[ExI] ETs/Aliens

[Keith Henson]

" perhaps in an SF story,"

I did that a long time ago.  Do you need me to post a pointer again?

Best wishes,

Keith

On Sat, Sep 7, 2024 at 9:38 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>
> 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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