[ExI] Should we still want biological space colonists?

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sat, Feb 8, 2025 at 7:55 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 7, 2025, 11:05 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Feb 7, 2025 at 7:06 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Any civilization that has mastered technology to the point of being
>>> capable of building artificial bodies and brains will see the engineering
>>> of customized robotics as far preferable to terraforming planets and will
>>> see the transport of uploaded minds inhabiting the unlimited space of
>>> virtual realities as far more efficient than trying to haul fragile,
>>> radiation-sensitive, prone to spoil, meat bodies to the stars in generation
>>> ships.
>>>
>>
>> Even if AGI was about to happen, there is a vast gulf between AGI
>> extended from current AI efforts and mind uploading.
>>
>
> You are correct that there is a vast gulf in technological sophistication,
> but the exponential speed at which technology advances implies there's only
> a short gulf in time between those two milestones.
>
> In my estimation, there's less than two decades between AGI and mind
> uploading. And with superintelligent AI timescales collapse further still.
>

I emphasize "extended from current AI efforts", as that lends no direct
support to mind uploading.  (Other than "but superintelligence can and will
figure out anything", which increasingly seems to be running into limits
the more that premise is examined.)  Though, current efforts do not seem to
lead to AGI in the short term.

I agree space habitats make more sense than terraforming. But what habitat
> is better than virtual reality whose only limit is imagination?
>

One that can't simply be unplugged, deleting everyone within.  Also, one
with any measurable impact on the universe outside the habitat.

It is true that one could live a blissful eternity in a virtual reality
habitat...and literally nobody else would care.  You could run a million, a
billion, a trillion instances of blissful eternities in such a habitat,
with not a one communicating outside or otherwise doing anything of
consequence to anyone outside.

Indeed, some versions of the Heaven tale essentially claim that is what
Heaven, with God as the highest level system administrator.  (There are
similar tales of Hell, save for being far less blissful for the average
inhabitant.)  And yet, even for those who fervently believe this is true,
in most cases (with notable exceptions for those unable to keep functioning
well anyway) given the choice of a longer life on Earth or going
immediately to Heaven, they keep choosing the former.  The reason why can
be debated, but most people appear to prefer to continue to affect the
universe they were born into.

Those who would prefer to opt out of the physical universe and live
entirely in self-contained virtual habitats, essentially commit suicide so
far as the outside universe is concerned.  Which means they have no
defenses should those who live outside the habitats desire to repurpose a
habitat's resources.  Does computronium become tastier with a greater
quantity of independent minds it used to run?


> At the physical limits of computational efficiency, the computation
> required to run 100 billion human minds could fit in a computer with a
> volume no bigger than a grain of sand.
>
> Can we rule out that we already inhabit a universe filled with such "dust
> ships"?
>

No.  Perhaps call the dust ships "fairies", and the reason why - and their
potential impact - becomes clearer.
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