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Why would computronium limit itself to a single planet or even a single solar system? There's plenty of matter that could be harnessed to perform ever more calc

Why would computronium limit itself to a single planet or even a single solar system? There's plenty of matter that could be harnessed to perform ever more calculations. If you estimate that life at our stage of development is relatively common, but notice the stars are silent, you should then conclude that humanity is doomed. Either we're doomed to destroy ourselves (like 100% of other life forms at our stage) or we're doomed to be stuck in one solar system. Note: I don't want to spend a bunch of time explaining my view on this, but I think that intelligent life is so rare that we're the only instance of it in our light cone.

derefr 16y ago
I basically agree with your conclusion in practice as a thinking human being—but I'm also a writer, and it's very hard to write speculative fiction when there's no FTL and our nearest neighbor might live in the next galaxy over—so I like to ask the angels-on-a-pinhead questions anyway :) So, a reasonable alternative solution: use the Anthropic argument. First, assume that there is intelligent life close to us. Then, realize that we still exist, and haven't been consumed by grey goo; and, according to our long-distance observations, all the planets around all the stars we've surveyed still exist too, in shapes that don't suggest intelligent redesign (even though "they" have had a few potential billion years to do so.) Given that, it's likely that whatever path civilizations tend to follow eventually preclude them from wanting to leave to go redesign the galaxy in their image. This might just be a problem of limited extra utility derived from expansion: if Moore's exponential curve does, in fact, turn into Moore's S-curve, then there's no point in sticking more Computronium onto the pile, because the lightspeed-delay in the optical relays could just get to be too long for the extra circuits to do any good (presuming everyone wants to live on a single "instance" of AwesomeUniverse2000, rather than sharding it.) Now, the number of additional assumptions in the conclusion can, by working back through Bayes' law, tell you how probable the assumption itself (that life exists close to us) is. I'm guessing it's a small, but not infinitesimal (compared to space) number.
- arethuza 16y ago
  "presuming everyone wants to live on a single "instance" of AwesomeUniverse2000" Looks like you have worked out their business model then - unless you pay you have to share it with others, go for the upgrade and you get to be selective.

derefr 16y ago

I basically agree with your conclusion in practice as a thinking human being—but I'm also a writer, and it's very hard to write speculative fiction when there's no FTL and our nearest neighbor might live in the next galaxy over—so I like to ask the angels-on-a-pinhead questions anyway :) So, a reasonable alternative solution: use the Anthropic argument. First, assume that there is intelligent life close to us. Then, realize that we still exist, and haven't been consumed by grey goo; and, according to our long-distance observations, all the planets around all the stars we've surveyed still exist too, in shapes that don't suggest intelligent redesign (even though "they" have had a few potential billion years to do so.) Given that, it's likely that whatever path civilizations tend to follow eventually preclude them from wanting to leave to go redesign the galaxy in their image. This might just be a problem of limited extra utility derived from expansion: if Moore's exponential curve does, in fact, turn into Moore's S-curve, then there's no point in sticking more Computronium onto the pile, because the lightspeed-delay in the optical relays could just get to be too long for the extra circuits to do any good (presuming everyone wants to live on a single "instance" of AwesomeUniverse2000, rather than sharding it.) Now, the number of additional assumptions in the conclusion can, by working back through Bayes' law, tell you how probable the assumption itself (that life exists close to us) is. I'm guessing it's a small, but not infinitesimal (compared to space) number.

arethuza 16y ago
"presuming everyone wants to live on a single "instance" of AwesomeUniverse2000" Looks like you have worked out their business model then - unless you pay you have to share it with others, go for the upgrade and you get to be selective.