Dan Fabulich <daniel.fabulich@yale.edu> writes:
> Actually, I agree with Tipler in saying that this is no life at all. If
> the bottles have a finite amount of information in them (as seems
> reasonable), you run into Poincarre (sp?) Recurrence. If x is the entropy
> available in your bottle, (that is, the maximum number of different
> messages you can encode into the bottle,) then the number of times you can
> make a baby universe and keep on surviving may be unlimited, but your
> memory is short term... Eventually, you'll exhaust all of the possible
> messages which your bottle could send, and you'll create a new baby
> universe in which you live the exact same life all over again, thinking
> exactly the same thoughts. Taking the Extremely Long View, Tipler argues,
> this is akin to eternal stasis. (I agree.) A very Nietzschean end to us
> all.
But it is not unavoidable in the Linde scenario if the domains we find ourselves in grow ever larger (i.e. have a smaller cosmological constant) so that we can gather ever more matter to cause ever larger black holes and baby universes. That way the information can still grow and recurrence be avoided.
> My hope is that sometime in the next 10^50 - 10^100 years we'll figure out
> some way to CAUSE a Big Crunch, if one isn't destined already, and make
> sure the whole deal is asymmetric, as Tipler describes. It's the only way
> I know of in which infinite computing power could ever become possible.
My main problem with the Tipler scenario is the assumption that there is no quantization that limits the density of the universe. If spacetime is discrete, then we're out of luck.
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