From: John K Clark (jonkc@att.net)
Date: Sat Apr 26 2003 - 00:38:11 MDT
"Mitchell Porter" <mitchtemporarily@hotmail.com>
> It seems thinkable that my species could be the seed of a cosmic
> civilization capable of spreading indefinitely into the
> universe. But if that happens, the future population of
> the civilization born in this biosphere will be orders of
> magnitude greater than the number of all humans who have
> lived so far.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Our decedents will be astronomically
more intelligent than we are but there may not be more of them. The amount
of information you can send down a wire is increasing even faster than
Moore’s Law, when communication between two minds keeps getting better
there comes a point where there is only one mind not two. I don’t know how
many individuals there will be, the only reason to have more than one is the
slow speed of light but you could cram in a hell of a lot of brain power
into a space before that becomes significant.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
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