[ExI] The Great Silence again

[Eugen Leitl]

On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 01:41:05PM +0100, BillK wrote:

> Subjective stasis.  The outside world is frozen because of the high
> speed posthuman life-forms.
> If they launched a rocket, the civ would watch it for a million years

You know, when a dandelion on my grass roof generates seeds it
will never see what happens to them. Yet it still happens.
Every. Fucking. Year.

> (subjective) as it appeared to slowly crawl away from earth orbit. If
> you were on that rocket you would miss out on millions of years of
> Matrix life.
> 
> >
> > Why?  I can already think of leaving it.  If I can, why would it be so
> > impossible for them?  I suspect they will feel limited if they find
> > themselves stuck in a situation like that.
> >
> >
> 
> 
> Heh!  :)  People today start to have a nervous breakdown if they lose
> the web connection for a day.
> 
> Consider a posthuman civ where they live in the Matrix. You'd die if
> you lost connection.

A "posthuman civ" is a highly diverse set of species with widely differing
complexities and goals. Some of them will be as dumb as viroids. They most
assuredly "not not die if you lost connection" than you would die if you
didn't check your twatr stats daily. Or the dandelions stop producing
seeds, because, you know, the ennui, it's so unbearable.

You know, this isn't a difficult concept. Either I'm really lousy at
explaining it, or maybe it's you.