From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon Jul 21 2003 - 10:53:34 MDT
On Mon, Jul 21, 2003 at 10:21:41AM -0400, Pvthur@aol.com wrote:
>
> Clarke said any sufficiently advanced civilization will be
> indistinguishable from magic. I don't think he goes far enough ...
> indistinguishable from Nature, perhaps, or indistinguishable from the
> vacuum of space, maybe. They don't have to be made of ordinary matter
> at all. They could exist on many levels that we are unable to detect.
> And they don't have to necessarily be hiding from us. That simply may
> be where they live.
Exactly. This is my own personal guess at the answer of the Fermi
paradox. But it has the problem of invoking the existence of some kind
of physics we do not know about; not an unlikely assumption or
prediction, but rather unsatisfying since it does not tell us anything
and cannot be tested.
Or can it? The assumption says that there should exist a domain in
nature where structures of extremely high complexity can persist and
perform at least Turing-computable operations, and that this domain does
not look out of the ordinary to us. The current candidates seem to be
either dark matter (essentially going back to "some unknown stuff") or
spacetime on the Planck scale. This case is interesting: it wouldn't
surprise me if one could prove that spacetime evolution in GR can do
Turing type computation (proof sketch: one could implement a billiard
ball computer with black holes using very massive cosmic strings or
wormholes as reflectors - but a real proof needs to show that this is
stable enough), but it would be needed to show that stable information
storage was also possible in principle.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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