[ExI] Von Neumann probes for what?

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sat, Jan 01, 2011 at 11:40:32AM +0000, BillK wrote:

> If the intelligence is processing in a substrate a million times

Who built that substrate? What happens when it gets crowded?

> faster than humans, that effectively 'freezes' the real universe. If
> they live on the edge of a black hole, then it actually does freeze
> the real universe so far as they are concerned.
> Sending out probes that never seem to move away is a pointless
> endeavour from their POV.

How do mighty oak forests grow? Acorn by acorn.
 
> That's likely why the galaxy hasn't already been swamped with probes
> many times over.
> (Or, possibly, no culture has ever survived its singularity).

You're very good explaining at why we're still in Africa.
Or why the first autocatalytic sets bothered with autocatalysis
at all. Dreary business that, let's rather contemplate
entropy.

Another one: it pretty much looks as if transhumanists
don't produce a lot of children. Whereas

http://postbiota.org/pipermail/tt/2010-December/008311.html

others do. Assuming memes are sticky, what's the face of
a resulting culture?

So you've got a population, some small fraction of it
is expansive, and the overwhelming majority is not.

So guess who's going to drop by for a visit?

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