"Robert J. Bradbury" <bradbury@www.aeiveos.com> writes:
> I think we are back to my question of a month+ ago that
> may have gotten lost in the M-brain discussions:
>
> Do "ultrahumanists" have to confront and eliminate one of the
> two "prime directives" -- self-preservation & reproduction?
Not necessarily, they just need to fine-tune them a bit. If you reproduce when there are enough resources to do so, then it works well. Each entity has a certain amount of resources, which may increase through good investments (like in nanotech "real estate" conversion of planets into computronium), and may chose to copy itself and divide these resources between the offspring - prolific reproducers will soon end up with little resources, rare reproduction means more resources for the offspring (it is the usual r- and K-strategies from biology). In the long run the population would grow as the cube of time rather than exponentially in an expanding technosphere.
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