Space Travel: Not for A Billion Years Wednesday, May 9 2007
space and transhumanism 2:19 am
Mind uploading will make space travel useless. If my mind is running at a million times human speed, then the Moon, Mars, and Proxima Centauri look far more distant than they were previously. It becomes pointless to visit them.
When minds are sped up, subjective time slows down. There are no philosophical conundrums inherent in this. It’s quite straightforward. There is no necessary link between cognitive speed and the external world. No necessary feedback cycle, or whatever. Obviously, if I think a million times faster, the present-day world would be an incredible bore, but technological changes do not happen in a vacuum. If we get the technology to make cyborgs or uploads with a million times brain speed, then we’ll also have technologies that can modify the environment on that timescale and other individuals with the same brain speed that we can communicate with. This technology sounds advanced, but it will follow quickly as a consequence of molecular manufacturing and atomic-resolution brain scanning. Nano rod-logics - no nanoelectronics or femtotechnology necessary - already offer millions of times, if not billions of times faster speeds compared to the human brain, as long as we can transfer minds from meat to machines, which we assuredly will.
And if you disbelieve in causal functionalism (the idea that the mind is substrate-independent) then I would advise hitting the “unsubscribe” button right now because I am just going to keep saying things you find totally implausible, I’m afraid.
If our mind operates a million times human speed, suddenly the Moon is 2/3 light years away. It takes an eight month journey to get there, even if I’m traveling at the speed of light the whole way. If I’m being beamed there in the form of photons, I’m dead for eight months. If I go by spaceship, it could take several subjective years. I think this is small enough that it’s likely that the Moon will be swallowed for computronium and be integrated into the Terra-Luna Supercomputer which is where the human race will spend the next subjective million years or so of time after uploading.
The problem for space colonization for uploads is that the other planets, not to mention extra-solar stars, are too damn far away. Once we have the technology to accelerate brains by a million times, we’ll use that advantage to invent the technology to accelerate them by a billion times, and so on, until we hit ultimate physical limits. Around this time, the Sun looks really, really, really, really far away. 8 light minutes becomes 8 light billennia, or 8 million light years. It would be useless to go there unless we run out of resources on this planet completely. Because we’ll eventually be able to code a single bit for every atom, and the Earth contains about 1025 kg of matter, with around 1025 atoms per kg, the Earth will be able to store something like 1050 bits, which is absolutely huge. Even if it takes 100 atoms to implement one computation per second (highly conservative), we have 1048 ops/sec of computation available, enough to store 1020 entities of size 1018 ops/sec, which is roughly a hundred quadrillion individuals.
One could argue that people won’t want to upload, and maybe a minority indeed won’t, but the majority assuredly will. There will be a slippery slope of economic, social, and personal pressures. Uploading will be far more appealing than, say, computer adoption because uploading will enrich outside life and deep experiences while computers only enrich a portion of experience and are exclusively indoors. People who choose not to upload will become irrelevant to the flow of history, frozen as statues while the uploaded society pursues science, technology, love, relationships, and unique experiences on nanosecond timescales. A mighty spaceship launched from the surface of the Earth will be laughed at by uploads, as they see it creeping along a few feet per subjective year. People need to realize that they will eventually have to choose between uploading and space travel, and it will be practically impossible to forgo the appeal of uploading. No one will force anyone to do it, but you’ll want to. In space there are maybe a few dozen stars and a couple hundred planets within 100 light years, but in virtual reality there will be millions of stars and billions of planets available as quickly as they can be generated by evolutionary algorithms or coded by hand. Spore will just be the beginning.
May 9th, 2007 at 2:40 am
But a upload can choose at which speed ve wants to run, and to like what ve wants to like. Egan has exemples of both. Also, if you choose to travel to the stars by transmitting a softcopy of yourself as EM radiation or whatever, the subjective time would be zero (Egan again, or RK Morgan).
I think perhaps on the contrary, uploading could be a powerful enabling technology for space travel, and there will be seamless integration of phisical reality and VR, uploading and space travel. See the deep difference in the approaches to RL and VR between Ashton-Laval and Carter-Zimemrman in Diaspora.
May 9th, 2007 at 2:50 am
Slowing down means tuning out for billions of subjective years. No one will want to do it. Say that everyone uploads by 2100 and is running at a million times normal speed. It will then not be until year 4,002,100 until someone makes it to the nearest star. So it may happen eventually, but not before 4 million (or billion, or trillion) years of other exciting stuff happens first here on Earth.
Egan is fiction. I fear that too much of current uploading-related thought is based on fictional examples. I’m currently reading Permutation City for the first time and am starting to realize that certain common transhumanist ways of thinking about uploading often reflect fictional stereotypes.
If you could choose to slow yourself down today so that a thousand years would feel like just a day to you, would you do it? I doubt it. Just think of all the fun you’d miss.
May 9th, 2007 at 3:03 am
Come on Michael, I would miss some fun here and now for more fun later and elsewhere. Wouldn’t you? Also, with potentially indefinite subjective time ahead, wasting a couple of millions years as measured by another observer is not a big deal.
Dulcis in fundo, if you are afraid you would miss your girlfriend you can take a copy along.
Yes, a lot of our thinking on uploading and other supertech is based on fictional examples. That is why I think (good) SF writers have a lot to contribute to the advancement of real science. They steer our thinking along certain paths and not others.
Richard Morgan’s world is our world + uploading. Egan is much more imaginative. I recommend reading Simon Funk’s After Life.
May 9th, 2007 at 4:01 am
I enjoyed After Life although it had some odd parts. Why would it be any more fun in another star system than here, when all that’s there is more of the same chemicals we have here in abundance?
I love my girlfriend but I doubt she would let me copy her if she’s still alive. I do have her permission to recreate her from memories if she dies without being suspended, however.
You are right that someone with an eternity might not care about a million years, but if you go, it’s like you’d be dead for that whole time. Your relationship with everyone on Earth would be over for that whole time. It would be like you were dead.
I do think SF writers have something to contribute, but see Eliezer’s predicting the future talk. Reality will be much stranger than fiction, and in the same way that Star Trek will never come true, neither will Diaspora or After Life. They’re based on late 20th/early 21st century human perspectives of the future, which will surely turn out to be oversimplistic.
May 9th, 2007 at 4:02 am
I hadn’t thought of this stuff, but you’re absolutely right! I was doing some research on how quickly we could get to, say, Alpha Centauri with current technology.
The best technology we can think of today appears to be a fission fragment rocket: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission_fragment_rocket which gets you an exhaust velocity of 3% of the speed of light. You could therefore travel one light year in 30 years, or 60 years if you want to slow down at the other end too, so Alpha Centauri is a mere 240 years away. In reality it probably won’t be this good, so say 500 years to be on the safe side.
If Michael is right about uploaded clock speeds, then as technology gets better, the stars will actually get further away. A lot further away!
I think people will still go though. Nowadays the only way you can build a fission fragment rocket is if you have a huge amount of money, but in the future technology will put space missions within reach of everyone. Some people will do it, just like today some people choose to spend all their time in their basements playing with model train sets.
People will go in large groups so that they don’t get bored at the other end, and they’ll start a whole new civilization when they arrive, complete with a dyson sphere around the sun, and maybe even a terraformed planet for those old fashioned folks who like to live in physical reality! People will do it just for the hell of it. Also someone might want to go visit a black hole, assuming we don’t find it more convenient to create one here on earth to study.
I have to agree that this means that space exploration is not “the future”, at least in the sense that model railway enthusiasts are not the epitome of the present. Think of all those countless science-fiction books/films which concentrate on space travel. They all got it very badly wrong!
May 9th, 2007 at 4:07 am
Even if we live in Earth-Luna for a few billion subjective years, we’ll want to migrate eventually, sometime before the Poincare recurrence theorem kicks in.
May 9th, 2007 at 4:21 am
Excellent article Michael, again.
But the robots will go out with the speed of light anyway, to colonize the neighborhood. At least to prevent a hypernova to happen and destroys some gadgets here. Or that some crazy evolution might challenge us in the future.
Then, why not send a copy of your upload there, to live and prosper there also?
May 9th, 2007 at 4:40 am
Michael: “Why would it be any more fun in another star system than here, when all that’s there is more of the same chemicals we have here in abundance?”
Why would it be any more fun in another club than here, when all that’s there is more of the same drinks, music and girls we have here in abundance?
Because in the next club the music could be better, the drinks cheaper and you could meet that particular girl you never met so far. What could be more fun than meeting aliens?
May 9th, 2007 at 4:46 am
Thomas: Why not build new minds from scratch? A world where only 1% of the people are originals and everyone else is a copy could be a bit boring. I’m sure we will send out probes in every direction at near light speed, and they may be programmed to build copies or new minds upon arrival at a substantial matter chunk, but as I argue, it will take billions of subjective years to make it there, and if you delete yourself here just to go on one of those ships, you’ll be dead to the next billions of years of activity on earth. What’s the point of making it past the Singularity just to shove yourself on a tiny ship that spends most of its time in an empty vacuum, and by the time you reach your destination, it’s the same thing we have here? Intelligence creates interestingness. The place to go for the excitement will always be the intelligent places, not the dead places.
Giulio: While I do think most clubs are basically the same, the idea is that there are different people, different culture, different drinks and food at different clubs. In a earth-sized computronium sphere, we could generate more of every conceivable type of complexity than you would ever find out in other lifeless star systems. (Other upload-civilizations may be interesting, but if they exist they are probably expanding out at the speed of light already.)
As to your question: building your own aliens with evolutionary algorithms that have billions of times more variety, diversity, and numerousness than anything natural selection could produce on its own. If you want to be surprised, have someone else build them.
Also, it’s almost certain that there are no aliens at least in this galaxy, or they’d already be here by now. You’d have to leave the galaxy to even have a chance of finding them, making the trip even longer.
May 9th, 2007 at 5:35 am
An image to illustrate my point.
May 9th, 2007 at 5:54 am
> A world where only 1% of the people are originals and everyone else is a copy could be a bit boring.
AFAIU (Understand) it’s the same thing. Beeing a copy or original, doesn’t matter.
May 9th, 2007 at 6:10 am
It will also be possible to “visit” these distant planets using virtual reality replicas. We will be able to scan these planets at decent level of detail..
May 9th, 2007 at 6:56 am
Scan is not good enough. You must influence them, if you want to be protected against some nasty event from there.
May 9th, 2007 at 7:02 am
I agree with Thomas … why not send a copy of your upload? That way you can have your cake (travel to the stars) and eat it too (stay on Earth).
May 9th, 2007 at 7:35 am
If you send your copy it’s a different person and you’ll never see them again! Why do people act as if when you make a copy, you somehow get to experience what the copy does? The second it breaks off, it becomes a totally new person, like a biological twin, but with shared memories up to the point of the split.
Thomas is right about protection. We can send out probes, but as I keep saying, it won’t be millions, billions, or maybe even TRILLIONS or more years into our subjective future before they make it anywhere. This is hugely different than what people think today, which is that we’ll be visiting the stars in the next few hundred years. We won’t be. They will look tremendously far away for an absolutely enormous amount of time. Better get used to your life here on Earth.
May 9th, 2007 at 7:39 am
Let’s say that only 1 out of 100,000 post-singularity intelligences have the personality that would cause them to want to travel in space. These explorers, however, would quickly come to dominate the universe. Evolution will strongly favor space travel regardless of how subjectively long it takes.
May 9th, 2007 at 8:14 am
Of course. But it will take a damn long time.
Btw, Guilio, what does dulcis in fundo mean? The google results bring up Italian Wikipedia. The closest thing I can think of is dulces en mundo, which means candy in the world in Spanish.
May 9th, 2007 at 8:34 am
Michael: Re: “It will take a damn long time.”
… So what? Such entities would have all of eternity. You’re thinking far, far too short term. No matter what else is done, there is one fundamental allure which, unless unwritten from the human psyche, *GUARANTEES* human space exploration: the desire to experience new things and places first-hand, that are physically real. The desire to explore.
Fantasy just doesn’t cut it. It’s simple; just ask yourself — if you had to choose between a perfectly simulated environment that was your personal paradise (which you know doesn’t physically actually exist), or the physical world in all its unglamorous nature, which would you choose? Gut reactions aside, which would you choose? That percentage is far, far larger than 1%. I’ll grant that it might not be a majority, but it is certainly a distinct plurality.
There’s also another area that you’re overlooking — separatist movements. How BETTER to separate yourself in such an environment than to have *light years* between you and those you deem “impure”?
100 light-years also makes a fairly decent (not good, but better than nothing) barrier to late-stage “Friendliness” failure.
For all of these reasons, I have to say — your idea that space-travel won’t be engaged in is frankly erroneous. I won’t even get *into* the concept of attempting to separate the mind from the brain. (Your point there is validated by the fact that it would be painfully simple to create a virtual substrate that replicates all the physical behaviors of “the real deal” once we reach a certain stage of technology.)
May 9th, 2007 at 8:39 am
Part of my point is that the fundamental allure is misguided. The future is in inner space, not outer space. There is also a generational gap at work. The Baby Boomers grew up during the Space Age. My generation grew up during the video game age. I realize that the virtual can be way more interesting than the physical. Video games and VR are fun while space travel is boring. Even if people made it to another star system, they’d probably spend about 20 minutes enjoying the view before they started converting the system into computronium and started running themselves in VR, where there are no immutable physical laws, no limitations other than those set by mathematical self-consistency.
The other point is that reality is what you want it to be. This point is pushed somewhat in the Matrix. “Real” is electrical impulses in your brain.
If people are so keen on being separatist, just log onto your own VR server. Huge, empty fields, worlds to yourself. All held in a computer the size of a thimble. Nanocomputers will be great.
My argument isn’t that space travel won’t be engaged in, just that the future is primarily inner space, not outer. I also just like to push people’s buttons.
May 9th, 2007 at 8:59 am
Michael, why do differentiate between uploads living in their virtual reality paradises, and those traveling to the stars? Why not do both?
Hey, if you’re living in VR, why not physically host the VR in a spaceship? You can amuse yourself “coding planets by hand” until you arrive, and once you arrive you have an entire new solar system to explore (or convert to computanium, or rearrange it to be more aesthetically pleasing). There are things that can not be learned without direct experience. And I have a feeling that novelty will be highly prized by immortal beings.
Sure it takes a lot of subjective time. So what?
Not everyone will choose to stay on Earth because they might miss the fun. There will almost certainly be those who don’t care about what the rest of humanity is up to and would be happy to leave Earth to whatever fate awaits it. Those who don’t mind being “left behind” by the bulk of humanity would spread into the stars.
Such travellers might actually choose to slow their clock rates drastically below pre-singularity humanity, so that a journey of 4 light years subjectively seems like only a few days. I can even imagine that some would find it amusing to create a virtual USS Enterprise for their trip, bringing the old vision of space travel to life, at least in a way.
Anyway, my point is that uploading and physical space travel are not mutually exclusive.
May 9th, 2007 at 9:07 am
Michael, I’m about three years older than you. That’s some generational gap.
Also, the statement about “real” being nothing more than electrical impulses is, frankly, entirely irrelevant to my point. But we’ve also had this conversation before — you’re also sidestepping the question I asked. Barring widespread use of deception, there will always be a significant portion of people who require “real world” stimuli. Not necessarily *all* of the time, but definitely a large portion of it. And that is, again, sufficient.
I can also guarantee you that if you can expect to live for 500 trillion years’ worth of subjective experience, then a measly 10 billion to get somewhere is a drop in the ocean. I submit to you that your thinking, here, is hopelessly mired in the “instant gratification” mold. This doesn’t seem to be an area you’ve realized the potential psychological ramifications of. What WOULD the day-planner of an immortal look like after a billion years’ worth of experience?
High-energy physics (or femto/nanotech, or a combination of these elements) might also permit for the creation of “wormholes” which could be used for “instantaneous” information transmission; in which case that 10 billion years’ worth of space travel would be in continuous contact with the “home-computronium”, and that’s not even going into anything resembling “exotic” physics.
As far as buttons go — “confirmation bias” much?
Myself, I must admit to the same — I personally am not a fan of the uploading concept as anything other than catastrophic failure backups.
May 9th, 2007 at 9:36 am
The main Michael’s point, as I understand him, is this:
“Some pessimist may delay his trip to the Moon to around 2100. So about 100 years of subjective time tp wait. What an understatement this is! It may be many billion of years of subjective time, before you get to the actual Mars!”
He is right about _this_, of course.
May 9th, 2007 at 9:49 am
It will be the whole new game, to stay around some large matter, where the lot of calculations are going on and where only they can going on, at all. To see and to enjoy the results, still warm from the computing oven.
But when the first star, larger than the Sun, will be transformed to some useware, the new center of calculations will be there. Then, it will be the time to move on.
Or to handle the mass/energy distribution on some clever way.
This is many billion of years in the future, measuring the subjective time, which only counts.
The same way, the year 2017 may be 10 years in the future. While the year 2027 is maybe already 10^10 years away, subjective time.
The planet Jupiter and the year 2100 are very far, from the reasons Michael pointed them out.
May 9th, 2007 at 10:00 am
Just a thought - who says we’ll only think a million times faster. Why not, 6 orders of magnitude “different”. That is to say, I’m not sure that we would understand the concept of serial time, causality or single stream thought.
As for earth being large, how long before our new-found “Borgian” growth function completely dominates the local environment. This is completely ignoring the entropy shock wave that will extend out from our activities. We’re gonna need space - a lot o’ it.
May 9th, 2007 at 10:05 am
Michael is completely correct. No one would bother to go any where else in this universe. It would just be like some one trying to go right now, which would mean leaving on a generational ship on a journey that would take a million years, only to be greeted by a civilization that used a later technology and got there first.
Even if you travelled on a beam of light, you would be greeted by a computronium system that would have been there for billions of subjective years.
This would always be the case, so that is a good answer to the Fermi Paradox. Civilizations find more room going in than out.
May 9th, 2007 at 10:06 am
“there will always be a significant portion of people who require “real world” stimuli.”
There’s no reason an uploaded being couldn’t receive it. Having access to a simulated reality doesn’t bar you from physical reality. Then again you could replicate physical reality in a simulation just as well. I think it’s pretty much guaranteed that the uploaded civilization will replicate planet earth, having all the experiences the physical world provides while excluding all the obvious drawbacks.
Michael is right of course, space travel will be a very insignificant part of our lives. We can accelerate our simulation, we cannot accelerate the speed of light. A trip to the moon would be an eternity. We will do it of course, I very much doubt that our non-physical involvement would drain all our desire to exlore space, regardless of how slowly.
Another way to look at relative time is relative to your life span rather than the outside world. You can comfortably wait a million years for a space probe to return if your life span is countless billions, particularly if you have an infinite reality to keep you busy. An exciting moment it would be when such a space probe would return, but insignificant compared to your non-physical experiences.
Space travel will be mostly forgotten if the light barrier cannot be broken, and broken by a ridiculous amount.
May 9th, 2007 at 10:11 am
The entropy shock wave from our Sun may be even bigger in the future, when we will take it over.
But maybe not. Depends on what is the optimal way to calculate, we will use it.
May 9th, 2007 at 10:17 am
> space travel will be a very insignificant part of our lives.
It’s not the point. We will be forced to expand almost with the light speed, but this speed will be subjectively MUCH smaller. Nothing will happen before several years after the S event. What means billion of years, subjectively.
This doesn’t explain the Fermi’s paradox. They should be here anyway, if there were any of them. They were filtered out by other means.
May 9th, 2007 at 10:44 am
Hi. Great and useful blog, congratulations. Regarding your argument on the endless time to upload: either I’m completely wrong, or thought (considered as “information processing”) only happens if and while a change happens in the data at hand. Static bits and bytes (a book, a DVD) are but a pool of information waiting to be perceived/understood. (And maybe not every change should be interpreted as thought, but that’s not relevant for this).
The assumption behind uploading (as-we-know-it) is of making a precise copy of the original data in another physical location. Therefore, no change should happen to the data that is being copied/transmited, other than adding to it checksums or other security methods to ensure a low error level in the copying process.
So, even if minds do work a million times faster, sending them as bits of information (as light) would not change them at all, so that no thought processes will occur even if their destination if the far reach of the universe. It’s an image of the mind at a specific moment that is being transmitted, not what makes it tick, so to speak. Only when that image is placed upon a given processing platform will it begin to think again, that is, to change the data from the original image.
The other option, of sending minds along with their supporting hard/wetware (brains in the broadest sense of the word), is not only subject to the laws of relativity (time to reach destination) as to the specific functioning of it. I suppose such an advanced platform could be “shut down” or have a “sleep mode” while on transit, or, if not, at least be able to be tuned down (for instance, a million times slower than normal).
Thanks.
May 9th, 2007 at 10:44 am
A compromise might be to send out space probes and have them bring the stars back to us.
May 9th, 2007 at 10:59 am
Thomas wrote: “This doesn’t explain the Fermi’s paradox. They should be here anyway, if there were any of them. They were filtered out by other means.”
Sure it does. The only reason to go anywhere in the universe would be to start new cultures, and that would be vastly easier to accomplish here. There will be whole new universes to explore and distract us and we’ll soon forget the one we originated from.
Should we ever send probes out, we would long forget them. Perhaps entire civilizations could be engineered to go with the probes to spread civilization outwards, but that would be dribbles compared to the oceans worth of civilizations created here. Current physics seems to be leaning towards the description of our local universe as fractal, meaning that there is likely just as much universe within, or inside, as there is outside. And the inside universe is much more accessible.
Cheers
May 9th, 2007 at 11:53 am
Not send those probes, and sooner or later, some probes will come and swallow you. At least they will awake you from this aphaty.
The reasons we must go outward are:
- security
- new resources
May 9th, 2007 at 11:54 am
There is also a finite degree we can go inward. Beckenstein bound prohibits that.
May 9th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
Computation at the Beckenstein bound in a black hole would keep us busy for a while. Perhaps we will want to gather enough material to make a supermassive black hole. It’s going to be hard to predict the desires, needs, and goals of beings well beyond any god-like entities we can imagine, let alone entire vast cultures of them.
My brain hurts.
May 9th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
For artificial minds or uploaded human minds operating within simulated environments it may well be possible for these to run at arbitrary speeds. However, biological systems are designed to synchronise with events occurring in “real” time.
Anyone who has ever done any work on control systems or studied biological circuits knows that these systems cannot run at arbitrary speeds. If the update rates of these are too slow or too fast they substantially fail to do the kinds of tasks for which they were designed (either by a human engineer or by evolution). When we observe the world around us our senses and cognitive processes fall into synchronised states (limit cycles) which allow us to construct useful dynamic models.
If you speed up a control loop without also correspondingly speeding up the pace of events within the environment the result is often wild erratic oscillations, known as “hunting”, and the system soon becomes uncontrolable. Having spent many years working on industrial control systems and observing the effects of different latencies within distributed multi-processor systems (which is really all our own brains are) I think it’s unlikely that an uploaded human mind would be able to operate at a significantly higher frequency without substantial re-engineering.
May 9th, 2007 at 1:41 pm
Bob, the human mind doesn’t have to directly interface with the outside universe. It can live in a simulated world also running at a billion seconds per second or whatever.
May 9th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
Nick; even that much is relatively irrelevant to a degree. In neural terms, “events” are nothing more than sensory inputs. If you speed up the input/scanning rate equally, you will maintain the balance almost indefinitely. (You eventually run into sampling limits but that’s another story, and probably equally problematic for the acceleration of thought anyhow.)
May 9th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
I think we would still need space travel just for safety and defensive purposes. Why would immortal minds risk the end of their existence by having their entire civilization in one spot which could be easily destroyed?
What about the risk of aggressive alien cultures reaching the post-singularity stage and expanding? It seems like if we have the chance to do this first we should systematically eliminate anything which might threaten us in the future.
But I agree the entertainment and scientific value of space travel is going to be minimal when you can just simulate entire universes.
May 9th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Nick, I agree that in the case where the uploaded mind is inhabiting a simulated environment you can just match the speed of the environment simulation to the speed of the mind and everything remains just peachy. From the upload’s perspective nothing much has changed.
However, in situations where there exists a significant mismatch between the rates of change in the environment and in the mind you will get dysfunctional possibly chaotic behaviour reminiscent of desynchronisation.
Of course it may be possible to substantially re-engineer the upload, adjusting the gains to facilitate an increased rate of thought whilst keeping the overall system within a somewhat stable regime (this might turn out to be difficult to do). As you go down this route though you’re heading towards systems which may bear little resemblance to the human minds from which they originated. It’s at least as possible that such re-engineered human minds could turn out to be “unfriendly” as for the classic AI situation.
May 9th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
I’m not sure this is a huge problem.
Just turn that big cyborg brain OFF for the duration of the trip.
May 9th, 2007 at 3:34 pm
If a spaceship travels at near lightspeed -presumably nano sized spaceships can be accellerated much faster than macro sized spaceships- the onboard time will pass slower because of relativistic effects. So maybe subjectively even distant destinations will be reached almost instantly according to the time experience of the spaceship’s crew, even though a lot of time has gone by for those in the other reference frame?
May 9th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
Yes, you can get there fast either through relativistic acceleration or turning yourself off. But it begs the question, WHY? Using hypertelescopes we will be able to observe coarse features of distant solar systems and simulate them right here in their entirety. Unless you guys actually believe there is life in the galaxy (which presumably you must), interstellar travel (maybe even interplanetary) is a great big snorefest, or at the very best, the same experience you would’ve had if you had just stayed here.
Or unless you think that there’s something special about “real”-y going there. Maybe you don’t believe we’ll ever create VR that replicates the real thing perfectly. I’ve heard the turning your brain off objection many times in this thread now, but why don’t you tell me what another big chunk of iron, oxygen, silicon, and so on has that this big chunk doesn’t?
Brian Dunbar of Liftport, ladies and gentlemen!
Our pal Keith (Henson) is right on the money with VR, to reference your recent Liftport staff blog comment.
May 9th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
If subjective experience is accelerated a few miljon times then relativistic effects would start to enter the picture even when communicating with the guy next door. It would be a gradual effect increasing with distance … So where would be the cutoff point where it would be more profitable to just simulate the neighbor instead of sending a message? It’s the same kind of problem computer processors have even now when deciding to use a cache or not.
May 9th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
Michael; simple — it’s not this one. I’m sorry to point this out, but once again you’ve overlooked a fundamental element: **unless fundamental psychological alterations occur** *THAT* will be reason enough. Our species from those evolutionary pressures you like to deride organics for, was engineered to be migratory.
Or do you *really* think that there was anything *RESEMBLING* a ‘need’ for someone to risk falling off the edge of the world in order to get a continent or two named after someone named Vespucci?
Your position is “confirmation bias”-styled derision of the position that the simple fact that something is physically *real*, it’s worth the trip. Seriously: “Space travel is boring […] a total snorefest […]” — *says you.*
Seriously; if you’re going to be seriously intellectual about this subject, you need to heed the same advice you give out to others.
May 9th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
An interesting point has been brought up in this discussion. It is true that there might by places worth going to even for post-singularity intelligences. Black holes being the example given. They do have the potential to make for the ultimate computers; there is no guarantee that equivalent black holes will ever be created artificially.
Also, black holes are just the begging, there are cosmic strings, monopoles, and most importantly — boundaries between our universe and other universes. If any of those can be found, post-singularity intelligences would have a strong interest in space exploration.
This notion that super AIs will all become homebodies is based on the assumption that nothing that would fascinate THEM will be discovered. This is my gripe will ‘Accelerando’ by Charles Stross. The AIs had evidence of a region of space that was very interesting, but they still allowed themselves to become so big that travel there became impossible. It’s like a very bright child living on one side of great wall finding out, by looking through a crack, that’s just large enough for him to wiggle through, that the other country on the other side is a thousand times better than his native land. Then instead of going through, he waits and waits, and grows and grows, until he can no longer make the trip.
One scenario that I like for an SF story is that every super AI created finds a patch of the night sky very interesting and promptly builds a ship to go there. Humans examine the same patch of sky and can’t see what’s so important and curse themselves for their inability to keep any of them around to take care of us.
Finally, I don’t think anyone would run a copy of themselves in transit if they could help it. If the copy had a chance to diverge and become a separate person, then it would be a unique life lost in the event of a collision with a speck. Better to keep all such branching-mind travelers suspended; thus allowing space travel for their copies to have a 100% safety record.
May 9th, 2007 at 8:15 pm
“or 60 years if you want to slow down at the other end too,”
You can simply create an electric dipole ahead of the spacecraft that will transfer its momentum to the interstellar medium to slow down.
“A world where only 1% of the people are originals and everyone else is a copy could be a bit boring.”
In a world with several quintillion people, I don’t think we’d notice. If 1% of people are originals, and the copying is evenly distributed, that’s a hundred copies per person. Even in today’s world, I doubt people would notice very much; after all, the chances of there being even two copies in a city as big as NYC or San Francisco are small. And doing out some rough math, you’d need to know eight thousand people, on average, before you knew anyone who was a copy of somebody else.
May 9th, 2007 at 8:19 pm
“interstellar travel (maybe even interplanetary) is a great big snorefest, or at the very best, the same experience you would’ve had if you had just stayed here.”
True, but this is only after pretty much everyone is uploaded and understands the new uploaded society. Given how slow humans adapt to social change, how long will it be before the vast majority of the population realizes this? Especially considering that if you took a survey of the current population about uploading, in all likelihood 90% would think you were A), nuts, B), stupid, or C), conmen.
May 9th, 2007 at 8:20 pm
[…] - Space Travel: Not for A Billion Years “Mind uploading will make space travel useless. If my mind is running at a million times […]
May 9th, 2007 at 8:51 pm
Never underestimate ANY sentient process’s will to do anything and everything with its internal clock-rate. For the sake of argument, I will use myself as an example. Naturally, upon upload, the first thing I would gladly do is ramp my processing rate to the absolute maximum I possibly could. As you note: who wouldn’t? A core precept of transhumanism is, after all, milking as much from existence as possible.
However, concomitant with that, I also want to be around to watch the evolution of a post-Singular or post-corporeal *human civilization. So: time to copy myself. That copy then loads itself into, say, a small observation platform designed to run very slowly, experiencing a single terrestrial year as merely a day, or even a minute. Then, I.2 would be able to relax and watch things happen with a leisure completely unknown to I.1, who is living in the thick of accelerated happenings.
However, I am not arguing against your central point: it has long been a favorite theory that the reason our Galaxy has not been subsumed into a gigantic computronium network already is simply that post-Singular civilizations do not expand due to bandwidth constraints. Best to stick close to your central power source (your star) where energy and bandwidth are plentiful, and EM transmission times are as small as possible.
Charles Stross deals with just this issue in his masterful novel Accelerando. It’s something I’m working with in a few writing projects, as well.
May 9th, 2007 at 8:58 pm
What if we are living near a future “gamma ray burst”?
Then, doesn’t it make sense to start moving out?
May 9th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
NO. It will be a move out, but in a billion years of subjective time.
We may go out as soon as 2020, get somewhere to 2025 - but still, it’s a billion of years of subjective time before that date.
Of course, if the Singularity strikes in 2020.
May 10th, 2007 at 5:47 am
Or unless you think that there’s something special about “real”-y going there.
I’m old fashioned - I want to go and see for myself. I’ll allow that VR could be as good as y’all are implying - so what? It still won’t be the same as being there.
There is also this - I like homo sap as a species. I expect I’ll continue to like us as time goes by. That said, even with upload, big ol’ cyborg brains and so on … being restricted to a single planet (or heck since we’re talking Big Ideas) a single solar system is a terribliy bad idee from a long-term species survival kinda deal.
Grow and expand so that a single catastrophe can’t wipe us all out .. that’s the ticket.
But really - there is value in diversity. Some people will stay at home, some will homestead the galaxy. We’ll send postcards.
May 10th, 2007 at 6:40 am
Subjective timescales may appear to be a solid argument to assert interplanetary progress will freeze up. To a human yah.
However, what may be more important are economics. If time, for the subjective experiences of a posthuman can be considered to be flexible, you can’t conclude that “stuff” would be boring if a fast version of “us” had to endure all that thinking time.
From the outside, an observer would see our civilization as it is now, jumbled, erratic and inefficient, muddling along. Then this singularity happens. Efficiency explodes. Demands for raw materials explode, especially rare trace elements. Demands for energy differentials increase too. Sure, where a modest slice of computational effort is wasted on a few tens of billion human uploads, human-mind analogs and related NPC’s, the rest of nonhuman civilization proceed with increases vigor.
Our servants (or zookeepers) head out to that precious differentials. In our soupy biosphere extremes of energy (cold and warm) are scarce and hard to tap; on our nearby neighbor planets they are more abundant; the moon will be invaded in objective days (which may be in fact a slow crawl for all billions of humans engrossed in meta-SL’s and meta-wow’s) but in a few years the moon will be lit my cities, and after that it might be slowly disassembled.
If after those billions of subjective human-uploads have still endured (and I expect they will have voluntarily dissolved/evolved in the virtuality hurricanes before 2200) they may decide to make use of lunar computronium.
If only because the earth is inhabited by half a billion virtual Paris Hiltons by then.
Next stop; mercury and asteroids, in objective months. Who cares if there will be humans piggybacking along as the artillects create dysonspheres? Human upload minds will be trivial and marginal by then. Maybe a few dozen billion human uploads, human mind analogs and accompanying cavalcade of NPC’s will signify billionths of billionths of available computational space. The big action will be elsewhere and thoroughly intransparant to us. Ehhhmm… “us”.
May 10th, 2007 at 7:52 am
A very nice discussion!
I must point out at least one very critical flaw in the argument against space expansion due to accellerating subjective time rates. Even assuming the massive multipliers postulated, as soon as space expansion becomes possible in any wide spread and affordable fashion…it will happen.
In a varied and widely distributed population of culture, bias, rationality, and intellect; some portion of humanity WILL always desire expansion, even with loss of contact with the rest of the human race due to light speed lag increasing with distance.
My own impression is that when the singularity implosion occurs and the majority of the world dives into there collective nirvana navel, I would perfer to take my time. Running fast and far may be the only chance for anyone to enjoy the real world without being sucked inward into a virtual human race solipsism.
Time traps can be fatal. Hey, looks like our virtual heaven servers are about to crushed by a building flung by a super tornado (guess we should have attended to the real world instead of the virtual). Don’t worry though, we’ve got about 10,000 virtual years before it happens. I can do something about it in 9,000 of those years, assuming I remember.
Connection to the real world will always require vigilence in real time. Boredom due to subjective time acceleration may result in unfortunate consequences.
Sometimes the journey is more important than the destination. Life is like that. I’ve no preference to get to the end any time soon.
May 10th, 2007 at 8:18 am
Michael said “Slowing down means tuning out for billions of subjective years. No one will want to do it.” No one, Michael? When someone speaks in absolutes, they are usually wrong.
John Acrinoe said “In a varied and widely distributed population of culture, bias, rationality, and intellect; some portion of humanity WILL always desire expansion, even with loss of contact with the rest of the human race due to light speed lag increasing with distance.”
John made the point far more eloquently than I did in an earlier post - there will always be some fraction of humanity that will desire to explore the real world.
May 10th, 2007 at 8:28 am
Well, I’ll have fun looking at you guys through my telescope, watching you putter along at around the speed of a model T. By the time I publish my first 1000-page novel you’ll maybe make it past geosynchronous orbit. Enjoy looking at the colored rocks millions of light years away!
May 10th, 2007 at 10:26 am
There’s the rub.
I fear that an exponentially increasing gap in power (due to subjective time dilation, intelligence modification, innovations, what have you)is what I really fear in a potential technoligical singularity.
Increased power, speed of thought, and intelligence does not necessarily translate into morality or wisdom. If the leading edge of humanity has orders of magnitude more power than the trailing 99%, civilization as we know it won’t last. It will no longer be a society of assumed equals (as if this we ever really the case). The differences in objectives and even rationality may be incomprehesible between the population segments.
I’ve speculated before that there may not be any way to escape the singularity, as the reach of advancing intelligence will outpace the speed at which you can flee. It may be that the only true defense is to embrace the acceleration. Stay as close to the leading edge as possible, lest the future of all be dictated on the whims of the few.
I shudder to imagine what trouble might ensue from a posthuman neo-deity with a subjective age of 5,000 or more years, problems distinguishing virtual fantasy from reality, and a serious case of boredom. Any one who thinks the singularity will solve all of our problems is dreaming. It will make the giant issues of our day looks like schoolyard squabbles.
May 10th, 2007 at 10:31 am
> a serious case of boredom
You can always cut out the pain. Boredom is a form of pain.
May 10th, 2007 at 10:38 am
“No one will want to do it.”
With respect to gearing down, I’m sure that *I* would. I enjoy the pace of human life as it is right now. I would also like to live forever. So perhaps implementing a superprocess capable of taking care of all of the rapid rate functions necessary, but a subprocess more or less identical to my current consciousness, into which “I” can gear down into once in a while.
Reliving tender moments with my son as he learned to walk, talk, and cuddle. Those are things I’d like to experience again, in perfect fidelity to the original moment.
May 10th, 2007 at 10:47 am
> Those are things I’d like to experience again, in perfect fidelity to the original moment.
Once or several septillion times?
May 10th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
> If you send your copy it’s a different person > and you’ll never see them again! Why do people > act as if when you make a copy, you somehow get > to experience what the copy does? The second it > breaks off, it becomes a totally new person, > like a biological twin, but with shared > memories up to the point of the split.
I had imagined that one of the benefits of uploading would be an ability to literally “share” memories with other uploaded folk, as easily as a computer might transfer a file of any form of media to another another computer (of the same speed, etc, heh). Thus, assuming that your poor copy makes it back home safely, you could each plug yourselves in (to grossly reference matrix-style VR) to the same supercomputer and share the memories of what has transpired in the past (for him, few; for you, many) years.
Of course, this seems awfully messy (you would be putting a life - albeit “only a copy” in danger, etc,when you could probably get practically the same experience from a VR simulation), and frankly I am confused by the tendency to assume that a copy of one’s self would be somehow devoid of desires.
As in:
> Dulcis in fundo, if you are afraid you would miss your girlfriend you can take a copy along.
It is entirely unecessary to create a copy of GF if GF desires to accompany Michael to such far reaches (as one might expect, if romantic relationships then are anything like now), and impossible if she does not (a copy would desire the same things the original would).
Of course, it all gets quite a bit more complicated if you try to alter GF-copy’s desires (which would be entirely immoral, IMO), or if you send a copy along with Michael and then have to decide what to do about him having two girlfriends upon return.
May 10th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
Wow Micheal this post has garnered a lot of comments! It must’ve hit a nerve among the community. I’m grateful for this post because I’ve thought about this in the context of how public resources are used. Let’s face it, NASA is going to get more money for a mission to Mars because the general public along with their trusted lawmakers are still stuck in linear thought. The thought is…well we put a man on the moon, then next logical step is the closest planet!
WRONG! They fail to see the impact of soon to be realized scientific and technological advances, and base their foresight on technology and events that occurred almost forty years ago. That is linear thinking at work.
If those resources were put into the enabling technologies that Micheal is talking about then plans to physically visit Mars could be scrapped in favor of a much more forward-thinking goals, such as the ability to transport ourselves to other galaxies.
We’ll know the Singularity has hit when this changes!
May 14th, 2007 at 9:27 am
“Also, it’s almost certain that there are no aliens at least in this galaxy, or they’d already be here by now. You’d have to leave the galaxy to even have a chance of finding them, making the trip even longer.”
Fermi’s Paradox is a complete fallacy when uttered in this manner. You should be ashamed of yourself, claiming a question to be an answer.
It is NOT “almost certain” that there are no aliens in this galaxy; Fermi’s Paradox is based COMPLETELY on:
1.) The rather strange assumption that aliens, in order to exist, apparently have to want to travel to other worlds outside their stellar system (what if, like us, space travel is cumbersome for them and takes too long, and they’re generally perfectly happy to stay at home? Perfectly likely, you know, especially if they are either no more advanced than we are, or are less-advanced or just more xenophobic)
2.) The equally strange assumption that they would know we exist and want to visit for whatever reason, or that they would somehow stumble across us on accident (the only two options for First Contact). Completely neglects the fact that perhaps aliens might not be lucky enough to find our planet, or that if they’re not within 100 light years away from us, they wouldn’t have even received television and radio signals from us yet and therefore might have no real reason to think there’s intelligent life here. That is of course assuming they use radio and television waves for communication, which they might not for all we know.
3.) Oh did I mention it also was based on the research of the time - which was decades ago, and did not take into account what we know now about real extrasolar planets in Goldilocks zones with the potential for liquid water in their atmosphere? If we’re looking for life remotely like anything on Earth (including microbes), Fermi’s Paradox is becoming more and more antiquated all the time, and it also doesn’t take into account what Asimov once did years ago: that alien life might require an entirely different environment from Earth’s, and thus that we might still be looking in the wrong places.
Also, I can’t help noticing that you used the word “aliens” - as opposed to “intelligent alien life that can communicate with and be recoginized by humans as intelligent alien life”. In short, you’re including microbes and other simple lifeforms in that. If we discover life on another planet someday, the chances are far greater that it would be a very simple one, such as a microbe or maybe if we’re lucky a plant.
Perhaps there ARE alien lifeforms on some rock on the other side of the galaxy, but they’re too crude or simple to communicate with us (but still interesting for science geeks), even if they’re multicellular animals. I mean, do you think even something as evolutionally well-adapted as a cat or a dog could ever make First Contact? Without help? The truth is that even humans are barely advanced enough that we could broadcast our existence or look for the existence of others through telescopes. And as far as we can tell, we’re the most technologically advanced species in the ENTIRE SOLAR SYSTEM, even though we’re vastly outnumbered when it comes to well, numbers, by… insects. Yeah.
Fermi’s Paradox is a good question to pose to the average SF writer who writes about intelligent alien life that is smart enough to communicate or travel long-distance and actually has the will and desire to do so.
It does NOT, however, really ANSWER the question it poses, especially when it relies on now-inaccurate calculations that were already purely STATISTICAL in nature to begin with, based on now-outdated astronomical data.
I’m not saying we’ll ever find Klingons and Vulcans (as fun as Trek and its ilk have always been, such a thing is indeed “almost certain” to not happen), but we actually have NO possible way of being “almost certain” there are no alien lifeforms at all in the entire galaxy, especially when you consider that any life we find may not be inherently carbon-based or even reliant on water or the same general temperature range as Earth’s life.
The definition for “life” does NOT include “carbon-based” any more than it does “sapient”.
By the way, something almost everyone who is pro-uploading or theorizes about mind-uploading seems to forget is what happens to the body once you’re uploaded?
If the upload is based entirely on brain-SCANNING, what is so inherently wrong with this process that the body would die afterwards? Unless people are ONLY uploading right before or immediately after physical death, I see no reason why there couldn’t be a perfectly large meat population right alongside the non-meat, for at least a little while. This is especially true if we aren’t able to simulate the pleasures of the flesh (or the truly complex semi-randomized nature of human thought and emotions) at the same time as we figure out how to do truly accurate brain-copying.
As for “Why would you send a copy”, why not? Life as we know it and have known it for our entire existence, is by its nature self-replicating. It WANTS to spread copies of itself. Granted, there will certainly be people who won’t want to send only copies off, but there would be others who might find the concept amusing. Also, the old “eggs in one basket” applies; people will already almost certainly be wanting to back up their minds, at least, because what happens if the server you’re on crashes, or gets attacked by a virus that erases you?
May 16th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Interesting thoughts. Not sure why you guys assume that the Singularity will succeed, if it happens — perhaps because it’s a “boring assumption” to think otherwise? Time dilation really messes up a lot of these arguments — if you could accelerate to 1-eps of the speed of light, then time dilation would “slow” the moving person’s watch by a factor of about 1/sqrt(eps). So one has to think about who is moving with respect to who, and why people would want to stay still (energy sources and knowledge, one presumes). Also I’m not sure the current laws of physics would really hold up for people like this, who knows they might leak out of our Universe through some hole in string theory or something.
June 6th, 2007 at 2:51 am
We can travel. but singularitarian will find us.
Also with mind uploading, it will be easier to send signal data than physical body, it will be faster.
I’m not reading the discussion, this is too long, but is it what you were saying ?
–Jon
September 19th, 2007 at 9:28 am
Light Speed travel is an option I believe and I do not think it will take a subjective incredible length of time from the travellers perspective.
It is my understanding that the reason subjective time slows as you approach light speed is that the individual electrons take longer to orbit the nucleus of the atom. At light speed, the electrons are continually following the nucleus which would mean that, electrically, no information processing would occur regardless of the substrate that your intelligence is on. In essence, for the traveller, the time light speed is reached to the time light speed is stopped, would appear instantaneous to the traveller.
Everyone else moving at the accelerated though pace would move through their relative timeframe which would be 1,000,000 times what we currently perceive if we thought 1,000,000 times faster.
I guess my point is this:
Assuming AGI allows us to develop light speed+ travel.
Subjective Travel Time is immaterial for the traveller.
September 28th, 2007 at 3:58 am
The concept of ‘mind uploading’ is fascinating, indeed. Excellent article and interesting comments! Great insights.
I’d like to challenge the assumption that extra-solar stars or exoplanets are too far away. This is only true, if the mind uploading technology matures faster than the technology required for interstellar travel.
My prediction is that interstellar travel will beat mind accelerating technology by a few decades. One of the most promising concepts is based on the assumption that interstellar travel will take several millenia and it becomes quite feasible by combining the following:
1) Long-lasting, durable and resilient materials (carbon nanotubes, titanium alloys …)
2) Cryopreserved human embryos
3) Androids based on advanced artificial intelligence (as suggested by you in one of the other posts)
4) Embryo-splitting technology
5) Identical twins born at different times (as a test scenario)
Does this make sense?
October 6th, 2007 at 1:59 am
Xenical hgh phentermine quit smoking detox….
Xenical hgh phentermine quit smoking detox. Xenical. Xenical meridia gt gt buy meridia….