I agree with everything you wrote about duplication...but I have to take issue with your last point.
Hal Finney wrote:
Another interesting result of this paper concerned "daughter universes". In some models, it may be possible to trigger the formation of new inflating regions which would "bud off" from our own space time and produce their own infinite-sized level 2 universes. The authors of this paper had proposed in an earlier one that this could be a mechanism for civilizations to survive heat death, that they could create daughter universes and somehow send information into them which could be taken up and incorporated by civilizations evolving in the daughter universes.
However, in the context of the multiverse, this won't really work,
because any finite number of messages are insignificant in the context
of an infinitely-duplicated multiverse. Only a finite number of regions
can receive the messages, compared to an infinite number of regions
that either don't receive them, or receive spontaneously-generated fake
messages (like our discussion earlier today of "magical" universes).
Therefore the messages can have only an infinitesimal impact on the
evolution of the daughter universes and cannot be considered a meaningful
form of survival.
I think that the survival would be meaningful for the civilisation doing the broadcasting so long as at least one daughter universe is able to replicate the civilisation, just as I have meaningfully survived so long as future versions of me exist somewhere in the multiverse, even if I only survive in an infinitessimally small fraction of the universes (Quantum Immortality).
Matt.
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When God plays dice with the Universe, He throws every number at once...
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