[ExI] ETs/Aliens

[Ben Zaiboc]

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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20240907/128b1768/attachment.htm>