[ExI] Von Neumann Probes

[Jason Resch]

On Sat, Jan 24, 2026 at 10:15 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 24, 2026 at 8:56 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> > More computation doesn't require more energy, this is a common
> misconception. But more computational speed does require more density. And
> higher computational speed effectively seals you off from the rest of the
> universe. If you run your minds a million times faster, the speed of light
> becomes a million times slower from your perspective (about the speed of an
> airplane).
> >
> > To email or text someone, or to download a web page from the other side
> of the planet takes hours.
>
> Actually it's even worse.  Downloading a small Web page from the far
> side of the planet currently takes about a second (optimally: light
> can circle the Earth about 7.5 times per second).  One million seconds
> is 277.777... hours, which is a bit over 11.5 days.
>

True. A lot of that extra time is because our protocols (TCP, TLS, HTTP)
require additional round trips.


>
> > If a civilization wants to explore, their best bet is to make a copy of
> their entire civilization and send a copy outward in a miniaturized single
> ship
>
> Exploration by entire civilizations, or any group larger than an
> individual (or a collective small enough that they would all go
> explore together), generally involves a small number of scouts going
> forth and reporting back.  That ship can't just "go explore"; it needs
> a way to send data back in reasonable time, or the civilization
> wouldn't build and send that ship in the first place.
>

There are other reasons they might branch out aside from the goal of
bringing back information (redundancy, protecting other planets, preventing
self-replicators from taking over, etc.).

But once you get to the point of running minds on artificial substrates at
greatly accelerated speeds, anything approaching interstellar distances is
for all practical purposes, isolated and cut off (for seeming millions or
billions of years or longer). Once the civilization ships separate, they
effectively become different civilizations (think how much human
civilization changed and evolved in just a few thousand years).

Jason
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