[ExI] jbrains again, was: RE: Early Archives... Re: Yudkowsky ‘Humanity’s remaining timeline? It looks more like five years than 50’

[Keith Henson]

On Fri, Feb 23, 2024 at 10:50 AM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> Which raises an interesting question:
>
> If a civilization was mass-drivering metal from one star system to another in astronomical quantities, at what range - if any - would we be able to detect it, and what would it look like?

I seriously doubt this would ever happen given the amount of metal
around any star.

Keith

> On Thu, Feb 22, 2024 at 11:10 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: [ExI] jbrains again, was: RE: Early Archives...
>>
>> >...This makes no sense in engineering terms...
>>
>> It makes no sense in our human terms because of our overall limiting factor: time.  We have all the material and energy we need, but our time is limited to less than a century.  Think of how your outlook would be different if you had all the time you need but are extremely limited by material.
>>
>> >...What are you trying to maximize/minimise?
>>
>> Computation per unit metal.
>>
>> >...You would be trying to get as much computation out of an object as you could while minimizing the distance between computational nodes...
>>
>> If a JBrain is metal-limited but not at all time limited, then it can spread out enough to solve the overheating problem.  Most of the energy from the star gets away, but there is plenty of it there for the amount of data we can store, given our severe metal constraints.
>>
>> >...As far as uploading goes, I don't think it will become popular until it is bidirectional.  And as far as humans merging, that's way too much like death.
>>
>> Keith
>>
>>
>> Agree with all of this Keith, but you and I think speed, like the severely time-constrained meat creatures we are.  Think instead of a colony of JBrains with billions of years left on their star's main sequence before the helium fusion phase even starts, but with a severe constraint of its own: only 10^18 tons of metal available any time in the foreseeable ten billion years.  Your outlook will change, if you think of life from that perspective.
>>
>> spike
>>
>>
>>
>>
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