4 ms·
This goes together nicely with the Aestivation Hypothesis (https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.03394 https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.03394). If a civilisation puts itself on
by OscarCunningham 8y ago
This goes together nicely with the Aestivation Hypothesis (https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.03394 https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.03394).
If a civilisation puts itself on hold for a trillion years, just waiting around doing nothing, then when it wakes up the universe is much colder and it can do computations 10^30 times more efficiently. If the civilization consists of minds running on computers then they've increased their own lifespans by the same factor.
- phkahler 8y agoYou might enjoy "The Last Question" by Issac Asimov: http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
- joejerryronnie 8y agoOne of my favorite quick reads! I probably re-read about once a year when some random train of thought leads me to it.
- elboru 8y agoHaving the possibility to ask this question to Google Now, Siri or Alexa and getting a real answer would be a cool Easter Egg.
- _mhr_ 8y agoWolframAlpha does this.
- enkid 8y agoIt's not like entropy will halt in that time. Worrying about efficiency of each individual calculation is a little ridiculous when you are wasting billions of years for the ambient temperature to drop.
- OscarCunningham 8y agoEven in a trillion years, a star won't burn up so much of its energy that less than 10^-30 of it remains. So the wait is worth it.
- novalis78 8y agoI'd argue the opposite: it only takes one non-hibernating species out to dominate and it will hunt down every sleeping civilizations data center and annihilate them - so that they remain the most dominant species. Such a "hibernation data center" must thus be the most well guarded / hidden place in the galaxy...
- OscarCunningham 8y agoThis is certainly a possibility. It's also possible that one civilisation will attain dominance and then aestivate. It's also possible that there are no other civilisations within range of us (if there are other aggressive civilisations nearby why haven't they have wiped us out already?).
- newsbinator 8y agoIt's possible that there's a physical principle by which you can aestivate without being accessibly annihilable. Some principle like "the only way to annihilate something in aestivating space is to annihilate the entire universe it's aestivating in." Guess we won't know for a while.
- mLuby 8y agoImagine if humans decided to hibernate en masse on Earth (maybe because of an ice age or fallout or something). We'd almost certainly set up alarms so if one hibernation center were damaged or destroyed another one nearby would thaw out some people (or machines) to go investigate. If the damn dirty apes really had become an existential threat to our sleepers, I'm sure we'd wake everyone up to reassert our planetary dominance before returning to a secure slumber. Same thing would make sense on larger scales.
- deleted 8y ago
- nabla9 8y agoThe background temperature of the universe now an trillion years from now is not significantly different. It's 2.73 Kelvins today. Even if it goes very close to zero, that's not a big difference.
- ben_w 8y agoIf you halve the temperature in kelvin, you double the number of calculations you can do.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]