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

[Robert J. Bradbury]

On Mon, 5 Jan 2004, Mike Lorrey wrote:

> If an Mbrain civilization
> expands its demands for processing resources faster than its ability to
> build transmission resources, it will eventually trap itself in its own
> solar system by informational overpopulation.

The outer layer of an MBrain is constrained by the temperature it wants
to radiate at.  But that doesn't prevent one from constructing orbiting
data storage devices, perhaps with onboard fusion reactors -- just enough
energy to occasionally read and restore data bits that get wiped by cosmic
rays.  So long as you have a supply of brown dwarfs or molecular clouds
to consume the quantity of data stored can get quite large (>> 2^50 bits).
The only problem is the access time.  Instead of waiting milliseconds
for the data you need to rotate around on a disk drive spindle (and
that is *fast* compared to the rotational delay on early drum storage
devices), you have to wait hundreds to thousands of years for your
data to become available for read access again (*much* slower than
offsite tape access now-a-days).  Perhaps you could setup laser
access and have the data in light-hours to light-days but this
is going to require much more energy be consumed in the orbiting
data storage units.  If you opt for the low-energy cost data
storage approach and the access is hundreds to thousands of years
there is probably a significant chance that the data will be obsolete
by the time it gets back to where it can be read.  In that much
time a MBrain can obviously recreate a significant amount of data
if necessary.

I toyed around with considering different compression approaches
and then realized this can get *very* complex.  One could think
of Chinese where one has a variety of icons with specific meanings.
One could imagine MBrain alphabets where strings of N bits each
have a different meaning but only the active mental state of
an MBrain knows how to interpret that set of bits.  So each
string is effectively "overloaded" with a meaning -- just as
when I say "red" this brings to mind a whole set of images,
experiences and comprehensions within the mind of the listener.
The agreed upon meaning of "red" is only required for our
interpersonal communication requirements.  If an MBrain is only
communicating within itself it seems resonable to allow "red" to
mean the entire set of overloaded qualities.  In a way this
seems similar to object-oriented programming where one is
passing around objects with a variety of qualities.

Robert