4 ms·
The real long–term plan is to live in orbit of a black hole, the larger the better. You can use the Penrose process to extract energy from one for very long tim
by db48x 5y ago
The real long–term plan is to live in orbit of a black hole, the larger the better. You can use the Penrose process to extract energy from one for very long time. Forget about a few paltry trillions of years, a supermassive black hole can last longer than 10¹⁰⁰ years. That’s 10⁹¹ trillion years.
- simonh 5y agoThanks, I’d not come across that process before. You need a reaction mass reserve that won’t run out in that amount of time though. That’s a lot of reaction mass if you have any significant energy needs.
- mlatu 5y agolot's of burnt out stars flinging around
- rbanffy 5y agoAlso lots of smaller black holes as well… At the very end we may use proton decay to power virtual world running on computers composed of folded spacetime. Subjective time within the simulation can continue no matter how slow the computation looks from the outside.
- tablespoon 5y ago> At the very end we may use proton decay to power virtual world running on computers composed of folded spacetime. Subjective time within the simulation can continue no matter how slow the computation looks from the outside. That sounds like pure science fiction. Is there even any theoretical basis for the construction of "computers composed of folded spacetime"?
- rbanffy 5y agoGive me a couple trillion trillion years to figure that one out ;-)
- perihelions 5y agoThe optimum efficiency comes from discarding our meat bodies and uploading ourselves into highly efficient software simulations. At the Landauer limit, the amount of computation is proportional to the total energy; it shouldn't particularly matter how quickly that energy is burned, what the "simulation speed" is in real time. Maybe the optimal future of humanity is a simulation powered by the radiation of a supernova, simulating 10^100 years in 1 hour. Who knows? (Top advantage: you wouldn't have to worry about hostile ETI's, since your entire civilization's light cone fits in one light-hour. For all practical purposes, your society's causally disconnected from the universe, as if it had hidden itself inside a black hole).
- usednet 5y agoI would assume at that point “individual humans” would no longer exist, just a super-intelligent singularity.