From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Thu Sep 14 2000 - 02:28:24 MDT
Samantha Atkins writes:
> I am not sure what your objection is exactly. With nanotech on the
You must be relatively new here, we've been talking about this for
quite a while. Alas, our archives are notoriously broken. Somebody,
somewhen has to make a few copies of a cleanly hypermailed and
full-text indexed archive (I hope the original mailboxes do still
exist). It would be a pity if all of this has eventually to go to the
big bit bucket in the sky.
> horizon we will most likely be in abundance mode on earth for most
> physical goods within the next 4-5 decades. All things are relative.
Ok, consider a being processing information at a time scale of
10^3..10^6 times faster than you. It can be (much) smarter or (much)
dumber than a human. At least originally it has been probably created
with a clean hardware/software separation (it might or might not keep
it, and I don't know what will happen if it won't). The thing is a bit
pattern which becomes a being in the right context. (In analogy to the
wet DNA world, it can grow from a much smaller and simpler
nucleus). The bit pattern is mobile, and, depending on complexity, can
be copied to a new substrate on ~ms..~s time scale. There is
competition for resources, we're in Darwinian regime. Clearly there is
a propagation bottleneck: the speed with which you can restructure the
matter (whether on a patch of land or a space region filled with
metabolizable debris or a large planetary body with a minable surface)
is very small in comparison to the actual copy burst.
This is bottleneck one: you must restructure the environment first,
before you can expand.
Now if you do the math, you'll find that despite the subjective
glacial slowness of expansion, on human time scale you can overgrow
Earth surface in days to weeks -- using existing organic material and
(possibly extraterrestrially boosted) insolation for energy. Earth
surface is limited in size, and right now we don't know any gentle
ways to dismantle it in a short time frame to turn trapped volume into
lots of new surface, but our successors in their search for new
lebensraum certainly will. Meanwhile, we'll turn to space. Now there
is a lot of kinetically accessible mass in Kuiper, Oort, the asteroid
belt bodies and the little airless rocks like the Moon and
Mercury. And one certainly can ablate the atmosphere of Mars, or
simply ignore it, as it is relatively thin. Gas giants will be hard,
but they'll be probably considered fuel, anyway.
The end of this little narrative is that on a time frame much less
than geological, every loose bit of useful material in the solar
system will eventually serve its purpose, being part of some critter
in the local food chain, (or encoding some critter in the local food
chain, though munching crunchy circuits will probably always make
sense).
This is bottleneck two: there is only that much atoms and energy
entropy gradient in a given solar system.
As interstellar travel is expensive (even encoded as photons, or
relativistic little matter packet streams), most critters (and people
and gods) have to stay here, and prey on each other or figure out some
less gory arrangement. Gods will have a lot more to say than
phytoplancton or people, but they're far from being omnipotent, even
if we knew what their motivation would be (we don't).
This is bottleneck three: travel is expensive, and potential
production rate of beings in a given volume far exceeds how many of
them could leave the given volume through it's surface, assuming no
unknown physics.
> Did you think I was talking about some free-floating absolute or
> something?
Of course. Why bothering with trivia ;)
> > Non-interference? Jeez, a yet another believer in the tooth
> > fairy. Have you ever seen an ecology go into non-interference mode?
> >
> Not in the least what I am talking about. Please attempt to read a bit
> more carefully and please keep gratuitous insults to yourself. I am
I did read what you wrote, and sorry if my little yelps of
exasperation offended you.
> talking about human beings and their proclivities to attempt to run each
> other's lifes not about ecology in general or any other broader context.
You seem to think that human beings, even transformed and radiated
human beings are something standing apart, not part of the big merry
olde rat race. If beings make imperfect copies of itself in a limited
resource (see above) context, you form an co-evolutionary ecology,
whether you want it, or not. The competition is always there
(intraspecies aggression can become uglier than interspecies), and the
form it takes depends on how smart the critters are. Since after the
radiation you'll be getting the full spectrum of complexity, they'll
be certainly enough mayhem left to make you puke.
The big hedonistic engineer sysop in the sky idea is certainly
touching, but, how to put it politely, based on a rather selective
perception of reality. Do not see it happen, and implementing the
hedonistic imperative does seem to clash with a few gears and cogs of
how sustainably stable systems work in the real world.
> > There are always good reasons to keep secrets.
>
> The questions are of what kinds, how much and for what reasons.
If I know a lot of things about you, I can predict what you're going
to do next, and use that to my advantage. Hence, it is always a good
idea to hold crucial information back, cooperation, or no.
> Knowledge and information tends to grow faster when the information is
> shared or at least relatively open. At least in areas where information
I don't really buy the "universe strives to maximize the amount of
information" jingle. There might be some larger scale pattern working
that way, but so far I see no evidence for it. If anybody knows a few
papers on laws that govern ecologies as systems processing information
(no linear log plots seem to be lurking there), please drop me a few
pointers.
> is built upon like in software, sciences, technological process and so
> on. There is an argument possible there that the speed of our growth is
> proportional to the degree the information flows relatively freely and
> to the degree of freedom the recipients have to utilize it.
You see a very brief snapshot, choose from it rather selectively, and
extrapolate it quite boldly. 1% of your genome are incorporated
(partly or fully functional dormant) retroviruses. There are more
bacteria on your body than it has cells, and the biodiversity in a
typical suburbian or city neighbourhood is but a tiny fraction of what
would have been normally found there.
Of course this is again a infinitesimally brief snapshot, so I won't
try to make any extrapolations on that, attempting to assess the
information content of, say, Britney Spears vs. an annelid. The trend
will probably still go up, and overcompensate for the current hole.
> > Paradise will never be, period.
>
> Exactly why do you say that? I will certainly not simply take your word
> for it. Relative paradise certainly will be. There is a question of
Paradise seems intrinsically absolute, and even relative paradise must
be necessarily small. Being John Malkovich is probably more fun than
being R. rattus in a rice paddy somewhere, but even he doesn't live in
perpetual bliss.
> degree. Do you think we are in endless competition mode regardless of
> what technologies and changes in ourselves and our environment we make?
Of course. It's the competion that ultimatively drives us to a higher
fitness. Without co-evolution, we would still be ursoup merrily
lapping the beaches of a lifeless planet. I don't know whether it
would have sucked more, ursoup doesn't feel much.
> If so, then what gives you your certainty?
1) Imperfect 2) replication in face of 3) limited resources. Harsh,
but inventive.
> - samantha
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