From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Wed Feb 19 2003 - 05:45:33 MST
This will be a reply to Daniel, Dennis and Lee based on some
incorporation of posts that have showed up on the Javien Forum
but not the ExI List itself (yet).
Lee Corbin [lcorbin@tsoft.com] wrote:
>At some early stages of the Von Neumann probe dispersal, this
>seems right. But then as one civilization begins using all
>available matter ruthlessly grasping for every cycle of compute
>power, this passes, I'd say.
I would tend to agree with this. The entire von Neumann probe
dispersal scenario seems very boring. So you conquer every bit
of available matter -- so what? You either have a very dumb
mechanical galaxy ruled by "we shall control everything" bots
or you have something more alive and evolving. That allows
scenarios like the Klingon or Romulan civilizations to evolve.
That seems much more interesting.
From Dennis:
> Competition between groups, particularly given WoMD, will prevent every
> speck of matter from being used.
This statement demonstrates a lack of understanding of scale by Dennis.
Current WoMD are useless/irrelevant on stellar scales.
One could explode all of the nuclear weapons that exist on our
planet today and it would hardly be noticed on a planet orbiting
around Alpha Centauri.
The statement Dennis makes demonstrates a key lack of appreciation
for two facts of life:
a) the power output of a star vs. a typical WoMD
b) typical distances between stars and how long it is likely
to take to travel between them.
Dennis makes an interesting observation with:
> With WoMD [geometric destruction] and geometric replication [von Neumann
> probes/biological systems] it is not obvious that there will ever be any
> situation where everything is used up.
Discarding the geometric destruction card (Dennis clearly does not
make his case in this forum -- a Matrioshka Brain is managing 10^26 W)
In comparison, one megaton of TNT produces 4.2x10^15 joules and the
largest nuclear weapons ever designed produce about 100 times this
amount of energy. So the largest WoMD ever imagined by human beings
still fall short of the power output of a star by about 7 orders of
magnitude. It isn't even worth debating.
There *will* be a situation where "everything" is used up. It
may happen very very far in our future when we have had to resolve
whether or not the Romulan or Klingon civilization perspectives
might indeed be best. I don't know. But the assertion that
Dennis makes is clearly incorrect. The expansion of civilizations
to fully utilize the resources avialable to them was made by Dyson
40+ years ago. If we are going to be debating it now we need
much stronger arguments than Dennis seems to present.
Robert
Robert
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