[ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are

[BillK]

On 21 August 2015 at 08:10, Giulio Prisco wrote:
> I think it's very plausible that people in advanced alien
> civilizations live as disembodied software and interact in VR scapes,
> like in Greg Egan's Diaspora. But that doesn't mean that they lose
> interest in the physical universe and space exploration. It just means
> that their footprint on the universe is usually small and therefore
> they are more difficult to detect. Their long-range communications
> might be based on physics that we don't understand yet.
>
> An alien nanoprobe crewed by thousands of upload just landed on the
> tip of my nose, too bad I didn't see it.
>


Once a civ moves to nanoscale VR then they have a scaling problem when
relating to the outside universe. If they are really tiny, then moving
at high speed becomes difficult. Every physical force is magnified.
Grains of interstellar dust appear huge. Distances are magnified. If
they have much faster processing, then time itself is magnified.

If they want to visit strange worlds and meet aliens, then they can
create them in their own VR universe.

BillK