From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Dec 28 2000 - 10:27:46 MST
Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de wrote:
>
> Anders Sandberg wrote:
>
> > The issue is what to do with all those Taj Mahal and French castles
> > littering the countryside...
>
> I recommend the Tuatha de Danann model: they do it with glamour.
> Rather resource-efficient. Of course, there is little point in
> crowds of statuesque nano-augmented spell-stricken people
> littering the countryside either, it would seem much better to
> build The Land of the Young from a carbonaceous chondrite rock.
>
> Also notice the timebase difference between fairy and mortal
> time, this indicates spatially widely separated node cluster
> which is slowed down by relativistic signalling, or a more space
> but less time efficient coding (interlaced execution).
On a sufficiently large timescale, all matter *except* Cold Iron glows
with the steady, radioactive light of atomic elements spontaneously fusing
or fizzing their way towards the minimum-energy point of Cold Iron. (Due
to quantum tunnelling... hence the very large timescale.) Thus, the
natural assumption is that the Faerie live on a much longer timescale,
such that everything in the Universe is alive, shining with its own light,
except for Cold Iron.
Eventually, all things, even the stars, decay to Cold Iron, and there
things remain... a truth so eternal that it echoes back to form part of
our ancestral memory, as is shown in our poetry: for example, Kipling's
"Iron, cold iron, is master of them all!"
Of course, on an *extremely* long timescale, the Cold Iron stars sometimes
tunnel through to neutron stars in extremely large explosions, and on even
longer timescales, neutron stars tunnel through to black holes and then
evaporate in Hawking radiation. But perhaps that timescale is too long
even for the Fay.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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