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The problem with interstellar travel in general is that it is so expensive, in terms of energy usage. I speculate that even for Kardashev type 3 civilizations,
by ansible 10y ago
The problem with interstellar travel in general is that it is so expensive, in terms of energy usage. I speculate that even for Kardashev type 3 civilizations, shipping matter around will be impractical.
The future is software. For entities that live purely as software, and aren't so picky as us meatbags are about continuity of consciousness, "traveling" from place to place by sending data is the most practical method.
All that is needed is that the destination be prepared appropriately. So that means firing off a kilogram (or so) of self-replicating molecular nanotechnology which can build the infrastructure you'd want to live in (compute on) at the destination.
I haven't seen any indications yet with physics that something more practical is in the offing. There's still a lot we don't understand (GUFT, dark matter / energy), but there doesn't seem to be much hope for life as we know it to flit around the universe faster than light.
- sandworm101 10y agoThere is plenty of hope, even with standard physics. "Faster than light" has lots of wiggle room. Sleeper ships are certainly an option. So too are near-lighspeed ships that, from the perspective of those on board, could get between stars in reasonable times. Even then, what is "reasonable" is a function of human lifespan, a number that could easily grow exponentially without breaking any physical laws.
- drhayes9 10y agoI just recently learned the term "Bracewell probe" for this kind of device: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracewell_probe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracewell_probe Instead of sending radio signals or etching words or pictures in matter, you send a software agent that is reasonably intelligent in a hardware device into space seeking ETIs. The intelligence aboard the probe can have a conversation with the ETIs and communicate back to home the results.
- euyyn 10y agoWe can't even make bots have a reasonable conversation with us in our own language :)
- fuhrysteve 10y ago15 yrs ago we were impressed that an apple computer could turn text into audio. Imagine giving us another 10,000yrs (blink of an eye to a blink of an eye in terms of the scale of the galaxy) before deciding how much we're really capable of there
- TeMPOraL 10y agoOr you can just send a freezed brain of a volunteer, hoping that alien civilization will be advanced enough to give it means of communication. (Yes, there was a book with exactly such a plot point.)
- avar 10y agoThere's no need to do faster than light, or even all that fast. The diameter of the Milky Way is at most 200k light years, with technology we could develop today we could populate the entirety of it with generation ships in the span of less than 100 million years, which isn't all that big in the scale of the universe.
- mustacheemperor 10y agoI read this, and about ideas like the Von Neumann probe[0] all the time, and it really fills my head with concrete to try and reconcile those ideas with the fact that we haven't found any signs of extraterrestrial life yet. If it's so feasible in a "short" time relative to the age of the universe, where are all the probes? [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#Von_Neumann_probes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#Vo...
- jrv 10y agoIf you read about this all the time, then you're probably also familiar with the Fermi Paradox and the possible explanations for it. 2016 may have given us a clue as to which one of them seems most likely.
- fuhrysteve 10y agoPlease elaborate? What did we learn in 2016?
- wishinghand 10y agoThere is a star we've observed between 1400 and 1500 light years away with odd, non-cyclical light fluctuations. It may be indicative of a megastructure being built or falling apart around a star.
- mustacheemperor 10y agoUnfortunately, I think a pulsar type situation is much more likely. There's many things that could potentially cause those fluctuations, especially considering our relative lack of knowledge about extrasolar space. In 1967 when we started detecting regular, precise bursts of EMR from deep space it looked a lot like aliens.
- jeff_petersen 10y ago> The future is software. For entities that live purely as software, and aren't so picky as us meatbags are about continuity of consciousness, "traveling" from place to place by sending data is the most practical method. Sure, but for entities that live purely as software the concept of "being" in a "place" is probably completely unimportant. There's no reason to assume that software entities would have any reason to want to interact with meatspace, especially when they can conjure every possible world (and every impossible world) out of nothing.
- ansible 10y agoWell, at some point the local system will run out of unclaimed matter and energy (Dyson swarm consuming all output of the local sun, built using all available matter in the system). So if you want to expand, you will have to leave. There would also be some astronomical phenomenon that aren't easily reproducible locally, so it might be useful to travel to them instead.
- jeff_petersen 10y agoThat is a fair point. Exploration for resources (including non-consumables like hard-to-reproduce phenomena) certainly would still make sense
- TeMPOraL 10y agoI wonder if such software civilization couldn't automate the exploration process away, so that the beings themselves don't care about it day to day. From the outside perspective, the whole thing will look like a weird blob of something, expanding in the direction of usable resources at speeds close to c. And beings inside may not even be aware they're consuming some "real world" around them. I guess I've just sketched a sci-fi story. I wonder if someone wrote it already.
- krallja 10y ago_Accelerando_ by Charles Stross: one of the stories is about a civilization that grew so much in complexity that it couldn't afford the physical cost to leave its system, but its star was being consumed so it couldn't afford to stay either.
- metaprinter 10y ago"...so that means firing off a kilogram (or so) of self-replicating molecular nanotechnology which can build the infrastructure you'd want to live in (compute on) at the destination." i just got a chill thinking we are living that exact thing in this simulation O_O
- ansible 10y agoNone of that was original, but I read the very best (Vinge, Drexler, Stross, Schroeder).
- rayalez 10y agoMy best argument against living in simulation is similar to the argument against the intlelligent design or solipsism - if you could simulate anytning, why would you simulate this? So many things in universe make sense if they have happened by accident, but make no sense to include in an intentionally created simulation. If I would have the power and intelligence to create/simulate a universe, there's no way in hell I would make the world to work like this.
- wernercd 10y ago"if you could simulate anything, why would you simulate this?" I want to agree... but then... I look at Youtube and wonder why a large portion of that gets made. With the computing power we have NOW... look at all the stupid stuff that gets made. Imagine 50 years from now.
- rayalez 10y agoWell, making a silly youtube video for no reason is not the same as making a world where millions of sentient beings suffer/die for no reason.
- motoboi 10y agoHave you saw those YouTube videos about genetic algorithms teaching a thing to walk of fly? You may think: this thing do not suffer or feel any pain in repeating millions of times the same moviments just to fall on the floor less and less, no problem at all. Advance a thousand years in the future and someone may happily simulate the world where you live among trillions of another things trying to evolve.
- gozur88 10y agoTo a sufficiently advanced civilization matter and energy are just flip sides of the same coin. Why make the distinction?