77 replies to this topic

[space3456]

http://news.bbc.co.u...tech/364496.stm

[JonesGuy]

Yes, absolutely.

I certainly cannot predict the timeframe however.

[space3456]

http://www.g4tv.com/...ch_of_Trek.html

[Brainbox]

Probably yes, but what's the relation with immortalism since you posted it in this forum?

[space3456]

The relationship is that immortals would be around when the warp drive comes out.

[biknut]

I vote yes, but it might not even be necessary. Other forms of travel may make it obsolete before it's even invented, like star gate.

[Lazarus Long]

IMHO the options should be relabeled or added to. For example the point about a *stargate* is that a wormhole is essentially FTL and taking advantage of the ability to *warp* space/time into a *wormhole*.

Will we create *quantum leaps* that exceed the limits recognized by Einstein?

The answer is not based on what we *know* as much as what we do not yet fully understand.

Warp/wormhole, transporters and any FTL (or equal to in the case of transporters) concept must alter the physical properties of the experience but more important they might accelerate experience relative to an Earth standard time.

Suppose as a hypothetical point that travel through *warp* automatically also compensates by a shift into the future relative to Earth equal to the restrictions of Special and General Relativity?

Transport would be experienced at the speed of light to the traveller but if you were to turn around and go back your arrival would be measured as a time displacement significantly into the future. This form of time travel is non reversible. You can travel instantaneously relative to *your experience* of time but not relative to the point of origin and destination.

I pose this because it may in fact be an associated risk or hardship. Going through warp may mean being gone forever to those you leave behind. That is unless longevity and immortality become common.

Will warp as presented on television and in movies come about?

Not unless a lot of what we think we understand about physics is drastically reorganized, again.

[the_eternal]

I was doing some research on FTL and I kept reading about causality violations. To be honest I don't know a lot about causality, but what I read did make sense, and it would have an effect on the warp drive. If anyone would care to expand on this that'd be great, otherwise I'll continue with my research and get back to you.

[MichaelAnissimov]

Either

1) FTL travel is impossible (most likely)
2) FTL travel is possible but the speed cap is something like 10c or 100c but not more
3) FTL is possible and the whole universe has no civilization that has yet discovered it

Given our current understanding of physics - FTL travel is impossible - only bending space and travelling at normal speeds through that bent space. But bending space across long distances seems ridiculously energy-expensive, and if there's no way to recoup the losses (i.e., irreversible), then I doubt it will ever be used.

And why leave the solar system anyway, aside from potentially rescuing primitive species in trouble? We have enough matter here to run 10^30 human-sized minds for 10^30 years, at least.

[JonesGuy]

Because four light years away, we have an equivalent amount of matter!

Why settle for a cubic foot of 'me', when there are enough stars in the milky way to give each person on the planet 10 stars.

And there are ~10 galaxies per person, too.

[Kalepha]

Why settle for a cubic foot of 'me', when there are enough stars in the milky way to give each person on the planet 10 stars.

And there are ~10 galaxies per person, too.

One thing worth considering, however, is that if the Solar System is optimized, given that all pre-existing humans weren't neglected during the singularitarian transition, our simulations would likely exceed our imaginations/expectations (you could live in an exotic Universe more rich and expansive than the one you currently perceive, in isolation even). We would actually need to become superintelligent to make optimal use of probes and the rest of the Universe. And if you're networked (or perhaps entangled) with superintelligent probes, why move?! Powerful optimization shouldn't be underestimated. Human-level inspirations and goals could be trivially reproducible.

[bgwowk]

And if you're networked (or perhaps entangled) with superintelligent probes, why move?!

Because I want to. I've always wanted to, wanted to for real, not simulated, and wanted to do so for reasons of freedom and security, which an immersive virtual reality "hive world" is antithetical to. In a society with increasing per capita wealth, if even one person (beman, transhuman, whatever) with an expansionist meme like mine survives long enough, interstellar travel will happen. The alternative is a totalitarianism which I dare not contemplate.

---BrianW

[JonesGuy]

A superintelligence requires mass to expand, and one would expect that the benefits of superintelligence increase with expansion. Why NOT tap another star for mass, if the opportunity cost is low?

In addition, I have a dream about attaining the mass of a star as an intelligence ...

[Kalepha]

Brian, it seems possible that an immersive virtual reality "hive world" could be more versatile than you currently expect it to be and, therefore, not necessarily antithetical to freedom and security.

Again, I think you and QJones are underestimating really powerful optimization processes. Your notions of freedom and security are probably more self-destructive than is presently recognized.

I agree that totalitarianism is repulsive, but it seems unlikely that individualistic transhumans will be able to weight human-level perceptions of repulsion to totalitarianism to the sufficient extent that they could transcend their surrounding optimization pressures.

But that just represents how I envision things. As of yet I don't know how to prove or present a rigorous case for these things, so I wish you both success anyway.

[JonesGuy]

What's better than a solar-size superintelligence?

Two of them, I'd expect.

Anyway, how can something be optimized such that it cannot be improved? I don't think that's possible.

[Kalepha]

Because I want to.

To be more succinct, I should've added that "want" isn't good enough. I might want to survive a free-fall from 4000 meters without a parachute (on Earth), but that wouldn't translate to success.

What's better than a solar-size superintelligence?

Two of them, I'd expect.

Anyway, how can something be optimized such that it cannot be improved? I don't think that's possible.

QJones, we currently can't imagine what all we can do with the Solar System optimized. Therefore, it's extremely likely a moot point to make plans beyond optimizing the Solar System. I think this was Anissimov's main thrust. That's not to say it won't happen. It's just that, given the conditions, goals such as personally owning solar systems and galaxies are likely counterproductive and possibly even self-destructive.

I vote Null.

[bgwowk]

Nate wrote:

Brian, it seems possible that an immersive virtual reality "hive world" could be more versatile than you currently expect it to be and, therefore, not necessarily antithetical to freedom and security.

Again, I think you and QJones are underestimating really powerful optimization processes. Your notions of freedom and security are probably more self-destructive than is presently recognized.

I agree that totalitarianism is repulsive, but it seems unlikely that individualistic transhumans will be able to weight human-level perceptions of repulsion to totalitarianism to the sufficient extent that they could transcend their surrounding optimization pressures.

"Resistance is futile," eh? Nothing personal, Nate, but it is because of such ideas that I want to put as many light years between me and the coming hive as possible.

---BrianW

[Kalepha]

Understandable, Brian.

[Live Forever]

MSNBC has an article covering the recent Space Technology and Applications Forum in New Mexico, which included a frontier physics session on hyperdrive, wormholes, and other blue sky ideas. The idea is a revival of NASA's long-dead (and heavily criticized) Advanced Propulsion Project.

[Kalepha]

(I just thought we needed another smiley face.)

[MichaelAnissimov]

The problem with most of the universe is that it's incredibly boring. Interacting with other minds is what's fun. And these minds will speed up radically. It could start off slowly at first, but it seems hard to imagine that our world won't take advantage of cognitive acceleration once its readily available. It will be a cognitive "arms race" - your best friend doubles her cognitive velocity because she wants to experience twice as much fun in a given time interval. Then you do it too.

When the mean of cognitive processing shoots to orders of magnitude faster than what it is today, the world itself will become boring unless we accelerate it also. And we will. (If we survive the Singularity, that is.) The value of g will be artificially accelerated because superfast minds will find it odd to let go of a ball in the air and see it freeze in place.

Soon we will be walking around at speeds close to c. In order to avoid setting everything on fire, a high degree of control over individual atoms will be necessary. This will be easier if there are less atoms to deal with. You will get to have more fun in a given time if you eliminate the superfluous matter making up your body, permitting control systems to more easily manage your physiology and neurology at high speeds. We will become physically smaller, with much more functionality packed into a tiny space. Beings made of neutronium or monopolium are possible end-states.

When your mind is moving a mile a femtosecond, the cosmos looks really far away. Septillions of times further away than it looked before. Sending a signal a few nanometers away could take subjective years, if not longer. Why on Earth would anyone want to travel meters away, much less light-years? I just don't see it happening.

The "hive" perception is all in the eye of the beholder. To beings who evolved on a gas giant who neurons fire once every minute instead of 200 times a second, we look like sardines in a can, spinning our wheels at a furious pace.

The whole grandiosity fetish is the wrong route. It's like the fledging computing industry in 1980 making a roadmap that consists of progressively larger computers rather than progressively faster and better computers with smaller logic gates. If we survive the rapids of progress ahead, I believe anyone should be able to basically do whatever they want... but we should remember that what we want now could easily change in light of new social and technological realities.

PS. Thank you Brian for inventing the concept of Phased Array Optics. My WiseGeek article article in now 1st on Google for the term - do you approve of its content?

[bgwowk]

Hi Michael. It's a good introduction, thanks for writing it. I would, however, ditch the sentence "A superlarge PAO surrounding a planet could provide the illusion of the planet being anywhere." I think that one is a bit over the top.

---BrianW

[Lazarus Long]

The problem with most of the universe is that it's incredibly boring.

Micheal you do realize how incredibly short sighted and unimaginative this sounds to those that understand it differently?

It says much more about you and your perspective than the universe.

Interacting with other minds is what's fun. And these minds will speed up radically. It could start off slowly at first, but it seems hard to imagine that our world won't take advantage of cognitive acceleration once its readily available.

Yes and it has started off slowly considering the evolutionary part of it. Even the interpersonal rapport part has been a long time coming. Mind sharing is the synergistic essence of human development and it is an essential aspect of the formation of the singularity.

It will be a cognitive "arms race" - your best friend doubles her cognitive velocity because she wants to experience twice as much fun in a given time interval. Then you do it too.

This has already begun too though the form is more a market driven dynamic of time/value and *re-creational* activity.

When the mean of cognitive processing shoots to orders of magnitude faster than what it is today, the world itself will become boring unless we accelerate it also. And we will. (If we survive the Singularity, that is.) The value of g will be artificially accelerated because superfast minds will find it odd to let go of a ball in the air and see it freeze in place.

Soon we will be walking around at speeds close to c. In order to avoid setting everything on fire, a high degree of control over individual atoms will be necessary. This will be easier if there are less atoms to deal with.

This will happen faster than might be expected by many because the metamorphosis to a quantized electronic medium is predicated on the mind being able to *materialize* as an abstract operator on a new substrate. If a copy can be made the copy acquires an existence within the form it exists. Not merely as a program predicated *image* but as a cogent manipulator of computation data and operational selection.

This leads to the Singulaity's FTL limit that reduces it to being a strictly local phenomenon on the universal scale. We have discussed this a little before but if FTL can be created for information (not physical mass) then it may be possible to overcome such a limit.

Without FTL it is impossible to overcome the duality of distance that results from the lack of *simultaneity* for informational experience that even occurs at the level of planetary distances within Sol System. I have always found this to be a profoundly overlooked weakness of the Jupiter brain concept for example.

Once we can experience C as the speed of light we also can differentiate the time delay occurring between two distinct bodies like Jupiter and Earth. The time lag and difference of rate of time would be *perceptible* like watching the flash and smoke from a starter pistol and hearing the bang moments later.

If for example you were on Earth and extending your personal experience to a distance of Mars or Jupiter the time lag would feel excruciatingly long. If you coincided for intelligent sensory presence in both places you may not be able to reconcile the data stream as *here and not here* simultaneously without a division of self that in principle denies the *singularity*.

[nazgul]

As of my current understanding of modern physics, it seems that FTL travel is not possible, nor can a signal carry information FTL. Instantanious effects DO occur, even over large distances, but cannot be used to transmit information.

One consequence of this is that a species widely distributed throughout the galaxy will become "out of touch" with itself. Communication delays of years to hundreds of thousands of years will effectively isolate cultures from each other. New developments in one place will ripple through population centers, crossing and producing interference patterns with new developments from elsewhere. Interesting speculations, but it's a long way off!

It will be interesting to see what the results from Gravity Probe B say about the edges of general relativity. The papers should be out summer 2007. It should help a good deal more with our understanding of relativistic jets from compact objects, and places where the spacetime is severly curved. http://einstein.stanford.edu/

Why would an immortal care if it took him 10 million years to get somewhere? Seems like a great time to read all the books again, watch all the movies, have some late night conversations and cocktails, play immersive video games, and get some sleep!

[jc1991]

I suppose it all depends on our gaining the ability to bend space with exotic matter.

If we can, we could travel as fast as we wanted without having to worry about relativity. (Since subjectively, the traveling ship would be moving at a speed of zero.) How does a speed if a few million C sound?

If we can't, I guess I'll have a few hundred thousand years in between stops to read every book ever written, and then some.

I personally think we'll discover a means to manufacture exotic matter, but that's more of an opinion than a prediction. (We as a civilization barely understand the physics behind negative energy density, much less negative mass. It'll probably take a superintelligence to solve that problem.)

[Lazarus Long]

I suppose it all depends on our gaining the ability to bend space with exotic matter.

If we can, we could travel as fast as we wanted without having to worry about relativity. (Since subjectively, the traveling ship would be moving at a speed of zero.) How does a speed if a few million C sound?

If we can't, I guess I'll have a few hundred thousand years in between stops to read every book ever written, and then some.

I personally think we'll discover a means to manufacture exotic matter, but that's more of an opinion than a prediction. (We as a civilization barely understand the physics behind negative energy density, much less negative mass. It'll probably take a superintelligence to solve that problem.)

You know I just reread the May '06 issue of popsci describing this very strategy.

Maybe I have already run into the coincidence temporal driver.

[airquote] Dejá vú vectors? [/airquote] [tung]

[phylodome]

Brian, it seems possible that an immersive virtual reality "hive world" could be more versatile than you currently expect it to be and, therefore, not necessarily antithetical to freedom and security.

Again, I think you and QJones are underestimating really powerful optimization processes. Your notions of freedom and security are probably more self-destructive than is presently recognized.

I agree that totalitarianism is repulsive, but it seems unlikely that individualistic transhumans will be able to weight human-level perceptions of repulsion to totalitarianism to the sufficient extent that they could transcend their surrounding optimization pressures.

You should pick up a copy of Castronova's "Synthetic Worlds". An interesting point of reference is on the intentional funneling of human biology from reality, as a function of impenetrable barriers to vertical social mobility, so that certain institutions won't have to deal with people whining for welfare any longer. Creating our own matrix against ourselves? Maybe. In all honesty, the possibilites for total sensory immersion are quite tempting, and even quite beneficial in a vast array of scenarios, but the bottom line still exists that those who currently consider Second Life and other MMORPG's their primary realm of existence (as some do), have been forced into that situation through an inability to cope with reality (just heard a story last night from a friend whose roommate literally attacked him with a knife for not paying the 'net bill on time). We should strive for biological agency of free-will, not settle for a brain-in-the-vat substitute; if you think otherwise, you are truly a danger to our reality.

And why leave the solar system anyway, aside from potentially rescuing primitive species in trouble? We have enough matter here to run 10^30 human-sized minds for 10^30 years, at least.

Conservatively optimal, yet this intelligence would still be a function of evolving order in the face of entropy; this should lead us to believe that we'd continute to spread virally throughout all of space and time as order has so far, most recently manifesting itself biologically (in our neck of the woods), after all, we'll likely still have some order of intelligence adhering to principles such as...

Why settle for a cubic foot of 'me', when there are enough stars in the milky way to give each person on the planet 10 stars.

And there are ~10 galaxies per person, too.

We're still little old humans and yet already we're speaking of Manifest Destiny on Universal scales. If that's not scary, I don't know what is; personally, I don't really want to imagine what massively intelligent warfare ripping the fabric of space and time to shreds might look like.

It seems that in our reality there might not truly be such a thing as conservation at any scale; as even the constancy of the speed of light is now being heartily challenged.

[Vgamer1]

By Einstein's laws faster than light travel is possible, but not relative to any stationary observer. I think there may be some disagreement in this thread on what "faster than light travel" actually means. It is of course possible that we can prove Einstein wrong somewhere down the line (i.e. wormholes). However, I have only heard of wormholes in a purely philosophical/sci-fi sense. I'm not aware of any scientific theories that would support the actual possibility of wormholes. Maybe someone can enlighten me though.

As for becoming an inter-stellar expansionist civilization, that scares the pants off me. Forget about the restrictions of the speed of light, because as a few of you have said that won't matter to immortals, which is true. But guys, think about what having ~7 billion minds all wanting to gain more and more intelligence and pleasure (matter and energy) at an increasingly exponential rate...

I believe if we go down an uncontrolled path like this we will soon (on the scale of forever of course) run out of matter and energy in the solar system, the galaxy, and even eventually the universe. I don't really have a solution to this, but I think that we should use caution and restraint instead of purely unrestricted expansion of ourselves.

Of course there is the possibility (although I don't really believe it) that we will be able to generate "infinite" energy at some point (through accessing alternate dimensions?)

What I think is a more realistic is to restrict our use of matter and energy and instead of using more and more over time we should strive to become more efficient and use less and less over time instead.

[Zenob]

One thing that seems to be overlooked is that we need some viable way to escape the solar system to prevent extinction. One good solar "burp" and we could lose the earth. A lucky(unlucky) gamma ray burst that hits us head on would flash fry the whole solar system. Eventually if humans want to avoid extinction we will have to branch out to other solar systems. It'll just be a question of do we do it with FTL drives or slow boats that take 500 years to reach the nearest star.

[Vgamer1]

One thing that seems to be overlooked is that we need some viable way to escape the solar system to prevent extinction. One good solar "burp" and we could lose the earth. A lucky(unlucky) gamma ray burst that hits us head on would flash fry the whole solar system. Eventually if humans want to avoid extinction we will have to branch out to other solar systems. It'll just be a question of do we do it with FTL drives or slow boats that take 500 years to reach the nearest star.

I completely agree that escaping our solar system is inevitable if we intend to survive indefinitely. Again, about FTL: it is possible to the traveler, but any stationary person would observe the traveler going at most the speed of light, which is what causes time dilation.

The only two ways that I could see getting around time dilation are wormholes or quantum teleportation, and neither of those may even work let alone get around time dilation. Also, quantum teleportation, like "regular" teleportation would kill a person, so that's not the greatest of ideas. No, I think that we'll have to settle with light speed travel and deal with time dilation. After all, aren't we planning to be immortal?