[ExI] The Great Silence again

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 08:49:55PM +0100, BillK wrote:
> Michael Anissimov at Accelerating Future has just posted a comment
> that appeals to me.
> 
> <http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2011/04/elon-musk-ill-put-a-man-on-mars-in-10-years/>
> 
> Quote:
> Another point I’ve made in the past is that as everyone becomes
> uploads and accelerates their thinking speeds, space will begin to

Why did we leave Africa? At these speeds villages were months
away. But there is always an adjacent village. And population pressure.

> seem very far away. Right now, Luna is 3-4 days away. To beings whose

Round trip about 2.6 seconds.

> brains are made up of molecular computers with 100 GHz switching
> speeds, Luna is about 3,000,000,000 days away. That’s about eight
> million years. An eight million year trip to go to an empty wasteland
> without any art, culture, or much Kolmogorov complexity to speak of
> beyond geological and mineral patterns?

Why did we settle Oceania? Australia? Americas? The whole
goddamn world down to the smallest island barely above
waterline, in fact. Kolmogorov complexity my arse.
 
> The near-term future of humanity is to convert the Earth into a
> “computronium globe” with a web of trillions of simulated worlds

Your "computronium globe" is many lightminutes across. Put that
into your relativistic pipe, and smoke it.

> within it. In several subjective millennia, we may consume the Moon,

Subjective doesn't mean much. Time is of no essence.

> but it will be subjective millions of years beyond that until we
> colonize Mars. In many billions of years, we may be fortunate enough
> to consume the Sun.
> ---------------------------------
> 
> 
> I think I've mentioned in the past that The Fermi problem is probably
> because advanced civs don't go out into space.

Yeah, just as we didn't. Wait, we've got probes leaving the solar
system and we barely started crawling. Something doesn't add up.

> For many possible reasons, including those mentioned by Michael above.
> 
> Sometimes called the retreat into virtual worlds of computronium.

Guess what, these won't go out and conquer the universe! We will.

P.S. Excellent troll, haha.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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