- Location
- The observable universe
So on both alternate history.com and Spacebattles have a thread for posting and discussing the videos of Issac Arthur but SV doesn't well now it does.
“Science and Futurism with Issac Arthur “ thread
- Thread starter StarMaker764
- Start date
- Science Tech Discussion
Jane Dough
(She/Her)
- Location
- Occupied Cascadia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
He's pretty interesting. He had a tendency to view civilization in terms of infinite growth for the sake of infinite growth though, and it gets kind of depressing sometimes.
Richardson
CAN YOU HEAR THE PEOPLE SING?
- Location
- Yes
The more resources you have, the closer to the Heat Death you can last. Or, perhaps well beyond it as he points out. There very much is a reason for 'infinite growth', as he points out. He takes the ultimate long-view.
Jane Dough
(She/Her)
- Location
- Occupied Cascadia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Perhaps, but kind of starts to wonder if it's worth just... devouring everything in your path. Just so your descendants might last a little longer?
It feels wrong somehow.
- Location
- The observable universe
He did suggest an alternate way last week by using the material to create stars in a relatively small area of space in what could only be described as a Dyson swarm of stars
Richardson
CAN YOU HEAR THE PEOPLE SING?
- Location
- Yes
Which... requires materials to make, so you need to go out and build Skadov thrusters around larger stars to bring them back so you can mine them down to make bunches and bunches of smaller red dwarves that will last forever, or store the fuel away for the dark ages long after 'natural' star formation has ceased.
- Location
- The observable universe
Would make for an interesting Sci Fi setting though
Richardson
CAN YOU HEAR THE PEOPLE SING?
- Location
- Yes
All of his videos make for interesting sci-fi settings.
Because they're filled with fantastical science.
RRoan
Technogaianist
- Location
- 'round a far, distant star
Why would you bring them back to some central location? Just disassemble them in-place and build a society there.
Shkadov thrusters are far too slow anyways.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
If you want to maximize the lifetime of the energy supply wouldn't turning stars into black holes then harvesting the Hawking radiation allow you to have a steady (if smaller) source of energy for much longer?
- Location
- The observable universe
You will have to feed those black holes in order to get any significant amount energy out of them and seeing as the most energetic Black holes are also the smallest they wouldn't last very long. You can use larger ones and rely on things like reverse computing to survive but you would need to wait till heat death
- Location
- Writeland
Well depending on the state of medicine or transhuman technology it might be so that YOU can live longer.
And what's the alternative? Just leaving it sitting around? How is that better?
Richardson
CAN YOU HEAR THE PEOPLE SING?
- Location
- Yes
Well, yes, once you use up all viable fusion fuel, long into the dark ages, that would be the next step.
Yeah, he covered this in one of 'Civilizations at the End of Time' episodes.
Yeah, Entropy is a cast-iron bitch like that. Have to jealously gather up all you can while you still can, then Scroogily hand out as little as possible to her, and even then she'll still kill you in the end. The ultimate Yandere.
- Location
- The observable universe
Well this pretty much becomes redundant if you can escape to an alternate universe, tap vacuum energy ro figure out a way to stop the universe expansion (which would be reversing entropy all together). Who knows what things we might discover in the future
- Location
- Writeland
Yeah but in the (Likely) event that all of those things are impossible, best to just make sure you have plenty of grain stored up because the winter is never going to end.
Jane Dough
(She/Her)
- Location
- Occupied Cascadia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Gonna be honest. No matter how good medicine is? I ain't lasting long enough to begin worrying about the death of the universe.
Perhaps some digital copy of me might, but that isnt me. It's no more me than a version of myself from an alternate timeline.
And honestly? Probably won't even be the original copy either. That will probably die long before and end up replaced with a new one.
Radical life-extension is possible.
Biological immortality is not.
- Location
- Writeland
Those are some big claims I'd love to hear you back up with more than "it seems hard so it's never gonna happen."
Just for starters; how do you feel about gradually converting your soft and squishy brain into something more durable? There's no single point where you suddenly "Become" artificial, and it's not a "Copy" because there is only ever one you.
EDIT: I just realized that this is a bit off topic, because when I said "You" in that previous post I wasn't talking about you personally, I was talking about some hypothetical person living in an established posthuman society. Not that I think it's impossible for it to be you personally, that's just not the scenario I was describing.
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Jane Dough
(She/Her)
- Location
- Occupied Cascadia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I don't belive mind uploads are impossible. But uploading a file doesn't actually move the file into the place you are uploading it to. It just makes a copy of it. Why should we assume minds work any different in this regard?
And it doesnt matter how good medicine is.
You will eventually get unlucky and die in an accident or something. Beyond that, even if they can bring you back from the dead in every circumstance, it very likely runs into the problem that uploading does.
It's great that some version of me might live a very very very long time, but I think it would be unreasonable to think that that is the same as myself living a very very very long time.
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- Location
- Writeland
I appreciate that you took the time to respond so thoughtfully to my first line, but I have since added some more as they occurred to me, so I hope you'll address those as well, although perhaps it should be in a different topic or PM since this discussion doesn't actually directly relate to any video I'm aware of.
Cloak&Dagger
Definitely Insane
Well here's the thing, if I think that an upload is me, and you don't, there will be quadrillions of me, who will live forever, and only one of you, who will die.
Regardless of pointless philosophical arguments, I win.
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Jane Dough
(She/Her)
- Location
- Occupied Cascadia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
.... what even is this?
Are we somehow in competition? Because I dont remember entering competition with you.
Cloak&Dagger
Definitely Insane
Life is a competition, you're always competing with others and the universe for resources.
If you voluntarily proclaim immortality impossible, the immortals will be perfectly happy with fewer competitors.
Jane Dough
(She/Her)
- Location
- Occupied Cascadia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I never said it was impossible. Just that it's impossible for this instance of me. My consciousness will cease, even if there are millions of other me's carrying on.
- Location
- Writeland
>Not networking your myriad forks into a single massive superorganism kept in sync through constantly updating shared databases.
>Not becoming the Cybernetic Pando Pando (tree) - Wikipedia
Your consciousness was always illusionary and meaningless anyway, it can't cease to exist because it never existed in the first place. You are created and deleted on a moment to moment basis and your consciousness has ceased and been recreated countless times since it initially arose. You've been dead for years, what you think of as yourself is merely a highly divergent mutated clone of the you that was.
So really it'll be business as usual, you won't even notice the difference.
Kokurokoki
"IDW DA NYA!"
- Location
- Area S09
Yeah I have to second this.
You could literally write an entire science fiction mythology on just the concepts that he explores in a few of his videos.
I mean... we are already doing this now if we are taking that angle unfortunately.
That said, I never got that notion from his videos, and I used to listen and watch them religiously. But going out into the stars and harvesting the materials that are readily available and virtually infinite in the context of the scale of our society doesn't really seem all that bad. We are currently dealing with resource shortages that tend to cause a lot of socio-economic friction in society now, if we could solve that issue then possibly we could then instead focus our energy towards scientific achievement and understanding.
Yeah that is a good point. I think Arthur even covers it in one of his videos. Are you still you millions of years in the future? If every aspect of your personality even down to your ideologies has changed, is that still you? That's kind of a bit of an existential horror in and of itself. Imagine you end up as a xenophobic bigot billions of years into the future. You've changed so much from your original form that you might as well have died.