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I often wonder if the math for evolution is a similar problem. There's only a limited string of code that will survive and thrive. There's a set of evolutiona

I often wonder if the math for evolution is a similar problem. There's only a limited string of code that will survive and thrive. There's a set of evolutionary milestones or versions that need to happen to get where we are. There's a fixed amount of time on earth or perhaps the universe. Is there really enough time for all those dice roles?

eru 3y ago
I'm not sure what you are aiming at? Most of the competition in life comes from other living things. So any organism's failure to survive and thrive is often because some other organism is stealing their lunch money. But the 'lunch money' (eg a spot in the sunlight) doesn't disappear. > There's a fixed amount of time on earth or perhaps the universe. For the universe: it looks like the universe will expand forever, and more and more of it will recede behind the cosmological event horizon (because places that are far enough away will recede faster from us than the speed of light). The amount of usable energy within the spacetime we can reach is most likely finite. (Where 'usable energy' include considerations of entropy.) Time might be unlimited in an endlessly expanding universe, but usable energy ain't. But here's the savings grace: as far as we can tell, the physical lower limit of usable energy required for doing computations is proportional to the prevailing temperature. And expansion decreases the temperature of space, or rather its background radiation. So if you have 1J of energy left in your civilisation, you can expand half of it now to do some unit of computation. Then you wait until the temperature of your corner of the universe has dropped in half, and you expend another half of your remaining energy (1/4 J), to do another unit of computation. You can in principle keep doing this indefinitely, and get an infinite amount of computation. You can use that computation to power eg a simulation of life. --- Of course, this assumes you have found materials or mechanisms to run your computation on that can persist for arbitrary amounts of time in stasis without decay or using energy. The lower limit of energy usage for computation also only applies for irreversible computation. Reversible computation can be had for free, in principle. With long enough timescales, Boltzmann brains or even Boltzmann planets or Boltzmann galaxies also become a consideration.

eru 3y ago

I'm not sure what you are aiming at? Most of the competition in life comes from other living things. So any organism's failure to survive and thrive is often because some other organism is stealing their lunch money. But the 'lunch money' (eg a spot in the sunlight) doesn't disappear. > There's a fixed amount of time on earth or perhaps the universe. For the universe: it looks like the universe will expand forever, and more and more of it will recede behind the cosmological event horizon (because places that are far enough away will recede faster from us than the speed of light). The amount of usable energy within the spacetime we can reach is most likely finite. (Where 'usable energy' include considerations of entropy.) Time might be unlimited in an endlessly expanding universe, but usable energy ain't. But here's the savings grace: as far as we can tell, the physical lower limit of usable energy required for doing computations is proportional to the prevailing temperature. And expansion decreases the temperature of space, or rather its background radiation. So if you have 1J of energy left in your civilisation, you can expand half of it now to do some unit of computation. Then you wait until the temperature of your corner of the universe has dropped in half, and you expend another half of your remaining energy (1/4 J), to do another unit of computation. You can in principle keep doing this indefinitely, and get an infinite amount of computation. You can use that computation to power eg a simulation of life. --- Of course, this assumes you have found materials or mechanisms to run your computation on that can persist for arbitrary amounts of time in stasis without decay or using energy. The lower limit of energy usage for computation also only applies for irreversible computation. Reversible computation can be had for free, in principle. With long enough timescales, Boltzmann brains or even Boltzmann planets or Boltzmann galaxies also become a consideration.