[ExI] Alien Civilizations May Only Be Detectable For A Cosmic Blink Of An Eye

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 19/10/2025 23:43, BillK wrote:
> On Sun, 19 Oct 2025 at 20:18, Keith Henson via extropy-chat
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>> Regardless, thinking about what we see gives us a strong hint of where
>> humans are headed.  I expect we will eventually build data centers in
>> space to accommodate trillions of uploaded humans.  I suspect they
>> will be in the relatively cold "computational zone" where the lower
>> temperature reduces errors.
>>
>> Keith
>> _______________________________________________
> I also think this is a likely future but.......
> Unfortunately, it contradicts the idea of zipping around the galaxy,
> colonizing other worlds. Once uploaded minds are processing millions
> of times faster than humans, the universe becomes frozen by time
> dilation. Travel in space takes a subjective eternity. Exploring
> millions of virtual worlds in computronium will be preferable.
> Advanced aliens will go quiet and stay local.

I'm not so sure.

Travelling physically will always take a subjective eternity, whether 
you're an upload or not. Unless you're not conscious. Travelling as 
information encoded onto some suitable photons will take no time at all, 
subjectively. Setting things up so that this is possible will take a few 
million years, as the hardware will need to be built, presumably by Von 
Neumann probes of some type, scattered throughout the galaxy and 
programmed to build the required receiving stations and processing 
substrates. Once that is done, people can zip around the galaxy at the 
speed of light. Providing they are willing to sacrifice a few thousand 
objective years while their peers back home are fitting billions of 
years of experience into the same time.

(This could already be the case, for alien civilisations, and we'd be 
none the wiser. The galaxy would still look the same to us, for having a 
few million data centres scattered about. At least for a while. If they 
served as seeds for new local expansion, that could be a different 
matter, but if they stayed small, we would never notice them)

I wouldn't be surprised if there are at least some brave and adventurous 
individuals willing to do this, but it would almost definitely cause 
huge rifts, mentally and technologically, between the stay-at-homes, who 
will have almost endless spans of time to develop, and the adventurers, 
who will be frozen at their previous level until they reach their 
destination. It would be a one-way trip, psychologically.

If things like picotechnology are possible, maybe the originating 
civilisations would effectively disappear, becoming too small for any 
detection method. The whole universe could be soaked in advanced 
civilisations, and still look exactly the same.

-- 
Ben
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