Po: no paradigm-breaching magic physics await discovery, only deeper tweaks
and compressions to what we already know; no wormhole or
information-carrying non-local connectivity or other superluminal
information transfers.
If that's the universe we inhabit, what's the ultimate foreseeable
transport system?
I have a sense of such a process, but in my ignorance I don't know if it's
anything more than wishful thinking. After brooding on this idea for a
time, I came up with the subject line idea, then remembered that Rudy
Rucker dealt with just this approach in his odd, idea-crammed pop sci
`novel' SAUCER WISDOM (Tor, 1999).
Ideally, you want to be able to reduce a mindful system to a code string
and broadcast or beamcast it into space at or near lightspeed. (Only *near*
c if you need to use modulated nearly-massless neutrinos, say.) This
conveys you as far as possible as swiftly as possible.
Trouble is, like DNA or computer code, such messages need to be decoded,
instantiated and run before they have any effect (and presumably before
they can be conscious and active). DNA needs a ribosome and a bunch of
enzymes inside the context of a metabolizing cell. Programs needs dedicated
hardware. AI or encrypted organic mind/bodies can get from here to there in
one of two main ways:
1) Fire ahead a stream of, say, very fast low-mass nano von Neumann devices
with redundant minimal information, able to build assemblers once they find
a source of convenient construction materials and abundant energy, which
deploy a receiver able to instantiate the signal that's being sent in their
direction. Or
2) Develop a self-extracting signal able to interface with some plentiful
natural condition -
(here a miracle of insight into nature's workings occurs)
- and modify that state of matter and energy into a device able to unpack
the signal's main message.
Rucker proposes (playfully but I assume seriously), `You have to make a
signal that's self-extracting, and you have to master femtotechnology to
extract out into a physical form' (p. 119). You start with a zettabyte of
coded transhuman that's first squeezed by crypto to an exabyte: the same
order of magnitude, interestingly, proposed by Greg Egan in several fictions.
His codes are impressed onto `higher-dimensional waves... like a skater
resting on a little line of a blade that carves a clean curve across the
ice. The blade-line is the ordinary electromagnetic wave that you see' (pp.
115-6).
Maybe we can get by without higher-dimensional waves (or branes, whatever),
or maybe that's just the kind of world we're in so we use what we can get
our hands on. Either way, I don't know how to make that final unzipping
occur. Run the code-string into solar plasma vortices? Into a planetary van
Allen belt? Into the accretion disk of a black hole? All these have been
suggested in fiction as habitats for smart signal resonances. I'm wondering
if anyone here can come up with better proposals.
Damien Broderick
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