From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Dec 29 1998 - 05:57:37 MST
"Joe E. Dees" <jdees0@students.uwf.edu> writes:
> You'd better hope for an eternally expanding universe, even with the
> attendant dangers of a Pynchonian Callistoish entropic demise (I
> prefer the frenetic complex energy of the lease-breaking party,
> myself). The mail alternative, an eternally cycling Big Bang / Big
> Crunch cosmic heartbeat (punctuated by the eternal recurrence of
> the Mother of all Singularities) does not permit pattern, the sine qua
> non of consciousness, to pass its superhot/supergravity Stygian
> microuniformchaosoup gate. Joe
Nice prose. But as far as I know the eternal cycle model has no
support other than aesthetics; it is unclear if inflation or weird
quantumgravity effects can reverse the contraction. The problem is
also that you cannot avoid an Eternal Return in the cycling model
since the amount of information that can be brought through the
near-singularities is finite.
However, we can at our present technological level not do much about
the expansion/contraction of spacetime (just you wait until I and
Mitch get our hands on the Higgs-fields, topology change and
inflation! :-), so we can just analyse possible strategies in the
different scenarios. Which is an useful exercise to study the limits
to intelligent systems anyway.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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