From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sun Aug 12 2001 - 08:13:52 MDT
This is mostly for Spike and Eric.
Spike, to get an idea of the size of things I'm envisioning
reread my message re: "NASA Ends Project Intended to Replace
Space Shuttle" from March 11th. See:
http://www.lucifer.com/exi-lists/extropians.2Q01/0426.html
or
http://forum.javien.com/future/XMLmessage.php?id=id::OUxbTWAK-UTsD-OC1p-FyNT-SHFpDTxwTHRM
(you gotta love those Javien URLs....)
That should let you do estimates on the size of the engineering
team required. Working at a sub-normal engineering scale
might make it tougher however.
[I'll note as an interesting aside to the list how its very
strange to me that a message posted in March ended up in
the 2nd Quarter of the archives.... Hmmmm...]
Now, responding to Eric...
> I think we talk a lot but hardly see any action.
Actually there is quite a bit of work going on in microrobotics
at JPL, Los Alamos, MIT and other places I'm sure. As far as
"coordination" goes, what you really need is something like
"robo-wars" in the super-light-weight class of < 0.1 kg or so.
That would push the technology development along the scales I'm
thinking about.
Regarding the MEMS probe URL you posted, that isn't exactly what
I had in mind. Yes, that type of thing will be great for
monitoring neural networks, but I was speaking of Micro-Electrical
Mechanical Systems in a more general sense of simply the
"MEMS" size scale which is typically 1-100 microns. You
need to build things at those scales to get the probe weight
down to 1-10 Kg as I had proposed in the URL I cite above.
For example "Microrobots for Micrometer-Size Objects in
Aqueous Media: Potential Tools for Single-Cell Manipulation"
Jager, E. W. H. et al, Science 288:2335-2338 (30 Jun 2000).
> we will only find it ethically appropriate [snip] to allow human
> beings to ascend to the transhuman level on their own free will.
> We can do this with the colony approach - far-away and independent,
> but accessible
Of course, but you are leaving out what happens when mere humans
are no longer at the top of the evolutionary heap in "known space".
The capacity of the solar system allows *each* human to up-evolve
by a factor of at least a *thousand trillion* times (10^15).
So now you have a very different picture of "reality". Say those
people who are still "humans" or anywhere in the sub-overlord
stage want to go colonize alpha centauri. You have to ask
permission from the overlords and receive some kind of grant
of ownership of the property. Why? Because with your limited
resources, you have no guarantee that by the time you get there,
the overlords might not have changed their mind, sent out a
faster ship and have colonized the system with their agents
before you arrive. Are you going to risk going there only to
discover there isn't anything left to colonize? The overlords
may have no interest in colonizing the distant system when you
ask them (because of the diminished value of information at
a distance I mentioned) but they may also have no reason to
grant you rights to the system in case they decide at some
future point they might want it. I think advanced civilizations
*may* expand but they do so only very slowly when close encounters
between solar systems occur. Then you get a bacterial-like division
of the civilization across both solar systems.
I doubt overlords are going to let humans or sub-superintelligences
going to run around colonizing things that they may want to
occupy when the time is right in the future. The situation is
probably somewhat like the situation on the Earth today where
everything is effectively "occupied".
> To assume that we cannot break the speed of light barrier into
> the long term future would not sound wise.
To have a discussion where one can modify the laws of physics
at will doesn't sound wise either. As Damien pointed out in
The Spike, regarding my ideas about the Matrioshka Brain:
"He (me) is remarkably conservative in his projections, refusing
(like Frank Tipler) to permit wild or exotic physics unknown
to today's science. That might turn out to be an error, but
it is a methodological choice a scientist is almost obliged
to adopt; otherwise *anything* becomes possible and no
proposal is interesting or testable."
This appears in list discussions as my infamous "No Magic Physics" (NMP)
comments. I'm fond of a quote that appears in one of the SETI conference
proceedings when someone in the audience commented to a speaker --
"Yes, but if you give the theoreticians long enough they
can explain *anything*".
The speaker's response was to agree. I prefer to do my speculations
on dry land rather than in the swamp.
> It would seem unwise to trust any and all cosmic visitors with
> bona fide intentions, for who knows if they have any motives
> such as reproduction of themselves at all costs.
When all the brown dwarfs in the galaxy are gone and the easy
pickings from the matter & energy tree seem to be getting scarce
is when I think this principle *may* come into play. For a
fully developed solar system to become concerned, what has to
be approaching has to have relatively greater mass/energy
resources at its disposal so it seems unlikely that it is
going to appear on your galactic doorstep "unannounced"
giving you lots of time to prepare a reception.
I'll try to spend some time later looking up references for
"berserker". The Javien search option
(http://forum.javien.com/future/search.php)
turns up some recent hits and the Extropian archive
(http://www.lucifer.com/exi-lists/)
gets a few more. But they both seem to be missing the major
discussions on this (lord... 20 years after the invention
of the PC we *still* can't get things indexed properly...).
Robert
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