From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri Jul 27 2001 - 02:33:51 MDT
Zero Powers wrote:
>
> It's no secret I'm no scientist, but I'm fairly convinced that the universe
> as we know it (call it the "usable" universe) will one day play out. I
> don't have a problem with that. For me "immortality" doesn't necessarily
> mean living unto infinity. I have a hunch that after a few billion years my
> curiosity will be pretty much satiated, and I'll be ready to "give up the
> ghost." So I guess I'm not really reaching for forever. But a couple
> thousand eons or so would sure be nice.
At a hundred-million-to-one subjective speedup, a billion years will
occupy approximately five minutes. I don't know if we'll all want to
flash into that kind of accelerated time the instant the Singularity
wavefront hits - I guess it depends on whether the physical time is
valuable - but I do expect that we'll be running at that kind of speed
eventually...
Also, any human mind would disintegrate long, long before you'd even begun
to get started on a billion years. A couple of millennia and I suspect
you will, of necessity, have changed to the point where you can see time
stretching into infinity.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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