[ExI] one way trip to mars

Ben Zaiboc bbenzai at yahoo.com
Tue Jan 11 19:04:54 UTC 2011


Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

> 
> Now what this solar system needs is a mesh network of DTN
> routers.
> 
> A router in every orbit, a robot on every planet.


Yes, indeed.

Not only would that create useful infrastructure for exploiting the resources of the solar system, it would also provide the means for rapidly colonising it, once uploading is perfected, without competing with those who prefer to remain in meat.  Vastly easier, cheaper and faster to send a few gigabytes of information into space than a few kilos of meat.

This makes me wonder about the possibility of 'personality compression'.  

It occurred to me that there's no need to transmit all the information about your preferred body, for example, provided that standard body designs were available all over the place.  You could just encode your preferred body type (a catalogue index number, basically) plus some parameters to vary it as you wish.

Then I thought the same kind of method could probably be applied to the mind.  Most minds will have a lot in common, just as all life has a lot in common (we are very similar, genetically, to pineapples, for example), so perhaps, given a sufficiently established infrastructure, you could travel as a set of mind-parameters, to be applied to a template when you arrive.  It may be possible to compress a person down to megabytes, or even less, in this way.  

Every time a new mind-type was developed, a template for it would be distributed across all the servers in the solar system, and incorporated into a catalogue, ready for individuals who use that mind-type to use for quick, lightweight travel.  

Anyone with a unique mind-type who was unwilling to distribute its specifications would just have to put up with travelling as a much bigger file.

Ben Zaiboc


      




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