[ExI] jbrains again, was: RE: Early Archives... Re: Yudkowsky ‘Humanity’s remaining timeline? It looks more like five years than 50’

[Darin Sunley]

Which raises an interesting question:

If a civilization was mass-drivering metal from one star system to another
in astronomical quantities, at what range - if any - would we be able to
detect it, and what would it look like?

On Thu, Feb 22, 2024 at 11:10 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [ExI] jbrains again, was: RE: Early Archives...
>
> >...This makes no sense in engineering terms...
>
> It makes no sense in our human terms because of our overall limiting
> factor: time.  We have all the material and energy we need, but our time is
> limited to less than a century.  Think of how your outlook would be
> different if you had all the time you need but are extremely limited by
> material.
>
> >...What are you trying to maximize/minimise?
>
> Computation per unit metal.
>
> >...You would be trying to get as much computation out of an object as you
> could while minimizing the distance between computational nodes...
>
> If a JBrain is metal-limited but not at all time limited, then it can
> spread out enough to solve the overheating problem.  Most of the energy
> from the star gets away, but there is plenty of it there for the amount of
> data we can store, given our severe metal constraints.
>
> >...As far as uploading goes, I don't think it will become popular until
> it is bidirectional.  And as far as humans merging, that's way too much
> like death.
>
> Keith
>
>
> Agree with all of this Keith, but you and I think speed, like the severely
> time-constrained meat creatures we are.  Think instead of a colony of
> JBrains with billions of years left on their star's main sequence before
> the helium fusion phase even starts, but with a severe constraint of its
> own: only 10^18 tons of metal available any time in the foreseeable ten
> billion years.  Your outlook will change, if you think of life from that
> perspective.
>
> spike
>
>
>
>
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