[ExI] ETs/Aliens
Ben Zaiboc
ben at zaiboc.net
Sat Sep 7 16:37:27 UTC 2024
On 07/09/2024 14:27, Keith Henson wrote:
> Most of you have seen this
> http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/04/12/transhumanism-and-the-human-expansion-into-space-a-conflict-with-physics/
>
> I made a case for civilization "collapsing" to 300-meter spheres sunk
> in the deep ocean for cooling.
>
> But if what we see at Tabby's Star and the other 24 in that cluster
> are data centers up to 400 times the area of the Earth, they seem to
> tolerate a speed-of-light communication delay of around 1.5 seconds.
> That indicates the aliens (if any) are running at close to our clock
> rate and I am wrong about a million-to-one speedup at least in that
> case.
>
> Keith
Surely such a data centre could contain many smaller clusters with much
faster internal communications, that only interact with each other
slowly, or rarely? Imagine 400 (or probably many more) separate
civilisations, with a common agreement concerning the physical
infrastructure but otherwise totally independent.
This idea could be scaled up, with nested clusters of clusters of
(clusters of, etc...) civilisations, metropolises, communities, right
down to the individual level. Communication speeds would then be scaled
depending on the level of the units communicating with each other.
We already have a weak version of this. For example, we know that it
takes ages for bureaucracies to get things done, and in the meantime we
just get on with our lives. Not so long ago, people used to write
letters to each other, and wait a few days or more for a reply. This
didn't slow our everyday lives down. Usually!
Perhaps for someone who is effectively immortal, waiting a couple of
thousand subjective years for a reply to your message to uncle Bernard
wouldn't be intolerable. The ability to vary your clock rate would add
another dimension, too.
It would be interesting to explore, perhaps in an SF story, the
implications of being able to speed up and slow down your clock rate in
a society where everyone has indefinitely long lifespans.
Ben
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