[ExI] Zuckerberg just bought 26 days of world peace?

[Ben]

Tara Maya wrote:

"farming seems a much more likely use of a planet"

This depends, I suppose, on what you see the future of the human race 
being. I see a future, if we play our cards right and are moderately 
lucky, where we successfully and comprehensively transcend biology. In 
that case, everything looks totally different. People are software, 
resources are matter (virtually any matter) and energy. Planets are a 
vast waste of space, where enormous amounts of matter are tied up doing 
nothing more than keeping a crust together, providing some gravity, and 
posing a continual threat to anyone on their surface (tectonics, 
weather, vulcanism, etc.). Oh, and presenting a quite large barrier to 
travel (you need lots and lots of energy to escape those gravitational 
wells).

On the other hand, planets, if dismantled, represent a mind-boggling 
abundance of resources, enought to support quintillions of intelligent 
minds, or even more. Including the kind of superintelligent minds that 
biology could never produce.

If, on the other hand, you see a fully or largely biological future, 
then planets are pretty much indispensable, protecting the weak fragile 
organisms from solar weather, extremes of temperature, etc.
In that case, yes, maybe farming does seem a more likely use for a 
planet. But it's not really a future I have much interest in.

In my opinion, if that's our future, we've failed, big time, and fully 
deserve our eventual and inevitable extinction. Biology won't last 
forever, and the average lifespan of a single biological individual will 
still be tragically short, no matter what life-extension technologies we 
come up with. Note that I'm calling a few thousand years (assuming 
phenomenal luck) tragically short. Software beings could potentially 
live for billions of years, and easily weather events such as the 
bloating of our sun, asteroid strikes, coronal mass ejections, maybe 
even nearby supernovae. Things that would completely and permanently 
destroy biological beings.

You say you're an optimist. I see your vision as pessimism. Remaining 
biological would be throwing away an inconcievably vast and wonderful 
future potential. So much so that I suspect biological beings can barely 
even begin to imagine it.

Ben Zaiboc