Free The Memes Archive
May 2008
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10:46pm Wednesday May 14, 2008 (link)
There's an idea floating around that if some future civilization had truly powerful computers, they could simulate the past. Possibly, they could simulate it with many variations. In that case, there would be many more simulations of the past world than there was a real one! So the odds are, this world is a simulation, not the real world.Tyler Cowen asks Does the simulation have an evil or indifferent designer?
I added the following comment:
If we had the ability to simulate the Earth in its earliest period, we could find out how life emerges, and the likelihood of other types of life. We might also vary the physical parameters, to try and evolve radically different types of life.By analogy, the purpose of this simulated universe (the one we're in) is to understand the emergence of true (artificial) intelligence. Other universes might vary the population of researchers working on AI, in order to see what types of minds might emerge. The rest of the human race are just background.
The simulation ends when the AI emerges, and you no longer need the people.
10:40pm Thursday May 1, 2008 (link)
I have another new essay at Charles Hugh Smith on the search for extraterrestrial life.Science doesn't take reports of flying saucers and alien abductions seriously, but interstellar travel is possible. Two human spacecraft (Pioneer 10 and 11) are on their way out of the solar system even now. True, it will be millions of years before they reach another star, but they have left. Designs for faster ships have been created (see Project Daedalus.)Read the whole thing here: Hoping Not to Find Life in SpaceIf a technological species wanted to spread through the stars, it would probably build what's called a von Neumann probe. This is a machine which can reproduce itself. In the original version, it would be launched towards a nearby star, where it would find a rocky planet. Then it would set up a factory and build copies of itself. These would be launched towards other nearby stars. Eventually, the probes would visit every star in the galaxy. What they do there depends on their programming. Given a powerful enough technology, they could do all sorts of things, including starting new colonies of the creatures that built them.
I prefer a more dramatic version. If you assume a more advanced technology, the probe is not simply a machine reporting back to its builders, but instead an artificial organism, with an artificial intelligence. It is the technological species, which isn't exploring the galaxy, but colonizing it. On top of that, assume the technology allows the creature to be the size of a seed, and live in or near a star. Let's call them the Appleseed species.
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