These things are more in line with science fiction than science. We have no idea whether any IGUS (Information Gathering & Utilizing System) or ETI exists elsewhere in the entire universe. There is a sort of Copernican principle that suggests they should, but we do not know that. We may in fact be little more than a vast almost infinitely improbable fluke <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faU-SK0pHCI>. There are reasons to not like this prospect, but if in the domain of complexity we are just one example it might be there are no other analogues. Extreme intelligent systems in the universe, such as Dyson sphere powered mega brain/computers, are very speculative. I would not say these things are impossible, but they seem very implausible.
The idea of telescopes the size of planets may suffer from one problem. Quantum fluctuations of secondary optical systems may introduce noise into the angular resolution. LC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faU-SK0pHCI On Tuesday, January 2, 2018 at 11:01:15 AM UTC-6, Jason wrote: > > > To a Jupiter brain, our most complex physical theories would be as trivial > as Tic-Tac-Toe. It stands to reason then, that whatever the particularities > of the starting conditions for the ultraintelligence, they soon become a > small fraction of what will occupies that mind. Most of what will fill such > a mind will be information extracted from mathematics, which is equally > accessible and common to all such minds regardless of the universe they > start in. > > What kinds of things might preoccupy a mind the size of a star? There are > certainly many things it could do, but what might it choose to do? > Obviously to get to its point it had to do much learning, discovery and > exploration, the continuation of such is one possibility. Bordom is another > great concern for an entity that can think so fast and exist for so long. > Entertainment is a second possibility activity for such ultraintelligences. > A third possibility is doing good for other beings. > > Humans are far behind the hypothetical intelligence of a planet-sized > brain, and yet we have largely figured out the laws of physics in our own > universe. Physics, and chemistry, as a source of new discovery and insight > might soon dry up under the anylsis of an ultraintelligence. Biology too, > once the ultraintelligence scanned and analyzed the DNA of every speices on > Earth and reverse engineered the course of evolution and adapdation going > back billions of years. Observation of far away planets may be possible > through the engineering of truly colossal telescopes, but it would likely > prove frustrating. > > An optical telescope with an apeture equal to the diameter of the moon > could only resolve objects larger than a mile at the distance of one light > year. To keep the same resolution while looking at something 1,000 light > years away and the diameter of the telescope's aperture has to increase > another thousand times. At this point, the telescope would be over 2 > million miles in diameter. Using such a telescope to view an Earth-sized > planet 1,000 light years away would yield an imagine a few thousand pixels > by a few thousand pixels. It would be enough to tell whether or not there > was life on the planet, and perhaps pick out the existence of cities, but > all told it is still a small amount of information returned for such a > massive investment of material and energy. > > This is a problem for ultraintelligences. Even with massive investment in > instruments to collect information from the physical realm, such > information comes in only as a slow drip compared to the > ultraintelligence's capacity to process that information. Fortunately, > there exist alternatives for such a mind to meet its thirst for knowledge. > By using just a fraction of its available computing power, it could > simulate the entire history of life on an Earth-like planet and in the > process learn everything there is to know about it. > > All movement and associated computation that occurs on our planet is > driven by energy. Nearly all (99.97%) of the available energy on earth > comes from the sun, with the rest coming from radioactivity and tidal > energy. This amount of energy is almost inconceivable. When quantified, it > is equal to 173,000,000,000,000,000 watts or 173 Petawatts. Yet, as much > energy as this is, it is less than one half of one billionth of the sun's > output. Most of the sun's energy escapes our solar system, unused and > wasted. Of the energy that does reach our planet, plants capture only 0.06% > of it, and so a further 99.94% is unused by life. > > A Matryoshka brain, built around a star like our sun would have available > 2.2 billion times the energy budget of Earth. This means without making any > optimizations to algorithms used to simulate life, it could run an Earth > simulations 2.2 billion times faster than normal time. An entire planet's > 4.6 billion year history could be re-run in about two years. However, it is > life where all the complex interactions happen, and life uses only 0.06% of > Earth's total energy. Therefore, a Matryoshka brain interested in only the > history of life on a planet would only need to spend 0.06% of those 2 > years, or just 11 hours, to run that complete simulation. > An ultraintelligence could therefore learn the entire 4.6 billion year > history of a planet in a matter of hours. This is certainly a superior form > of learning than peering through a telescope for billions of years, and > better still, it scales with the capacity of the mind. The more intelligent > and capable the intelligence is, the greater its capacity to produce new > knowledge through simulation. Further, there are no limits to what it could > explore. It could, for example, explore possible planets in universes with > different laws of physics. There is no physical way for the intelligence to > ever visit these places, but they are not out of sight from an intelligence > so vast. And if mathematical realism is true, these discovered places > represent genuine discoveries, rather than imaginings. There are unlimited > riches available in the universe of possibilities of mathematics. An > ultraintelligence could no doubt spend many eons searching through this > space, finding new connections between things, in its effort to learn > everything. > > Jason > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
