From: Piotr Szaniawski (anborn@o2.pl)
Date: Fri Jan 05 2007 - 11:24:28 MST
Danila Medvedev wrote:
> The whole discussion is completely wrong for the following reasons
> (...) it is just stupid to discount future resource flows in the same
> way as we do today.
I would agree on that as nobody has mentioned bandwidth as a valuable
future resource yet. We have to remember we are limited by the speed of
light, which, obviously, affects computers and virtual beings too.
> From an economist viewpoint, there likely will not be any discounting
> whatsoever, since what matters is total subjective time (i.e. amount
> of calculations), which is unrelated to astronomical time and is
> related to resources only.
If no wormhole or equivalent technology allowing FTL data transmission
is possible, then that very subjective time will put lots of constraints
on interstallar travel. A 'space empire' spanning a light year would
have huge trouble maintaining contact with opposite sides of its
territory: imagine a situation where information the core sends would
reach the borders after half a year objective time and God knows how
much subjective time. To call it 'inconvenient' would be a bit of an
understatement, wouldn't it?
Thus, exploring a system 10 light years, or so, away would probably be
only an option in the case of using up all the available resources in
the mother system. That's, of course, not taking racial traits such as
curiousity into account.
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