[ExI] Where is the new space odyssey epic?

[spike at rainier66.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of
BillK via extropy-chat
Sent: Tuesday, 29 November, 2022 2:23 PM
...
>
> Space shmace: there is more than enough of everything down here and lower,
if we somehow spawn centiproles, in which we live on the centimeter scale
rather than the meter scale.  Most life on this planet does exist at that
scale and smaller.  We are way up here at the big end of the spectrum.
Think about it.
>
> spike
> _______________________________________________


>...Hmmmn.   There are problems with humans of centimeter size. Did you
ever see the 1957 film 'The incredible Shrinking Man' or read the novel by
Richard Matheson? The hero ended up fighting spiders...

Sure but of course that assumes that the shrinking man scales down in such a
way that he is still recognizable as a human.  This expediency has its
advantages in the film medium of course, for the costume people and script
writers have no need to imagine what a scaled-down human would look like.  

Engineers however recognize the square/cube nature of scaling.  If we were
to take a meter-scale organism and somehow scale it linearly... its strength
would be so far in excess of the requirements that we would completely
understand why the flea can jump the way it does.  The strength of a muscle
scales as the square of the linear dimension for instance, but masses scale
as the cube and the moment of inertia of the limbs scale as the fifth power.
This explains why the best gymnasts are little people and the best ones are
women.

Fortunately... we wouldn't need to fight spiders, for we have... Windex!

>...and then continuing to shrink to atom size...

Ja, clearly there is a limit to this whole notion and we already see it in
microprocessors.  Those getting as close to as small as practical.  Sad but
true: when the youngest amoungest gets to be older than the most ancient
present... microprocessors will likely be similar to how they are now.

The above notion of course is irrelevant if some astonishing computational
paradigm takes place.  So my message to the youngest amoungest: get working
on that please.


>...The world doesn't reduce as well, so, for one example, bad weather would
destroy tiny humans and tiny cities...

Not necessarily BillK.  Do free your mind of the notion of a scaled-down
human form.  That whole absurd notion was a mere Hollywood convenience.
Plenty of stuff does live on the centimeter scale, and the beasts are
undeterred by weather, even the severe variety.  

Those who live in BillW's neighborhood have likely at some point witnessed
rafts of fire ants in a severe thunderstorm flood.  They deal with it.

>... And the cat would eat us.  :)

The cat won't eat what I envision as the scaled down human: cats prefer
carbon-based biomass.

>...Speeding up intelligence means moving intelligence into computing
devices, and probably in space...

Possibly, but again not necessarily.  Another paradigm from which I do urge
you to break free: that scaled down intelligence is sped up from ours.
Although we normally think of it that way, it wouldn't need to be.

>...But the other effect of speeding up intelligence is that it makes long
space journeys many times longer in time...

Agreed.  So... make sentient beings slower than we are, to shorten the
perceived trip and conserve energy.  Evolution has already discovered this
solution in one form or another: the giant tortoise and the sloth for
instance.

>...As Mike says we would have to take our whole civilisation along with us
on the journey....BillK

_______________________________________________

Ja, not just civilization, the sun and the planets must go too, BillK, the
whole shootin match.  I claim to be the inventor of the thrust-producing
variant of Robert Bradbury's Matrioshka Brain.  It's in the ExI archives.
Refresher course available on request.

spike