[extropy-chat] Dark matter and ET

[Robin Hanson]

At 08:59 PM 7/14/2005, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>>It is a subtle question what exactly the goals of alien civilizations 
>>would be,
>>and different goals lead to different computational priorities.
>
>I don't see why different computational priorities should affect the 
>material prediction, valid for an extremely wide range of goal systems: 
>that superintelligences should convert available matter into 
>configurations more useful than stars, which generate massive amounts of 
>entropy without performing any computations...

Robert Bradbury assumed that each alien civilization had a fixed chunk of 
matter and repository of free energy, and wanted to extract as many CPU 
cycles out of those, no matter how long this took, and were not very 
interested in exchanging I/O with other civilizations.  These assumptions 
lead to very different optimal computation configurations than, for 
example, a rapidly expanding civilization that only cared about computation 
in order to support that expansion.  Such an expanding civilization would 
be much less patient, would want lots of I/O regarding colonization 
targets, and would want the computation to be located near in space and 
time to those efforts.



Robin Hanson  rhanson at gmu.edu  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323