From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Wed Dec 08 1999 - 12:46:27 MST
On Wed, 8 Dec 1999, Kate Riley wrote:
> > I commented on having 10^16 of me...
>
> I'm confused. Why 10^16? (Feel free to reply to this off-list if it has
> already been discussed on-list)
No, I'm always number-dropping on the list...
If we assume 10^26 "operating" minds / 10^10 people (allowing for some
growth in human population before we have uploads), that gives you
10^16 "running" copies. Since memory capacity (particularly on
the really long photon loops) seems greater than "operating"
capacity (limited by the energy output of the sun unless star-lifting
is employed), I suspect you have some even greater number of backup
copies that are inactive. That allows you to easily tolerate those
bad-hair days when an unobserved nanoprobe comes screaming through your
MBrain cluster depositing a significant fraction of its kinetic energy
(at even low speeds like 0.1 c thats a lot of kinetic energy) in the
midst of your computronium.
Hmmmm... Perhaps thats yet another reason interstellar nanoprobe
colonization doesn't occur -- a shotgun blast of high velocity
nanoprobes through an MBrain makes quite a mess. It doesn't
really damage them, but when they have to restore 10^12 "running"
copies from the backup storage, it gets them *really* pissed.
They are going to want to know who sent out those nanoprobes without
looking where they were shooting.
>
> I imagine that you'd want to keep copies of yourself at various stages, so
> that if you made serious mistakes, you could reboot yourself to a previous
> "pristine" time, as well as keeping a copy (copies?) of yourself at the
> present time.
Yep. Gets dicey though in determining who gets to decide what
is a "mistake" that you should erase...
> Even so, 10^16 seems a tad excessive. Would these copies be
> dormant caches of data, or co-operating identities?
>
Could be "individuals" as we know them or a hive/borg-mind.
I suspect there are nested heirarchies of mind-units that have
different thought hold times (concentration times?) or
perhaps as Ander's suggests, different memory accuracies and
retention strengths.
Robert
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