[ExI] Uploads as a group of AI agents

[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Mar 29, 2026 at 2:58 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Mar 28, 2026 at 6:54 PM Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>>> >>> If there are aliens, it seems to me that they could have constructed a much larger data center in their home star system and not bothered to spread out.
>>>
>>> >> That doesn't explain why one ET hasn't sent out one Von Neumann probe.
>>
>> > Nope.  On the other hand, perhaps they think of themselves as Von Neuman probes.  The evidence can be read that they are spreading at 1/3rd of c.
>
> Forget 1/3 c, if just one ET had been able to send just one Von Neumann probe at 1/30 c then almost instantly (cosmically speaking) it would be very obvious to anybody that the Milky Way had been engineered, but instead we see a huge astronomical number of energy rich photons from hundreds of billions of starsradiating uselessly into empty space; and the Milky Way is not unique, even our largest telescopes can find no sign that any other galaxy has been engineered either. That's why I think the evidence is overwhelming that we are the only intelligent beings in the observable universe.
>
>>>> >>>  Communications between them [different uploaded civilizations or individuals around a star] would be (from their viewpoint) painfully slow.
>>>
>>>> >>> But also extremely information rich. The communication channel would have lots of latency but also contain lots of data, far far more than anything in biology.
>>
>> > True.  Only we don't see lasers, and the SETI people have not seen anything in the radio spectrum.
>
> And that is yet another reason why I don't think the dimming of Tabby's Star, or that of any other similar star, has anything to do with ET.

You may be right.  The odds are astronomical against there being a
technological civilization spreading out when and where we can see it.
But it is not aliens; we need to figure out what is causing light dips
in a cluster of stars a thousand light-years in diameter.  Got any
ideas?  All of those proposed have physical or logical problems.  For
example, dust clouds.  A dust cloud would be blown out ot the system
by light pressure like a comet tail, and the chances of us seeing such
a transitory event are very low for one star, not to consider a couple
of dozen.

Aliens have good points and bad ones.  If the light dips are caused by
aliens, they apparently survived their own singularity.  That
indicates that maybe we can do the same. That is good.  The bad point
is that we have competition.

In any case, thinking about what might be causing the dips made me
consider the long-term fate of uploaded humanity and the concept of a
"computational zone" out where it is cold, and computers make fewer
errors compared to the "habitable zone" where water is a liquid.

Keith

>  John K Clark