From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Oct 20 1999 - 03:02:33 MDT
Spudboy100@aol.com writes:
> In a message dated 10/19/1999 11:13:53 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
> rhanson@gmu.edu writes:
>
> > The SciAm article also says that Steven Frautschi of Caltech
> > in 82 explored the possibility of scavenging mass to feed a
> > black hole in an expanding universe. But neither the article
> > nor the preprint cite any such paper.
>
> I have read a work called 5 Ages of the Universe, by a couple of
> astrophysicists from University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, who might dispute
> with Professor Frautschi on the continuence of computation and life over
> Petaplexes of years. The there's people like Tipler at Tulane, or Max
> Tegmark, now at Penn State, who provide their own solutions to extinction.
The problem of shrinking horizons posed in the Krass and Starkman
paper (incidentally, our Nick Bostrom has written a paper with
Circkovic on the problem too, gr-qc/9906042) is not dealt with by
Tiper or (to my knowledge) Tegmark. If the expansion of the universe
is accelerating (as current data seems to suggest), then horizons will
creep inwards and limit the mass-volume intelligence can use,
eventually squeezing it out altogther.
What is Tegmark's solution to extinction? I thought he was more
involved in the "everything" theory, which of course implies that in
*some* universes, if it is possible at all, intelligent life will
never be extinct.
> We don't know enough about the cosmos to make such pronuncements, as the big
> wheels in the 19th century did in their pridefulness.
This is a dangerous meme, that we know too little to dare say anything
about the remote future. Sure, these theoretical arguments are
currently fairly weak, but they are based on known physics or not too
unlikely possibilities. They will have to be revised over time, there
is nothing wrong with that. Keeping silent while waiting for certainty
is a recipe for catatonia - after all, we can't be 100% certain the
sun will rise tomorrow.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:05:33 MST