[extropy-chat] Dark matter and ET

[Mike Lorrey]

--- Robin Hanson <rhanson at gmu.edu> wrote:

> At 10:51 PM 7/14/2005, Dan Clemmensen wrote:
> >An SI will expand beyond its natal solar system only if The NPV of
> >the knowledge gained by use of the extrasolar computational power
> >exceeds the NPV of the computational resources to be invested in
> >the expansion. 
> >Example: the SI might expend an asteroid's worth of comptutronium to
> >colonize a star system 4 light-years away.  Using a speed-of-light
> >probe, at best is takes 4 years to initiate the colony, and at best
> >the colony starts with a knowledge base that is four years old. The
> >SI will not get any new input for at least eight years, and the new
> >input will be four years old and will be based on an eight-year-old
> >knowledge base. The SI may very well conclude that it will gain
> > more knowledge by incorporating the asteroid's worth of
> > compturonium within itself rather than launching the probe.
> > If this is generally true, then we would not expect to see any 
> >expanding spheres. Instead, we will simply see systems going dark.
> 
> This is a clear example, where, as I warned, predictions depend on
> your assumptions about the goals/priorities of the alien
> civilization. 
> You assume the only point of colonization is to spawn a computational

> sub-process, where you already have the needed inputs. This gives
> very different predictions from a civilization whose goal is to
> colonize as far and fast as possible, for example.
> 
> A robust way to forecast alien goals/priorities is to just predict a
> wide divergence of such goals.

Quite so, Robin. But Dan's premise also fails a test of extropic logic,
which is that the marginal utility of a colony in another star system
is not just the computation happening in that star system, but also the
probes being spawned to other systems from there, and others in turn,
as an exponential budding process. Sure, the core SI takes a loss
computationally for the first few generations, but the exponential
growth quickly overtakes that, especially if each probe travels with a
supply of entangled particles or is otherwise able to establish some
sort of FTL network once they've reached a destination star system.

Furthermore, Dan's calculation leaves out the utility of new
information found at new star systems, assuming that every system is
going to be like every other. There is only so much that can be gleaned
from interferometry from one's home system. At some point, if you want
to know more, you have to go there.

Furthermore, his statement about 'sending robot probes' is a
contradiction with the rest of his comment. If you are going to send
anything as a posthuman civilization, a robot probe will be a person or persons...

Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://intlib.blogspot.com

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com