RE: Doomsday vs Diaspora

From: Harvey Newstrom (mail@HarveyNewstrom.com)
Date: Wed Apr 30 2003 - 12:08:52 MDT

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    Lee Corbin wrote,
    > Though you may be right ("it would be the Labor of Centuries"),
    > pace Singularity, the time it takes to colonize a galaxy is
    > miniscule by geological standards.

    I'm not sure this will ever be true. I personally have in front of me more
    computing power, information retrieval, and global communications ability
    than I ever dreamed possible when I was a kid. I remember that one of my
    wildest dreams was to actually have a computer in my own home when I grew
    up. Well, now I have much more than that. But so does everyone else.
    Instead of giving me a competitive advantage or a life of leisure, I now
    work more hours per week than my parents ever imagined. As we get more
    power and capability, and as we get a better understanding of the universe,
    we find more and more avenues of innovations so fast that we can't keep up.

    Most predictions of having plenty of time or resources are based on using
    those massive future resources against today's to-do list. When we actually
    get to the future and achieve all those resources, we will have galactic
    problems and issues and pressures which we never imagined today. I doubt we
    will have excess time or resources. I believe that we will always be
    pressured for more. By the time we become immortal /and/ safe from
    accidental death, we will be fighting the final death of our universe.

    Sorry to be so glum, but utopian theories will probably never materialize
    unless we give up growth and expansion. I'm not interested in a boring life
    anywhere as long as there are still new frontiers to be explored.

    > Well, that's been the pattern so far. In each century our ideas have
    > changed so much that the most farsighted dreams of the preceding
    > century seem lame. So I suppose that "converting every bit of matter
    > in the universe to more compute power" may suffer the same fate. Somehow.

    This is my prediction as well. My guess is that it will take more energy to
    move a bunch of particles far away to capture other particles for our use,
    that it becomes a losing proposition as the sphere of computronium grows
    larger. I think instead we will make due with localized computer resources
    here and there that are just good enough for the specific tasks given to
    them. Whole planets will be converted to computers for some giant tasks,
    but not every planet. And who wants a computer that is far away or takes a
    long time to communicate with?

    --
    Harvey Newstrom, CISSP, IAM, GSEC, IBMCP
    <www.HarveyNewstrom.com> <www.Newstaff.com>
    


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