. My point is that at least with
tokamaks and stellerators, the greatest physical problem is plasma
"turbulence" or variation of the plasma stream; which tends to quench the
super-hot reactions needed to produce workable reactors. Call this a
serendipity of scientific discovery; but such turbulence or variations, can
be considered "primordially" to be usable as a kind of super-hot computer--in
the great, great, distant future. Its utility today might be analogous to an
antimatter-powered pacemaker; doable, but why-ever-fore?
As far as proposing a soft-landing fix after one has launched a space program
(very good point!) what comes to mind, for me, is that life on this planet
has been dying for perhaps 4.5 billions years and almost certainly even
longer in the universe. The program has started already, by randomness, or by
designer or by some fractal process, or something we haven' t yet
conceptualized yet. We must fix death "on the fly" because that is how our
universe is built. Perhaps "all the Kings horses and all the Kings men cannot
put Humpty back together again" today; but in a few billion years of
technology..? The Transhumanist answer is a unbreakable egg, the Extropian
answer is to upload the egg into a realm of unbreakable cyber-eggs. Well, I
am starting to get hungry so I will close now.
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