From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Mon Jun 10 2002 - 12:54:01 MDT
Lee Corbin writes, regarding Wei Dai's proposal to corral as much matter
and energy as possible locally before it disappears over the event
horizon:
> We have to go lasso that matter only if by "our civilization"
> you mean something that does not apply to our colonies. Why
> are you not content with our merely sending our programs
> (equals our selves) out to the distant matter to colonize it?
> It still seems to me that you are wasting absolutely huge
> resources.
If you have twenty bits' worth of matter, and it gets separated into
two ten-bit heaps, then each one can only go through 2^10 or 1024
different states. So there are a total of 2048 states being explored.
Whereas if you bring the 20 bits together, you can go through 2^20 states
or over 1 million. Generally collecting matter together will allow for
exponentially more states to be explored than allowing it to be separated.
Hal
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