From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Sep 07 2002 - 21:54:55 MDT
Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> The Hubble recently took a picture of Hoag's Object:
>
> http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/2002/21/
>
> Its pretty unusual to see young massive stars on the outskirts of a
> galaxy 120,000 years across and most of the rest of the stars
> concentrated in the center.
Don't you think you're being kind of anthropomorphic? It may be fun for
us to imagine moving stars around rather than (a) leaving them alone as
irrelevant or (b) transforming them so that they are no longer stars, but
it seems unlikely that a posthuman society would coincidentally happen to
land so squarely between those two extremes. An engineered galaxy, if
posthumans bother engineering galaxies, is one that (a) has been
transformed into a very dense clump of computronium and (b) has sent out
further probes as soon as the first replicators arrived, which (friendly
or unfriendly) would reach our planet before the light from the final
fully transformed galaxy arrived.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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