From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sun Feb 23 2003 - 00:31:31 MST
Robert Bradbury wrote
> [mailto:owner-extropians@extropy.org]On Behalf Of Robert J. Bradbury
> Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2003 4:46 AM
> 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.
Why do you suppose that after everything in our galaxy is
converted to computronium, or as near as it can get, that
the galaxy'll be a bore? Think of all the thinking that
will be going on.
> That allows scenarios like the Klingon or Romulan
> civilizations to evolve. That seems much more interesting.
Sounds like science fiction, to me. Like Brin's boring
uplift scenarios (I haven't read the books, and they may
indeed be lotsa fun), but alien species? C'mon. On this
list it's commonplace that any technology that gets past
a very primitive level goes singularity---and the least
that I mean by that is that it becomes silicon.
> 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.... The expansion of civilizations
> to fully utilize the resources available to them was made by Dyson
> 40+ years ago.
The scenario I've been imagining for the last 10 years or
so, and I don't recall that I've seen it refuted, is "The
Wind from Earth". In this, the whole solar system is
converted to living tissue in just the next two hundred
years or so. (This is quite in line with other people's
singularity scenarios.)
Then this center of life spreads out at just about the
speed of light. The first (highly intelligent) probes
reach the nearby stars and convert it to living tissue
also. That which is Dead, i.e., not yet converted to
Life, consists only of atoms outside the expanding
sphere at any given time T.
Meanwhile, at a given radius R from Earth---or perhaps
from Jupiter---local Life fights a constant struggle
for existence. What to do about the algorithms from
Earth?
Yes, they're newer and more powerful, and they've
been beamed straight from the center, but can they
be trusted? How severely do they affect local
identity? The dilemma: if you don't use them, then
you fall further and further behind, but if you do
use them, you may lose your identity.
I see this technological gradient as being probably
permanent: always near the center will be the most
advanced algorithms (entities), because kilotons of
matter cannot even begin to explore all the possible
algorithms of the future. A human brain could easily
run on a 1cc device, and no telling what could run
on a Jupiter brain. But the Jupiter brain's program
(its algorithms) will hardly be optimal. So large
is the search space that perhaps optimality will
never be within any finite time.
Lee
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