RE: PHYSICS: our increasingly strange universe

From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Wed May 21 2003 - 19:46:24 MDT

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    > -----Original Message-----
    > From: Adrian Tymes [mailto:wingcat@pacbell.net]
    > Sent: Thursday, 22 May 2003 10:28 AM
    > To: extropians@extropy.org
    > Subject: RE: PHYSICS: our increasingly strange universe
    >
    >
    > --- Emlyn O'regan <oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au>
    > wrote:
    > > > > --- Emlyn O'regan
    > > <oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au wrote:
    > > > > > It's depressing how buggy the universe is.
    > > >
    > > > Depressing? It's elating. Explains the meaning
    > > of
    > > > human existence: we are evolving to debug this
    > > place.
    > >
    > > If the meaning of life is that we are maintenance
    > > programmers for a bug
    > > ridden, feature bloated universe, I'm going to be
    > > very annoyed...
    >
    > Maintenance implies customers, and support. We're our
    > only customers; the system itself provides our
    > paychecks of existence. Which means there's no one to
    > stop someone from, say, hacking the accounting system
    > into not producing any more terminations. (Of course,
    > human relations is another story altogether, but at
    > least they don't automatically terminate everyone
    > eventually.)
    >

    It's such a bitch to hack though. The Contractor who built The Universe
    seems to have pissed off without leaving a copy of the source, leaving us
    utterly dependant on a buggy v1.0 with only the binaries. Worse than that,
    it's all on custom, undocumented hardware, meaning that we have to reverse
    engineer pretty much the whole thing before we can even think about chucking
    out the old crap and starting over.

    The fact that we are theoretically able to do what we like with it has been
    little consolation to the billions of humans who've had to rely on it so
    far. It's a productivity nightmare; the entire history of science expressed
    as maintenance man hours should be fairly good proof that this was a bad
    deal.

    If anyone manages to find God, let's sue his arse, the bastard.

    Emlyn



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