[extropy-chat] fermi's paradox: m/d approach

[Matthew Gingell]

Robert J. Bradbury writes:
 >  The solar systems of advanced civilizations can probably contain
 > >2^50 bits and one doesn't transmit a useful fraction of that
 > across interstellar distances cheaply.

 This is a really evocative and interesting way of putting it. It
 immediately raises the question "how compressible is an advanced
 civilization?" I'd suggest the answer, for sufficiently large values
 of advanced, is not at all:

 We can think about the problem of optimally utilizing all the
 resources available to a civilization as a data encoding problem. The
 goal is to most efficiently transmit into the future whatever content
 it is that distinguishes your civilization from vacuum across mass
 and energy modeled as bandwidth on a Shannon-style noisy channel.
 (Noise in this analogy would be be quantum effects and classical
 uncertainty at various scales.) The solution is necessarily not
 compressible, necessarily completely impenetrable to reductive
 analysis.

 Delta some sophisticated error recovery mechanisms, the idea of a
 civilization completely free of redundancy (in both the conventional
 and Kolmogorov senses) completely boggles my mind. That any
 sufficiently advanced culture is indistinguishable from random noise
 has implications I can't seem to wrap my mind around... How does one
 relate to stellar masses of algorithmically irreducible "Stuff."