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The question is, why do you assume that advanced civilization would maintain 10^18 animal bodies to carry around brains? That's ridiculously inefficient. It's a

The question is, why do you assume that advanced civilization would maintain 10^18 animal bodies to carry around brains? That's ridiculously inefficient. It's also unclear why you would expect an advanced civilization to be built on a large number of individuals either. That, too is derived from an animal impulse to procreate and maybe a reaction to mortality. Say that in the next thousand years we manage to move consciousness off body, and the experiences enabled by this make the greatest drug trips obsolete by comparison. Why would we choose to build space habitats for bodies when we could build space ships that use a fraction of the energy but allow us to explore the galaxy by slowing down the rate of experience.

cletus 7y ago
I don’t assume that. If however your goal is a digital existence then you still have energy as the limiting factor and the best way to maximize this is likely a Matrioshka Brain, which from far away is largely indistinguishable from a Dyson Swarm.
- Certhas 7y ago
  And why would energy be the limiting factor? Maybe the limiting factor will be accidental entanglement with the environment of your quantum computer, and you want to cool your system waaay down to avoid thermals interfering with your finely tuned computation engine. Having a hot sphere around a star seems like a terrible set up to do that. Maybe sitting out in a hydrogen cloud and running well controlled fusion would be a much better for that. I'm not saying one or the other is more or less likely, but the range of possibilities is vast and unimaginable. The idea of energy (in the sense you and I use it now) is not even 400 years old. Harnessing ever larger amounts of stored energy was the hallmark of the industrial revolution. Declaring it to be the fundamental law underlying civilization is like concluding that the earth is flat: You mistake the shape of our immediate environment (the recent past and short term future) for the structure of the overall thing. We are quite definitely headed in the next couple of hundred years for an end to exponential growth in energy consumption. Exponential growth near where we've been would lead us to cooking the earth in 300-400 years. By the time we're capable of doing solar system scale engineering we will have had millennia of 'culture' that exists within a constant energy envelope. What these entities will value, or want to do is beyond anyone's guess.

cletus 7y ago

I don’t assume that. If however your goal is a digital existence then you still have energy as the limiting factor and the best way to maximize this is likely a Matrioshka Brain, which from far away is largely indistinguishable from a Dyson Swarm.

Certhas 7y ago
And why would energy be the limiting factor? Maybe the limiting factor will be accidental entanglement with the environment of your quantum computer, and you want to cool your system waaay down to avoid thermals interfering with your finely tuned computation engine. Having a hot sphere around a star seems like a terrible set up to do that. Maybe sitting out in a hydrogen cloud and running well controlled fusion would be a much better for that. I'm not saying one or the other is more or less likely, but the range of possibilities is vast and unimaginable. The idea of energy (in the sense you and I use it now) is not even 400 years old. Harnessing ever larger amounts of stored energy was the hallmark of the industrial revolution. Declaring it to be the fundamental law underlying civilization is like concluding that the earth is flat: You mistake the shape of our immediate environment (the recent past and short term future) for the structure of the overall thing. We are quite definitely headed in the next couple of hundred years for an end to exponential growth in energy consumption. Exponential growth near where we've been would lead us to cooking the earth in 300-400 years. By the time we're capable of doing solar system scale engineering we will have had millennia of 'culture' that exists within a constant energy envelope. What these entities will value, or want to do is beyond anyone's guess.