From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Thu May 16 2002 - 00:36:13 MDT
On Thu, 16 May 2002, Damien Broderick wrote:
> Maybe not, if being surrounded continuously by a lot of very smart
> computronium working flat out gives the home SI, and its later progeny, an
> advantage over
>
> (a) a small SI outward bound at moderate sub-light velocity, awake and
> processing and trying to keep up to date via emailed reports from home, or
>
> (b) a tiny seed SI outward bound arbitrarily close to c, but therefore
> inactive and restricted to catch-up once it arrives and compiles itself out
> of local materials.
There may be a way to have your cake and eat it too.
*IF* (note its a big if), you can launch a seed AI on matter stream
(perhaps alternating days of matter and anti-matter) that
functions to contribute momentum as well as material to the ship
as it is harvested and this is then used in part to expand the on-board
computronium and the matter happens to be delivered as high-information
content patterns (think information stored at DNA densities) that can be
read-out into the expanded computronium as it is disassembled, then
I think you can travel and grow (both physically and intelligently
at the same time). So you could end up at the destination having
grown from a seed SI into a small SI. Of course, you would owe a
matter/energy/intelligence debt to the originating SI that would
presumably have to be repaid in some way.
Note that I think as spike has pointed out -- you don't ever want to
travel too close to c due to the damage the cosmic rays and interstellar
dust will cause the ship.
Robert
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