From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sat Mar 02 2002 - 10:56:22 MST
On Fri, 1 Mar 2002, Mike Lorrey wrote:
> That being said, one error that Robert Bradbury's most extreme "Pave the
> Universe" scenarios make is to fail to account for the fact that each
> greater generation under Moore's Law not only enables greater power,
> processing, information, etc, but it allows the resource utilization
> efficiency to rise as technology improves [snip]
I'm aware of this Mike. For example, the Matrioshka Brain design is
based on Eric's 1 cm^3 nanocomputers. Those use reversible logic
precisely to minimize the heat produced by current non-reversible
designs. So if the thought-equivalent capacity of a 1 cm^3 nanocomputer
is equal to 10^5-10^6 human brains, then then you ought to get 1 brain
equivalent in 10^-5 to 10^-6 that volume. Interestingly enough it
still requires 1-10W of power.
You can probably go even further through the use of special-purpose
hardware if you know the precise goals and requirements of the
computation you want to do (as the Gravity Pipeline/GRAPE computers do).
One of my eyebrows does go up when one starts to invoke subatomic
engineering or worse yet FTL travel, so I do assume at some point
there are limits that will be reached -- and at those points economics
(or optimal resource allocation) rears its head again.
I do generally assume that if the barriers are low to expanding ones
"mind", one will do so. So it seems likely that one would grow to
occupy the entire 1 cm^3. However there one may stop. If even 100
billion of us do that, there is still a lot of energy and matter left
around in the solar system. Whether we will decide to use it seems
difficult to determine. (Yes, I know that if "anyone" decides to
use it it will get used -- but that will not be the case if there
is some hypermoral or hyperethical reason that all posthumans
recognize as reason to not utilize it.) As you point out there
are reasons one might want to become stealth aliens within a
non-posthuman reality.
> Star Trek is BUNK.
True but on average over the years, not particularly bad BUNK.
Given that it looks like MGM is screwing up sufficiently to
bury Stargate, it looks like Andromeda may be the best thing
available. I mean point source singularity weapons and
using nanotech to construct bodies for AIs -- thats pretty
cool stuff.
Robert
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