[ExI] Fermi Paradox and Transcension

Kelly Anderson kellycoinguy at gmail.com
Thu Sep 6 15:14:50 UTC 2012


On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 4:01 PM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 10:23 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> Once your mind is uploaded and operating at computronium speed, then
> spamming the universe would just seem silly. If you fire off a rocket,
> then after a subjective thousand years in your computronium nest the
> rocket appears to have moved about one mile. It will be subjective
> millions of years before the rocket gets anywhere.

Bill, I've heard this argument here before, and it is a good one, but
it seems to leave out one very large variable. Computronium will
require matter, right? Some kind of stuff, even if it is dark matter.
What if all the local matter is used up by more powerful beings and
you don't have access to it? Wouldn't you be willing to cross space,
even at subjective millions of years (and why wouldn't you just turn
the clock rate down) to get at more matter? Then you could become the
most powerful being in that new area, with that new matter.

The idea that you would be satisfied with whatever matter is at hand
just totally discounts one of Jesus' more intelligent pronouncements,
"You will always have the poor"...

Where there is relative poverty, there will always be striving for new
material to work with, so no matter what you do, there will be a
segment of the "population" that will be poor, and will go out seeking
materials to work with that have not yet been claimed.

Do you have a counter argument?

-Kelly



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