[extropy-chat] What Human Minds Will Eventually Do

Russell Wallace russell.wallace at gmail.com
Sun Jul 2 11:49:19 UTC 2006


On 7/2/06, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Wait, slow down a minute.
> If a gram of smarts is enough for an entire upload civilization, then
> we won't be moving much outside our solar system.


(I should clarify, because numbers sometimes take on a life of their own,
that the 1 gram for a civilization figure is for mass-optimized static
storage in transit, not actually operating computronium, though this is an
aside, not part of the current argument.)

My answer is: I will. No matter how much you argue that we should value
sitting at home shuffling bits over going out to convert the wasted
mass/energy of the universe into people living worthwhile lives, the
empirical fact is that I do place far higher value on the latter, and so do
a lot of other people. If the means become available, we will go out to
colonize other star systems. Of course there's no guarantee that the means
will become available, but as long as there are people who want to do so,
the lack of desire argument is null and void.
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