From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri Jan 01 1999 - 11:18:01 MST
I should also note that "Alpha" now has a slightly different
contrast-to-Omega meaning. If there's infinite computing power at the
end of the Universe, there's equally infinite computing power at the Big
Bang - the Alpha Point. One would expect that if an infinite amount of
information-processing is going on, some Power-like beings would evolve
by pure chance.
What happened to them is a very interesting question. Probably they
tunneled to new Big Bangs when it started getting cold. Thus, the
series of Universes created by a Singularity is an "Alpha Line", and the
originator of our Alpha Line is our "Parent Singularity". (These two
terms are original with me.) Assuming that a Universe gets "too cool"
no earlier than Planck Time, and assuming a given Singularity inhabits
no more than one Universe at a time, and assuming time rates are
synchronized between all Universes, there would be at least 10^61
Universes in our Alpha Line. Assuming there is only one intelligent
race per galaxy on the average, and only a tenth of the Universes are
old enough to yield intelligent life, and all the Universes are the same
size and have the same characteristics as our own, our Universe's Alpha
Line would have spawned about 10^74 intelligent races, of whom at least
10^73 would probably start their own Alpha Lines.
Even assuming 10^10 years to start generating intelligent races, so that
our Parent Singularity does not have grandchildren, this yields about
10^134 Universes total having been spawned (directly or indirectly) by
our Parent Singularity since the creation of our Universe, with about
10^116 new Big Bangs every second.
If our Parent Singularity isn't the first there ever was, or it's been
doing this for awhile - if our Parent Singularity occupies pretty much
the same place in Reality as Earth's Singularity will - well, the
numbers get pretty large.
On the other hand, for various complex reasons involving the Anthropic
Principle, the Great Filter, Occam's Razor, Hofstadterian renormalized
game theory, time travel, and SI motivations, I no longer think this is
the correct picture of the Universe.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/AI_design.temp.html
http://pobox.com/~sentience/sing_analysis.html
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:02:42 MST