[extropy-chat] Bainbridg today in Transvision06 on personality capture vs info-resurrection

[John]

> That sounds way high.  The solar burn rate is about 1500 tons of mass to
> energy per second.  The mass deficit is a little under 1% so fusing 
> 150,000
> tons per second would do it.

According to my resources... [grin]

"The Sun's energy output (3.86e33 ergs/second or 386 billion billion 
megawatts) is produced by nuclear fusion reactions. Each second about 
700,000,000 tons of hydrogen are converted to about 695,000,000 tons of 
helium and 5,000,000 tons (=3.86e33 ergs) of energy..."

But anyway, our probe probably wouldn't weigh anywhere near the weight of 
the mass ejected by the sun and we can probably do with accelerations under 
0 to lightspeed in 1 second. I think, alongside containing and controlling 
that kind of quantity of energy, one of the other big problems will be 
harvesting it and the ethics of doing so. We have a hard time now powering 
lightbulbs and cars. When we're thinking of sending something that far, I 
think we'll have to really stop and think... "is it worth it?".

I suddenly realised, the Enterprise is like a guy driving back and forth to 
the store at the end of a road in one of those huge opencast mine trucks you 
see on "the world's biggest" programmes. They scoot from place to place to 
do very little, at a gigantic energy cost. I think if we follow that 
mentality too far we'll end up having to think in terms of "which star 
system should I destroy today to go shopping?". "There are loads of stars, 
no problem... oh, we ran out.".

Self preserving / serving logic (like us) exploits energy transitions to 
push it's self along and prevent / retard it's own thermodynamic decay. It 
does so often by compressing the temporal parameters of another energy 
transition it can tap into (nuclear fission for example, or setting fire to 
a lump of coal which would otherwise oxidise, very, very slowly over the 
eons). In doing so, it of coarse accelerates the rate at which that 
transition reaches thermodynamic equilibrium. Humans won't exist in their 
present form in a thermodynamically balanced environment (we rely on things 
being unbalanced to power ATP pumps etc).

I think things like the Enterprise will end up having their mission prefaced 
by a review at "The board of thermodynamic ethics & equality - lead by 
John".

"Our mission will be to visit the Boleans so's that ensign Harry Kim can 
pick up a new picture for his wall" - "REFUSED; additional, recommend C. 
Janeway is reassigned to refuse maintainance deputy"

snip
> "As my chief information officer said, while gazing down at the mess:  'A
> clear case of burnout from information overload!'"

Quite!

All the best,
John