[ExI] Uploads as a group of AI agents

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 28/03/2026 07:36, Keith Henson wrote:
> I have considered some of the problems.
>
> https://web.archive.org/web/20121130232045/http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/04/12/transhumanism-and-the-human-expansion-into-space-a-conflict-with-physics/
>
> And I have written here about the possible aliens at Tabby's Star,
> where the data center object (if that is what it is) is 2.5 light
> seconds across.  Ghod knows how many alien minds could be supported in
> a data center 509 times the area of the Earth.


These two examples contradict each other, do they not?

They also suggest the solution that seems obvious on reading the hplusmagazine article.

The problem with sinking your civilisations in the sea is that you are severely limiting the number of them that can exist, seeing as there are only so many planets in the solar system with oceans that would be suitable, and you're deliberately putting them in places where harvesting solar energy is difficult. Really, the only factors you are considering are communication speed and cooling, ignoring things like existential risk (all your eggs in one basket, or maybe a handful of baskets), making efficient use of available energy, and maximising the number of intelligent beings in existence. You'd also still end up with a number of different civilisations, but limited by the capacity of the oceans to support them.

How could the purported aliens around the Tabby stars have a single civilisation?

The answer is, given no breaking of known physics, they couldn't. Even running at slow speeds (which as you point out, seems very unlikely), the assemblies around different stars can't effectively communicate with each other in such a was as to maintain a cohesive civilisation (unless their psychology is very strange indeed), so they'd be several different ones.

There's no reason this can't apply in a single solar system. Rather than aiming for a single civilisation with relatively quick communication speeds, you accept that there will be many different ones, each fairly independent, only communicating with each other at slow or extremely slow speeds (or not at all).

I see nothing wrong with a Dyson swarm where the light-speed limit means that there are many many overlapping spheres of 'local influence', where the people in one sphere can communcate easily with each other, a bit less easily with people a bit farther away, etc. There would probably end up being gradual shifts in cultures with distance, making things much more varied and  interesting.

Transmitting yourself to the other side of the solar system should still be possible, either directly or in a series of local hops, for the adventurous, and I can imagine that a commonly-agreed set of protocols could exist that would enable long-distance communication of things like technological advances, news, etc., in a series of ripples with many different sources.

There could even be different cultures that run at different speeds, dictated by different availability of energy (maybe civilisations in data-centres out beyond the Oort cloud would run much more slowly than ones close in to the sun)

-- 
Ben