My complaint about the new and improved warpdrive is that it is a designer metric - it is designed to work as a warp drive, but there is no attempt to derive it from physically possible field distributions and the field equations. So it might be utterly impossible to build. That is why I get happy each time I see a wormhole paper that sneaks around a few more of the energy conditions - that makes the construction more physically likely. But what we need is a paper showing an existence proof that some field configuration in roughly flat spacetime can fold together into some custom geometry we want - and that is still lacking.
"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com> writes:
> Well, as soon as I read that news article, just one thought passed
> through my mind: "So much for the black-hole limits on Jupiter Brains."
> David Zindell's "computational origami" is looking more plausible all
> the time. You fold up a bunch of Jupiter brains into little Tardis
> pockets, and then they all communicate with each other in this
> meta-Jupiter brain. And, while I don't know if physics would permit, I
> see no reason why you couldn't fold up the meta-Jupiter brain and have
> meta-meta-Jupiter brains. I hereby dub this the Fractal Tardis Brain.
Noted. I think you are using origami differently from Zindell though, I got the impression that he meant having computer programs that did several different things with the same code - a bit like the Obfuscated C Contest programs we see from time to time.
My problem with this structure is getting energy into it and entropy out of it - heat dissipation has been a major limiting factor in most of my jupiter brain designs, and it gets even worse inside Tardis pockets. If you could economically blow up open "pockets" to dissipate into, then things would get very nice - although classical thermodynamics would have to be thrown out of the window!
Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y