[ExI] Fermi Paradox and Transcension

Ben Zaiboc bbenzai at yahoo.com
Fri Sep 14 13:37:01 UTC 2012


Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:

> Ok, I had the time today to read the whole article. It is very
> interesting, but I can't imagine that ALL life would head down into
> nano-space... There is the niche down, and ALL THE ZILLIONS of niches
> upwards.

Actually, I reckon that's the wrong way round.  There are many, many (googols) more niches in the downward direction than in the upward.  At least, there is a lot more 'room' (in the sense that there are more orders of magnitude of length scales in the downward direction, until you get to the planck length, than there are upwards until you get to the size of the universe) at the bottom.

If you then consider that there is only one universe (that we can access, that we know of), but there are many many many (googolplexes?) physical locations at a sub-micron, sub-nanometre, sub-femtometre, etc., scale.

If you /then/ consider that it's quite possibly easier to access these tiny realms than the gigantic ones (not least because of the lightspeed limit), it seems very likely that existence on a tiny scale would be a very attractive option for advanced civilisations.  If you shrink right down, the amount of space, time and energy available to you is staggeringly stupendous.  It's pretty much the opposite of Spike's MBrain scenario, with the immortals who only have a few subjective decades left.  The 'tinies', in contrast, would have subjective quadrilennia.


Ben Zaiboc




More information about the extropy-chat mailing list