261–270 of 272 posts
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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."
Some of these are ironically myopic: " 10,000 years: If globalization trends lead to panmixia, human genetic variation will no longer be regionalized, as the effective population size will equal the actual population size. This does not mean homogeneity, as minority traits will still be preserved, e.g. the blonde gene will not disappear, but it will be rather evenly distributed worldwide. " That prediction makes the…
> our potential growth and expansion is effectively unlimited It's still finite. I recommend this famous Asimov story [1]. I don't think that it makes humanity "more meaningful" or something similar if we start interplanetary colonization. Really, it doesn't matter even if we inhabit the whole observable universe. We will die and it doesn't matter if I die on an exoplanet as a 1500y/o guy in a young body or if I die…
We each have to find our own personal meaning to life. For myself it's simply knowledge. And starting to colonize other planets, and more generally become a genuinely space faring civilization, is going to revolutionize our knowledge and understanding of this universe. To what end? Well, I'll tell you when we run out of things that we don't know. I expect, even if immortality should come to pass, this is a question I will not have to answer.
While the topic is on. I am trying to find a short story I read some years ago (4-5) about the evolution of life on our planet in the far future. Warning, massive spoilers: There are like 5 or 6 mass extinction events followed by a new civilization each time built by a different specie. At some points a raven civilization goes on the moon (they always had an innate tendency to go higher) and find an old rover, then i…
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Fun fact: most Boltzmann brains pass out in a matter of seconds, then die, and there's nothing they can do about that.
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 ...)
If you consider the likelihood of a one-brain-state person spontaneously arising in thermal noise versus the likelihood of many similar brain states spontaneously arising in thermal noise, the probability that a given person is going to continue living beyond the current moment seems very low, assuming a finite age for the universe.
Hopefully there's some better, lower-entropy mechanism out there for generating brain states. Maybe it's even an objective physical reality and human evolution producing physical brains. :)
(I loved Permutation City, by the way. I don't think any other novel has made me think so much.)
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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 don't even really need a sequence of closely-related brain states encoding a coherent stream of consciousness. Maybe you only exist right now, and nothing else ever happens in your life. All you need is a single brain state with all of the right memories loaded up and you'd have a person who thinks they're going about their day. If you consider the likelihood of a one-brain-state person spontaneously arising in t…
Agreed mostly, though personally I think Permutation City was dancing around trying to imply something one step further than that: maybe you don't even need that single brain state to exist in some objective reality for it to have a coherent stream of consciousness. In other words, the Mathematical universe hypothesis[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...
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Why don’t we just 6 minutes at the end of each year? Seems to be more practical to me
You want December 31st to be 6 minutes longer than December 30th?
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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.…
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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.
Try Anathem by Neal Stephenson.