[ExI] Interstellar FedEx.

[John Clark]

On Sep 27, 2009, at 8:03 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote:

> s there a fundamental energy or entropy cost of moving matter  
> around? If
> I want to send a mass M from point A to point B within time T, how  
> much
> would that cost? Obviously there are concerns of friction in  
> terrestrial
> environments, but I am mostly concerned here with interstellar  
> distances.

If you're concerned with interstellar distances then it's very hard to  
understand why you'd ever want to move matter around, moving  
information is so much quicker and more economical. If you insisted  
you could transfer the quantum state of an object and it wouldn't use  
much more energy than moving information, but teleportation is  
difficult for large objects and seems overkill to me.

Well OK I exaggerate, you might want to send Von Neumann probes, but  
they are so small they wouldn't use much energy unless you were in a  
big hurry for then to get to their destination. Even at today's speeds  
you could send one to every star in the galaxy in less than 50 million  
years, and that's nothing.

  John K Clark


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