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Timeline of the far future

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Re: Timeline of the far future

#231

Post by starshadowx2 »

stevenAthompson wrote: post #162
AgentME wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe some Boltzmann brains start out with rich fulfilling memories. And then a later (or earlier) Boltzmann brain happens to exist with a continuation of those memories. (Now I realize I'm just reciting a plot point from the excellent book Permutation City ...)

You, Sir, have excellent taste. Permutation City is the only recent hard science fiction books that I can fully embrace. It has novel and genuinely new thinking, it is realistic, and it's thoroughly entertaining. Most modern sci-fi fails at one or more of those tasks. Indeed, most modern sci-fi fail's at not being mere fiction.

Have you read any more from Egan?

Re: Timeline of the far future

#232

Post by collinmanderson »

21 wrote: post #8

> The length of the day used for astronomical timekeeping reaches about 86,401 SI seconds. Under the present-day timekeeping system, either a leap second would need to be added to the clock every single day, or else by then, in order to compensate, the length of the day would have had to have been officially lengthened by one SI second. Can you just imagine the amount of legacy code with DAY_SECONDS=86400 out there 5…

Pretty sure the Y10K problem would be a bigger issue.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#233

Post by sjf »

marviel wrote: post #109
improv32 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been suggested that perhaps one way to find evidence of extrasolar life, would be to find exoplanets whose years are integer multiples of their rotational periods, i.e. they've done what you describe just to eliminate leap years and make their calendars easier.

That is fascinating! Do you have a reference?

In the Three Body Problem series by Cixin Liu, the orbits of planets and moons in the solar system are altered to make colonization and terraforming easier.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#234

Post by ASalazarMX »

garmaine wrote: post #141
marviel wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is fascinating! Do you have a reference?

I think he might be sarcastic. There is no known method I know for measuring the rotational period of extrasolar planets, without having enough observational power to defiantly notice the astronomical engineering required to alter an inhabited planet’s rotation rate.

"You see that big city past that mountain range? Use it as a marker to measure the planet's rotation."

Re: Timeline of the far future

#235

Post by andbberger »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #199
Symmetry wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the universe is really powered by processes that dissipate energy across a gradient to fuel a structured, very low entropy state. By 10^(10^50) years that'll be long over.

which is exactly his point...

Ya no not at all

Re: Timeline of the far future

#236

Post by Florin_Andrei »

majos wrote: post #226
baddox wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And likewise, maybe others start out in a state of unimaginable agony with a long memory of the same.

As a dude-do-you-ever-think sidenote, this sort of thing keeps me from getting excited about any type of virtual reality that does anything with our brains. How do I know it won't simulate 10 years of torture, then at the end replace that memory with 10 minutes of an edenic golden field, so when I actually unplug all I have is a nice remembered experience that I'd like (incorrectly) to try again?

Well, growing up you have no guarantee your life is going to be 100% sunshine-and-bunnies, and indeed it rarely is.

And yet you live.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#237

Post by AgentME »

starshadowx2 wrote: post #231
stevenAthompson wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You, Sir, have excellent taste. Permutation City is the only recent hard science fiction books that I can fully embrace. It has novel and genuinely new thinking, it is realistic, and it's thoroughly entertaining. Most modern sci-fi fails at one or more of those tasks. Indeed, most modern sci-fi fail's at not being mere fiction.

Have you read any more from Egan?

Permutation City is still my favorite from him, which is a little disappointing since it's one of his older books. It touches the most subjects and makes the biggest sci-fi leaps. Diaspora scratches some of the same itch, going further with some of the ideas, and Schild's Ladder is in the same bucket. Distress and Incandescence are both something different, but Incandescence's subtlety took me a while to appreciate. Zendegi ... skip it. It seems to be written with outright disdain to sci-fi fans with weird author tracts and caricatures, and it doesn't really tread new ground otherwise. Is Greg Egan getting sick of the fan mail he's getting?

Re: Timeline of the far future

#238

Post by majos »

majos wrote: post #226
baddox wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And likewise, maybe others start out in a state of unimaginable agony with a long memory of the same.

As a dude-do-you-ever-think sidenote, this sort of thing keeps me from getting excited about any type of virtual reality that does anything with our brains. How do I know it won't simulate 10 years of torture, then at the end replace that memory with 10 minutes of an edenic golden field, so when I actually unplug all I have is a nice remembered experience that I'd like (incorrectly) to try again?

@Florin_Andrei: Sure, but we have reasonable expectations of how bad things can get and our capacity to learn from them. Alter your perception and memory and those things go out the window, and that's way scarier than normal organic life.

Re: Timeline of the far future

#240

Post by pc86 »

walrus01 wrote: post #144
cpeterso wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky novels, the characters in the far future track time using megaseconds (~11.6 Earth days) to sidestep the problem of days with different lengths. They still count from the 1970-01-01 Unix epoch, but the characters mistakenly think that date is when humans landed on the moon.

There's also such a thing as a Programmer-Archeologist, can you imagine dealing with 14,000 years of nested dependencies? One key plot point in one of the novels, a totalitarian group is running a omnipresent surveillance network but has no idea about the software running underneath it. They set it up using the GUI and are using it but never looked under the hood. The group attempting to get out from under the grasps…

Yes but at least that far in the future we'll finally be rid of JavaScript.
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