Re: Doomsday vs Diaspora

From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Sat Apr 26 2003 - 11:43:49 MDT

  • Next message: Robert J. Bradbury: "RE: Doomsday vs Diaspora"

    A. Sandberg stated:
    <<I was hardly first with that idea - it is inherent in the early
    extropian writings and the work of Ilya Priogogine. Open systems can use
    free energy to decrease their own entropy, and certain kinds of systems
    have an internal dynamics that also increases their complexity (which is
    still a somewhat vague term even after more than a decade of debate in
    the alife and complexity community).>>

    I remember reading Prigognine's small tome, which is hiding in plain site in
    my bookshelf now. He might have been able to do the science of
    thermodynamics, but explaining was not his particular forte'.

    <<My preliminary answer would be that in a finite region there can only be
    a finite amount of complexity. But this could very well be an
    exponential function of the number of available states. >>

    Yes, back to Plato. If the Universe is infinite, so is available knowledge
    then; platonic forms and all that. Getting back to the original query by Jef;
    we need to ask if its easier to develop complexity, then it is to use energy
    to travel? There may or may not be theoretical limits to
    knowledge/complexity, but there are surely practical limits, if only
    temporary. There are limits to travel speed, and the energy expended, but one
    goal may be more achievable then the other. Right, now, in the very early
    Interplanetary Epoch, we don't know.



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