[extropy-chat] Bainbridg today in Transvision06 on personality capture vs info-resurrection

Keith Henson hkhenson at rogers.com
Mon Aug 21 13:38:43 UTC 2006


At 06:18 AM 8/21/2006 +0100, John wrote:
> > I venture to guess not as much as I have.  :-)
>
>Maybe... 8^P
>
> > None of these are a problem.  The output of the sun is enough to launch
> > 1500 tons per second to near light speed.
>
>Not a problem, if you have an engine with an output similar to that of a
>star burning 700 million tonnes of hydrogen per second in a fusion reaction.

That sounds way high.  The solar burn rate is about 1500 tons of mass to 
energy per second.  The mass deficit is a little under 1% so fusing 150,000 
tons per second would do it.

snip

> > Not really.  Laser up to the task of pushing ships between stars have no
> > problem sending information back to the ones who stay at home.
>
>I'm not entirely sure about that. Over such distances, the beam's
>degredation has a huge impact on it's data capacity. Transmitting a wave of
>brute force energy for something to ride on is a lot easier than getting
>massive quantities of data into it.

It has other problems too.

"What happened to the Earth?"--a report presented at the Far Edge Party.

Chairman:  "As you all know, Earth went out of communication 240 millennia 
ago after a few weak garbled messages.  Captain De Long's ship was closest 
and was dispatched back to the home planet to see what had happened.  Even 
being closest, the message took thousands of years to catch up with him and 
25,000 years for him to get back to the Solar system.  I will now turn this 
over to Captain De Long.

Captain De Long:  "Thank you Mr. Chairman.  As most of you know, the 
intention was to relay our travel logs and scientific data back to earth 
using our launch lasers through the earliest star systems we touched 
on.  It was a condition for the energy and material used to launch our 
ships.  After the lasers pushed our ships to cruise velocity, they 
reoriented toward earth and the beam was modulated over and over with the 
accumulated petabytes of information from exploring that system.

"We now know the ship and crew duplication program had a programming 
error.  It reset the target location back to the home planet at ever 
duplication instead of the previous location.  Initially there were only 
100 of those multi Tw data beams impinging on the solar system.  Then 200, 
400, 800,  . . . . even though they were coming from further away, the 
power grew exponentially."

"Fortunately, by the time we reached the solar system the near ones had 
shut off so the earth's sky was just bright instead of killing bright."

"We didn't land, the earth was still too hot to support life, the seas had 
boiled, mountains melted."

"As my chief information officer said, while gazing down at the mess:  'A 
clear case of burnout from information overload!'"

Keith Henson








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