[ExI] Do we live in a universe that allows infinite computation?

[john clark]

Back in 1993 Frank Tipler wrote an interesting book called "The Physics of Immortality". In 2007 the poor man went a little funny in the head, you know, just a little funny,  and he went and did a silly thing; he wrote another book saying we should look for divine DNA on the Shroud of Turin and check for radiation around the tomb of the Blessed Virgin Marry that was caused by an intense beam of neutrinos that must have shot out of the bottom of her feet as she ascended into heaven. Anyway, in 1993 he still had all his marbles and he gave a fairly plausible rough outline of how the universe might be able to perform an infinite (not just very large) number of calculations; to do that you'd need an infinite (not just very large) amount of energy but he thought the laws of physics and of cosmology were so constituted as to allow for that. If you could perform an infinite number of calculations then infinite subjective time is possible even if objectively
 time comes to an end. 

>From the assumption that immortality was physically possible Tipler worked backward and made a number of predictions about what he thought the laws of the universe must be for immortality to happen. Tipler's predictions turned out to be wrong, some spectacularly wrong; he predicted the expansion of the universe would slow down, then it would stop, then it would change direction and collapse in on itself; from the heat of that imploding fireball he thought a hyper-advanced civilization could theoretically extract an infinite amount of energy. But we now know that due to Dark Energy the expansion of the cosmos is accelerating not decelerating so that fireball will never happen. It's clear we don't live in the sort of universe that Tipler thought we did, but could we still extract an infinite amount of energy from the real universe and thus perform an infinite number of calculations? Perhaps.

Suppose you had 2 spools of string connected together by an axle and you extended the 2 strings to cosmological distances 180 degrees apart from each other. As long as the Dark Energy force between the atoms in the string that were trying to force them apart was not stronger than the attractive electromagnetic force holding the atoms of the string together the string would not expand as the universe expanded, so there would be a tension on the strings, so there would be torque on the spool, so the axle would rotate. The axle could be connected to an electric generator and it seems to me you'd get useful work out of it. Of course you'd have to constantly add more mass-energy in the form of more string to keep it operating, but the amount of mass per unit length of string would remain constant, however because the universe is accelerating the amount of energy per unit length of string you'd get out of it would not remain constant but would increase
 asymptotically to infinity. If the theories about the Big Rip turn out to be true and the acceleration of the universe is itself accelerating then it should be even easier to extract infinite energy out of the universe; it would just be a simple matter of cosmological engineering. What could go wrong? 

If you have infinite energy then you can perform an infinite number of calculations, so you could have an infinite number of thoughts, so you would have no last thought (the definition of death), so subjectively you would live forever. Of course the objective universe might have a different opinion on the matter and insist that everything including you had come to an end, but that hardly matters, subjectivity is far more important than objectivity; at least I think so.  

  John K Clark 

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