"The mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog."
@@DavidChipman Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. If I remember correctly, this is a random pointless tangent where the protagonist says something seemingly innocuous, but unbeknownst to him a random quantum fluctuation opens a wormhole from a point right next to him into a negotiating room in another galaxy, where his words get misinterpreted as a grave insult to both parties.
The Matrioska civilization discussed towards the end is such a fascinating concept to me. The way the different shells offer different experiences of time and different levels of social connectivity is mind-bending to think about. I mean, imagine how much the societies in each ring could evolve and diverge from one another, some changing thousands of times faster than others. Obviously this would be dampened somewhat by the immortality of individuals, as I assume that would decrease the general population’s propensity for change, but still! It’s crazy to think about, and I’d kill for a nice Sci Fi book that dug into all the implications of it. Great video as always Isaac!
The reddit story, first contact by ralts touches on this and alot of what isacc has on this channel, it's close to 600 chapters, the writer says it's the story he sees when he closes his eyes to sleep and feels compelled to write it.
I remembered the Story "Perfect State" by Brandon Sanderson is about this episode specifically, it's a pretty compact story, quick read that stays with you, I'd recommend it first.
One of my favourite personal story ideas I keep meaning to write about is a type of medical nanite that posses a gestalt sentient mind. They only live in the human body and are symbiotic with "their" human. Their focus however is on the macro scale, so they don't care much about what their human does in their day to day life but more on how it effects their shared body which is their home.
Oooo! A good subplot for a sequel might be that there is a schism among the nanites. They decide they just can't co-exist in the same meat-ship, so they give the host an overwhelming urge to reproduce in order to create another host for one of the factions to leave in. This would probably be an easier plot to work with a female host... That biological clock you hear ticking is all in your head in so many ways!
I remember reading the bobiverse series wondering why one of the bobs hadn't just decided to dedicate an entire system towards making the largest VR simulation in the entire bob empire.
I believe that Bob is to human to do that. He would need many other replicants. Or be really bored and run into blind alleys do to lack of other points of view.
with them having true realtime communication, they could turn multiple star systems into giant compute nodes and connect anyone anywhere to a staggeringly vast VR simulation, and connect them all to each other.
Well, he did make a nexus, his research station, where bobs could stay before they could move on. No mention on how many Bobs could be supported though.
@@Eulemunin Nail on the head. He would scoff at that idea, then feel like a hypocrite because he of what he did to a certain star. If ya know ya know 🤣🤣🤣
Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, April 2001, "Cockroaches" by Joseph Manizone had several neighboring aliens living in Virtual Reality on their homeworlds, making "bubble universes" with their VR that connected to other alien worlds in VR space only via hyperspace. Travel in real-space was unheard of. Until they found a new planet, Earth, whose inhabitants were making progress with space probes instead of VR.
Well, yes and no. Do to the square cube law, smaller organisms need to eat more per kilo of biomass to keep up with their larger metabolism, which in turn is necessary to keep their insides the right temperature.
Has there ever been an episode done where, if we were looking out at the stars, what a civilization expanding out past its home star or even a digital civilization look like to our ground based equipment? How could we tell if there was something truly anomalous happening around a star? And how far away can we detect strange activity before it fades into the background?
@Gravel Pit Radio signals work just fine after even thousands of light years of distance, that's something we discussed in that episode. You just have to scale up your approach, either in receiving or transmitting.
@Gravel Pit don't forget that Earth went through hundreds of millions of years covered in life, albeit not what we call sentient life. Smart monke is only a half million years old, and only learned to read and write a few thousand years ago. There might be lots of planets that for one reason or another don't produce a sentient species, but are nonetheless covered in life. And it maybe be quite tasty when covered in mayonnaise.
This episode dovetails nicely with Anton Petrov's video about a new proposed Kardashev scale where advances in human civilization are measured by greater efficiency of power and greater and more thorough integration into a given environment. Instead of focusing on Dyson spheres collecting a zillion times the energy we can, they start by doing a zillion times more work out of every watt of power than we do now. A Qualitative Kardashev scale instead of a Quantitative scale. Elements of miniaturization fits perfectly into such a scheme. Also it's about integrating and adapting to our planet, or other environments better before making great expansions further outwards. ua-cam.com/video/b3xro2jHevk/v-deo.html
One thing to point out is that while not unlimited miniaturization to some extent could be done fully biologically. After all humans are primates which compared to other mammals have somewhat done this on evolutionary terms, however we are far from the pinnacle of biological life birds have far more compact brains which use multiple sizes of neurons arranged into neural lattices. This is why birds can be so smart despite being so small compared to us and they still have fully meat brains despite what some crazy conspiracy theorists on the internet might claim.
Good discussion of the tradeoffs of large Dyson spheres - large size for cooling, small size for interconnectedness. (Or Dyson swarms, but let's not get caught up in that. Dyson called them spheres) I've often thought that we might do better by using a large sphere as a huge heat rejector and conveying the refrigerant to a smaller inner sphere where the computation is done. Heat transfer by conduction or convection is generally more efficient than radiative heat transfer. One downside would be that it would take many years for the refrigerant mass to make a complete orbit so you're not getting as much use out of it as you could.
I think keeping it radiative would be best. Innermost shell/swarm (lets just call it shwarm) collects shorter, high energy photons (UV?), extracts some energy, rejects rest as a lower energy visible photons outward to next shwarm. That shwarm does similar, now radiating out to the next shwarm in the infrared. We do already have photocells that can collect infrared, so make a shwarm for that wavelength. Possibly you could keep doing this all the way to just above the 2mm cosmic microwave background.
I figure there's no reason why a civilization wouldn't be filled up with both the biological, cybernetic, fully synthetic, and people that live digitally full time, part time, or some mixture of all of the above. And even having a lot of the latter would only be a delaying tactic for expansion. You'd still want to head to the stars eventually!
This works in the biological world only where the separate life forms can’t utilise the same resources. Same holds for human cultures. Let’s hope that is the case in the future. You don’t see a lot of stone age cultures still hanging around, though I have heard about this island out in the Indian Ocean...
This works in the biological world only where the separate life forms can’t utilise the same resources. Same holds for human cultures. Let’s hope that is the case in the future. You don’t see a lot of stone age cultures still hanging around, though I have heard about this island out in the Indian Ocean...
Wouldn't it be advantageous for the outer rings to run slower and manage the deep space mining/colonization efforts and let the inner rings not have to worry about that stuff? And they could be on rotating shifts so you spend a few years in the outer ring then spend a few centuries in the inner ring or just stay in the outer ring if thats your preference.
@@hil449 If we haven't surpassed the societal problem of income inequality and class divides by then, we might as well just give up at being a civilization lmao, what a pathetic failure
I'm imagining a prisoners dilemma where people defect from living IRL because they can do so much more in a simulation and a further layer where people inside the simulation defect from the main sim to become asynchronous or "desync" because they want to do over events, live in a different time or basically be catered to by their personal reality.
The trouble with that is the digital version of you isn't you it's just something new that is very much like you. Even if the process of digitizing you involves blasting your meat body with enough radiation to accurately fix the position and composition of all your component atoms and vaporizing you in the process, YOU still die. I can't really think of a way to transfer yourself into code that isn't more like having an immortal digital child that's exactly like you. People would still do it to be sure, but I would think you wouldn't get widespread adoption. Of course, since those digital children would be immortal, eventually they would be the dominant civilization assuming meat space people were not immortal themselves.
@@MNewton That's getting into the Ship of Theseus paradox. In my experience, the people who favor digital brain uploads are following the "if it quacks like a duck" philosophy; "If it thinks like me and acts like me, then it is probably me." (Or they haven't thought about it past the cool factor.)
@@MNewton Not necessarily, depends how quickly you do it. Yes, switching out your brain for an artificial computer at once would seem to most people like dying. BUT what if you just install a chip to better interface with your computer? And then another to improve language capabilites? And then another for better logical thinking, another for better memories etc. After a few years/ decades/ centuries your "brain" will consist mainly of chips, after a few more centuries, the "biological" part will be negligable. I don't think most people will feel like they have died in between, since there has not been a clear "cut" - in fact, cells, molecules, neurons in our brain change all the time anyway. It's kind of a Ship of Theseus type of problem.
i wonder what we really could become in the future. i often think about that transhuman in house of suns, abraham was his name i think. Very cool stuff. good video isaac!!
If you want efficiency, there's *far* simpler ways to achieve this: there's currently about 90 billion animals that serve as livestock. Reduce that number by a factor of 10 and you save more land than any amount of vertical farming would. That can be done without turning everyone vegan, too; just reduce the amount of meat consumption (which in turn would have health benefits as well).
@@binaryblackhole8666 Efficiency isn't just about the raw cost of production and distribution. Firstly, it will be greater quality by needing less time to get to markets, and also not needing pesticides, so less waste. By having food production within a city, you also create a tighter trade loop, ideally contained entirely within the city. That eliminates external risks. And most importantly, a vertical farm is more easily automated, and more easily serviced by technicians within the city.
I think that once we understand how the human brain works, I don't think Moore's Law will be a limitation in making a solid state brain: Smallest neuron type = 4 microns = 4000 nanometers Smallest feature size in current ICs = 5 nanometers
A neuron integrates inputs from a large number of connections. So, it is more like a "summation" device than a switch. Your point is still valid. But the scale factor might be 100::1 instead of 1000::1.
Got to be careful with the nanometer "feature size" as marketing has cast its reality distortion field over that recently. A better measure would be "transistor density", which has not been keeping as fast a pace as Moore's law would predict recently.
@@richardgreen7225 The neural network research field is prototyping analog elements to do just this, moving away from binary to store the weightings during network training. There are definite speed advantages to be had by breaking the digital abstraction that neural network CS researchers have been forced into for hardware reasons.
It might be disappointing, the 'inspiration' for much one of the most recent scripts was me walking around the back of my farm, slipping in some mud, falling on my butt, and thinking "I wonder if civilizations ever feel this way about early space race efforts and say screw it?"
I love your work man keep it up please. The Fermi paradox is one of my favorite things to ponder. Given just blind luck and happenstance to provide an opportunity for life and an observable universe that seems around 14 billion light years in any direction it would seem to me that we must be among the very earliest to develop possibly even the first truly technological civilization. Give me a moment for this, even starting with say hydrogen and discounting all subatomic activity as factors for simplicity, consider the number of fusions required to produce enough materials to form a human ( I will not even touch the numbers required to produce such an elaborate electromagnetic machine from biological parts) even given a trillion stars per galaxy and a trillion galaxies in the known universe so we have greater chances of success and start with that as our proxy universe. The deck is stacked in favor of life forming as we have unlimited time to achieve it. What we supposedly know of the universe relies on "inflation" to grant us the space to perform our task. What if it never happened and what we see as the inflationary period was merely due to proximity of mass and time dilation caused by such mass. In other words it just looks like inflation due to our current temporal perspective. What I am driving at is simply are we a really lucky fast solution or is the universe far older than we think.
@@InterviewsWithTheAncients No need to be so aggressive that's not helping your case, quite the opposite. As far as we know, we cannot observe any traces of civilization outside of earth, that's the main point of the Fermi paradox, that you seem to be ignoring
@@InterviewsWithTheAncients Not ignoring anything, to be honest there are some convincing, or rather interesting evidence but nothing that is "rational" in the sense of the scientific method, meaning that we are able to reproduce results of previous testimonies. Therefore, we cannot be sure of anything. The only thing we can be sure of is that, by looking at space around us, we do not see any trace of either civilization or any technosignatures, even though we think we should. That's the only certainty we have right now. It might change in the future who knows, but if I may, you should change your condescending/on the defensive tone, nobody's attacking you here and that's not helping your argumentation
For 20 years, I thought that civilizations go into the microcosm long before they go into space. And from the microcosm to the depths of the Universe unknown to us. But Isaac Arthur almost convinced me that a technological singularity is impossible.
No one would be able to bend or break him... Cas he's got Faith Of The Heart... It's been a long road, To get from there to here. It's been a long time, But my time is finally here. And I can feel a change in the wind right now. Nothing's in my way. And they're not gonna hold me down no more. No they're not gonna hold me down. Cause I've got faith of the heart. I'm going where my heart will take me. I've got faith to believe. I can do anything. I've got strength of the soul. And no one's going to bend or break me. I can reach any star. I've got faith, I've got faith, Faith of the heart. It's been a long night, Trying to find my way. Been through the darkness, Now I finally have my day. And I will see my dream come alive at last. I will touch the sky. And they're not gonna hold me down no more. No they're not gonna change my mind. Cause I've got faith of the heart. I'm going where my heart will take me. I've got faith to believe. I can do anything. I've got strength of the soul. And no one's going to bend or break me. I can reach any star. I've got faith, Faith of the heart. I know the wind's so cold, I've seen the darkest days. But now the winds I feel, Are only winds of change. I've been through the fire, And I've been through the rain, But I'll be fine. Cause I've got faith of the heart. I'm going where my heart will take me. I've got faith to believe. I can do anything. I've got strength of the soul. And no one's going to bend or break me. I can reach any star. Cause I've got faith, Cause I've got faith, Faith of the heart Faith of the heart. I'm going where my heart will take me. I've got faith to believe. And no one's going to bend or break me. I can reach any star. 'Cause I've got faith, 'Cause I've got faith, Faith of the heart... It's been a Long Road...
Here's the thing that never seems to get taken into account with the Fermi Paradox. Humans - Homo Sapiens, to be precise, emerged 300K years ago, but due to evolving during a period of glaciation on the planet, farming was not started until less than 12K years ago. Farming is at the very heart of civilisation because without farming you don't settle down. An alien civilisation that evolved on a planet without an ice age, or during one if its warmer periods could be conceivably 300K years more advanced than us. They're probably advanced past radio so any radio signals they leaked likely reached us when we were still hunter gatherers. It's hardly surprising we hear nothing now.
Several hundred thousand under ice? The record is much more spiked back and forth and we were doing a lot of div-stuff earlier than you assume. You ignore flood-farming and other opportunist adaptions. Your stuck in a very old paradigm. Look up the spanking-new Graeber-Wingrew book ‘start of everything’ or ‘beginning of everything’ … the first of four planned books presenting a wider-angle view on human societies and our flexibility.
Well we don't just rely on radio communication as our only way of detecting another civilization. We also look at heat. If a star is giving off more heat than the light it gives off suggests, that is an indication that the star may have something around it collecting that light for power, but as excess heat must still be radiated away this shows possible advanced technology. Not to mention that even with a few hundred thousand years head start on us, their signals depending on our relative proximity to them could just now be arriving. An example is if the Milky Way is 200,000 light years across as some now believe and the other civilization started up 150,000 years ago on the far side of the galaxy from us we might have already had their signals pass, they are just arriving, or they have not gotten here yet. As all this depends on when they started using radio and how strong. While they probably would use radio as it is one of the low hanging fruits on the Electromagnetic Spectrum, there is no way to predict if our advancement to it was fast, slow, or average. Nor since we have only sent a few probes out and have no need for powerful communications across stars, just when such a system would be in wide, powerful use. Or for that matter if we ourselves would even use radio to communicate with other stars we ourselves may colonize. This also works with any technology we have developed. It could be we developed farming rather quickly, took forever, or are average as compared to other possible civilizations. With a sample size of one we really can't say how likely many things are. My personal beef with the Fermi Paradox is it's premise that there should be other civilizations out there. The Fermi Paradox as I understand it is that due to the age of the universe there should be other civilizations out there. This is however not exactly true, but instead how we perceive time. We look at the universe as billions of years old. Because that is ancient beyond measure compared to us. Even by the most radical theories I have heard the human race is still less than half a million years old. So we look to the 13 billion approximate years old and think that is ancient. In reality the universe is relatively young. Estimates range of star formation continuing from 100 billion to a trillion more years. And some of the smaller stars lasting trillions and some estimate quadrillions of years. To me this puts the universe still in it's toddler years at best. And based on that I think we are the first or one of the first. If any others do exist we simply haven't had enough time to see them yet.
@@davidtherwhanger6795 just because the universe is young does not change the fact that it is still too old to be empty. If you increase the life span of the universe you don't spread civilizations across time, you just increase their number. Also we are suspiciously early in the universe, almost as if there is a selection effect against being born late....
@@AwfulnewsFM OK. In your first paragraph you say the universe is too old to be this empty. And in your second paragraph you say we are suspiciously early in the universe. This seems to contradict itself. I tend to agree more with your second paragraph than your first. Bare in mind that the universe didn't start out day one being able to have life. It took quite some time for even stars to form. Then more time for stars to create the elements in abundance. Then more time for those elements to coalesce into planets. And more time for life to start. The we begin the long climb up that ladder. Which from our one and only example took billions of years. And as that is the only thing we have to go by we must assume that it is average that it takes a long time and has many points along the way in which life can be snuffed out and the process must begin all over again. All of this points to us being one of, if not the, first in the universe.
Very interesting. Seems like the beginning steps towards transcendence theory; intelligent species generate a black hole to orbit their star and then surf the event horizon.
Ever since I was a kid in the 80's I've had this fantasy of being the size of an ant and equipped with power armor to fight off wasps and horse flies and other pesky biting insects.
@@Andrew-zq3ip That's awesome! I used to pretend my TV/VCR remotes were starships and simulated battles between ships and paper tanks I drew myself. Then make up stories about their adventures and write them down.
I think the same limits would be reached just with proportionally higher numbers. Termites and ants out-mass us humans 2 to 1 here on Earth, but they can more directly consume cellulose. If you add the biomass of our cattle, which is how WE consume cellulose, we are about even with the termites and ants in biomass.
Everyday physics would also be weird to human perception. Manageable quantities of water (such as what you might want to take a bath in or try to cook a meal with) wouldn't be flowing fluid, they would be jello-like balls sticky with surface-tension, or in larger quantities, a surface you could walk on. Fire would be different (e.g. candle flame instead of campfire). Falling would not be dangerous, but a breeze might blow you into another country. But riding dragonflies could be fun!
If I had the resources and authority, I would consider a gardener fleet that created real representations of the most interesting virtual worlds across the galaxy. Art, on the most massive scale imaginable.
Even if miniaturization is limited, computation is limited by communication. And communication latency is limited by the speed of light. So a planet-sized computer needs 0.03 s to get a signal from side to side. An eternity. Therefore if an uploaded society seeks to maximize computation, it will try to be as physically compact as possible. And taking a ship away from the hive mind, dropping your IQ from trillions to billions would be so painful, that "people" would prefer to stay with light milliseconds from the central quantum computer.
I wonder about that. The current optimized general intelligence on this planet (us), tend to spend an awefull lot of our time trying to think Less, and Slower. Add up the money and human-hours devoted to drinking alcohol, smoking ships rigging, playing repetitive video games, chanting repetative mantras/prayers... Now compare that to the numbers devoted to, say, hunting down more fundamental mathematics of physics. Maybe it is the case that human level intelligence is a barely tolerable condition, and that gets even worse once it is ramped up to super-human?
@@NullHand One of my speculations is the possibility that intelligence might tend to fragment if/when it exceeds the (roughly) human level. At human level, there's already a bit of this tendency. People with multiple personality disorder, or just authors and RPG enthusiasts who enjoy making up and "being" different characters, and so on. Increase cognitive capacity just a bit, plus grant the ability of minds to "upload," and those alters/characters could genuinely wander off to become their own people. At least, it's (IMO) a good way to have super-futuristic societies with human-level characters instead of un-relatable transhuman/trans-alien god-tier superminds.
I was wandering if our host has heard about the MIT 2040 Doomsday report, it's recent update, and maybe his thoughts on it? I have my own opinion from a social science background but would like to hear a physicists perspective.
I would imagine any civilization, even digital ones, would find value in having offspring simply from the standpoint of strength through alternative points of view. Any civilization not doing this necessarily falls under the Fermi paradox and explains why we never hear anything about them.
@@InterviewsWithTheAncients I'm specifically referring to aliens who have let their civilization grow stagnant through lack of growth, by not pursuing offspring. My point is offspring benefit society, not only from sheer numbers but from divergence of perspective.
That assumes they value alternative points of view. It's also possible that a hyper-conservative civilization could define "strength" in terms of preserving continuity of Tradition, and (if equipped with digital immortality) might reject procreation precisely because the young might get "crazy newfangled ideas" and become troublemakers.
It would be nothing to edit one's memories, so the mundane experiences are quickly forgotten, allowing a person to experience 40,000 years in a sort of fugue state, disconnected from the true passage of time. Only those events which were novel would "stick", and so they'd never be bored. Of course, boredom is another mental state, like aggression or the drive to pioneer, which could be switched off, leaving a subject perfectly content to watch the walls rust until his or her actions were needed to preserve the ship and its crew.
The problem with that might be competative time debt. What if another ”colony ship” headed the same way also at a similar fraction of the speed of causality spent that 40,000 years in research and inovation?
@@NullHand Why bother? Send a colony off with the means to download and install minds, and bootstrap an industrial base, put a skeleton crew aboard to shepherd it to where it needs to go, and have the rest of your colonists manning a research station, advancing the cutting edge, right up until the day they need to be beamed to the colony ship. Of course, the problem with this, and with your example, is that during that 40,000 years, the goal, or just the concept of the goal, is likely to change quite radically. The people who arrive are unlikely to be the people who left. What they want will change over the ensuing years. That other colony, after spending 40,000 years in sim aboard a ship barreling through the cosmos, might very well hold a vote and decide they'd all be much happier putting the ship into a highly eccentric orbit around a star, with the apastron being slow enough, laterally, that they can casually mine an asteroid belt for material to expand the ship into a purely digital colony. They might simply no longer be interested in establishing the type of colony they assumed they were taking part in a subjective forty millennia previously.
@@S_RoachI’m assuming that the speed of light/causality is in effect both for ships and beamed communication. I am also assuming ships can be pushed up to some fair fraction of that, say c/2. In a 40,000yr colonization race to some destination 20,000 light yr away (galactic core?), three ships from competing companies/subspecies/factions. Ship one spends the entire voyage in R&D, whether real or simulated. Ship two hits the hibernate button for 40,000 years, they will be up to 40k years of development behind ship 1. Ship 3 just sends a people printer/downloader. Once they land they begin printing out souls that were beamed 20,000 years ago from the launch civ. So they are potentially 20,000 years behind ship 1. But if the beaming civ is able to advance technologically at twice the rate of ship 1, they will be even.
@@S_Roach Another assumption. All 3 ships have a very good reason for wanting to be 20,000 light yrs away. Something like an existential threat. Genocide, enforced obsolescence of your virtuality. Maybe digitalization refusenics who want to stay sqhishy, but all available habitable zones are being ”gentrified” into matrioshka computronium.
@@NullHand I take it you didn't catch that in the video. He was talking about the pilot/crew potentially running on a higher clock, and the ship traveling to a much nearer destination, on the order of lightyears, not tens of thousands of lightyears, while those onboard experienced accelerated time. Not 40,000 light years away, but 40,000 years of subjective time. Since they're running at such a higher clock speed anyway, I'm assuming they're already digital. Also, at .5C, the passengers will only experience 0.866 of the passage of time of someone who stayed behind. 40 years would feel like 34.6 years, unless the crew was running at a higher clock. Then it'd still be slower than what could be achieved by a stationary facility.
The irony of me literally reading a hello fresh recipe as I get the notification for this video, about to cook some hello fresh :D OK I'm gonna shut up and watch the video now :D
This reminds me of what Douglas Adams said about an entire star fleet being swallowed by a small dog as they didn't take the relative scales into account.
I'm a big fan of your channel, Isaac. Particularly the way you present the logical reasoning for your conclusions (I did physics with Open University). I don't always agree with the conclusions, but the point is this site makes me think about them. For example, not convinced that the human brain can be so easily put onto computer: it's been a few years since I read Roger Penrose the emperor's new mind, but the basic argument makes sense. Evolution will find the least inefficient solution. That solution could well be that our brain's can use subtleties in quantum physics, like entanglement or many worlds, that we are only just figuring out. In that case simply replicating the neural connectome will not capture the subtleties. Also, there does appear to be growing (subjective) evidence that dreams are more than the standard model of neuroscience would have us believe, and that near end of life patients really do appear to connect to "the other side" before death - see publications by Peter Fenwick. I make a point of stating that the evidence is subjective and not objective, but it is statistically significant. To be clear I am not religious, but declare myself as pantheist (regarding the universe as inseparable from spiritual aspects). No doubt I will post more thoughts on other SFIA subjects as time allows...
One solution to the Fermi Paradox could be that there are vast differences from one galaxy to the next, in terms of the amount of habitable planets that also have strong magnetic fields, or some other factor that permits digital devices to exist free from solar wind damage. And perhaps the Milky Way is middling, or even deficient, in this regard. Perhaps there is a galaxy nearby, maybe even in our Local Group, that is much more digital friendly? Or it could be even simpler. Perhaps, once a galaxy exceeds a certain metallicity, you will find that it is teeming with life. Or perhaps there are factors that we aren't even considering. But if this life friendly galaxy is not the Milky Way, we probably won't find it for many thousands of years.
something that kept coming to mind, is the movie "downsizing". they miniaturized humans in some mysteries way, that was never really looked at. but, it was a main plot point, that they used less of everything, costing that much less, to live day to day. so, if some people have gone smaller, how much easier would it be to send they to colonize, and start production plants, for the "normal" sized humans to come to? sending the tiny scouts, who dont need as much fuel, to bring everything they need, to start making everything that the larger people will need. using that split between, to speed up and make colonizing more planets, solar systems, etc. but then, you also have the speed they live their lives, and the cultural issues between, since both groups are still meat, not machines, yet.
Has your channel touched on the topic of alternate or parallel dimensions? The existence of these, and the ability to tap them, might explain the Fermi Paradox very neatly. Once a society reaches the level of technology necessary to interact with this alternate dimension or dimensions, they do so and we simply cannot detect them at all with our current tech.
he's mentioned alternate realities & pocket universes a few times but since that depends on science we don't have & don't have any reason to think exists there's not much to talk about. Though it bears mentioning that it isn't a perfect solution as the vast/infinite reasources of a multiversal civilization just trivializes interstellar colonization to the point where it would be hard to explain why no one would at least send probes out of curiosity &/or security
So our Universe is basically a flyover state farming village where everybody leaves for a less boring reality as soon as they get a drivers license. I think Ian Banks wrote that into his Culture series.
Here's a hot take from a Canadian regarding 'Framejacking': I find that when I partake of our legal marijuana, I experience time compression. I feel like hours have passed, look at the clock and it's only been minutes. I guess my brain is just really accelerating?
In regards to communicating with people on the other side of the sun / out in space. If the program everyone is living in agreed to shut down once a year for 30 seconds you could turn that 1000 year message into a 1 year message, you could go even further and say once a day we shut down for 1 second to allow messages / mail / orders from the government to populate to everyone?
do you think magic like scarlet witch or dr strange use from marvel is just advanced programmable matter like nanotech, picotech or even femtotechnology with maybe different physical constants due to being from another universe. because nanotech can manipulate any molecules, picotech and femtotech can also manipulate any atoms and sub atomic particles
You should make a video about military/spec ops strategy with the help of FTL/warptech/clarketech and interplanetary large fleet battle (if you think they are plausible) strategy
Isaac: figures out complex communication strategies for simulated human societies Me after living for thousands of years in a matter of some real life days: "I'm mister meeseeks look at me! I just wanna diiiieee!"
oh crap he did it. ive been thinking this for a loooong time. the best thing about size is time is relative to size so in theory the smaller you get the more you can do in a shorter amount of time.
The main problem for the digital society, that for them it would be even simpler to travel other solar systems. For them existing in a space ship or on the surface of a planet would be the same, living long enough to see the result of the voyage is expected and so on. And since they need much less resource, they could much easier colonize non ideal solar systems, they only need basic materials and solar energy, probably available in any solar system. Also the much smaller needed space means smaller interstellar spaceships, so once again, simpler and faster travel. The only downside would be losing the access of the original network as the lag grows, but that only an issue if we assume every "individual" in this system is 100% addicted to the network.
@@virutech32 They are problems for someone who wants to use the possibility of digital societies as an explanation for the absence of visible aliens and a reason why they would not expand outside their solar system.
Issac you're brilliant. And I can't tell, but some of the stock footage and digital assets you use are borderline scary. You're trekking the uncanny valley Arthur
While it may not be quite the same, anyone who's played a bit of Stellaris may recognize the benefits of 'playing tall' and using your space to the fullest before you start any earnest expansion, if you do at all. Seems to me that in those terms, a Matryoshka Brain is just the ultimate way for a machine civilization to play tall, sending out mining drones to gather resources for the super-long-term, when their power supply component (the Sun) reaches end-of-life and needs to be replaced.
If they have teck to shrink in size they probably have tech to enlarge resources... Going smaller is not the smartest move in the midst of evolutionary species competition and eventual future wars... Going into virtual worlds seams great but wouldn't the servers be left at the mercy of eventual solar flares, meteorites or alien intrusion ? Unless they created robots to protect them... Edited typos
What if we make a simulation that procedurally generate a universe ahead of our exploration to the exact laws what the actual universe have except we can implement ways of traversing this distance. In that sense we can achive space exploration as it would be in the real thing with less resources as we only generate the explored areas in meaningfull detail and the distance this algorithm starts to produce significant deviation from the real thing might be so far out in the digital realm that not even our hacks on it would be enough to reach it in a life time (including a digital life time, counting a desire to die into it). If nothing else this would be a grteat alternative to compensate those generational ship's generations that die trough the voyage but experience the real thing close to death in such a way so effectivelly they wouldn't feel to be just a means to to the end and wastly reduce stress or other complications related to missing fullfillment.
from this episode, I propose the grow-slow solution: intelegent civilizations odn't expand to the stars until they use up all the resources in ther home star, and none have yet. this assumes that the assumption in the paradox of an ancient universe falls apart in the math. let's assume that population growth and resources used per person growth are small enough to not outgrow their home star yet. let's also assume that waste energy can be reused, maybe not infinitly but enough to allow a star to dissapear and leave no obvious IR radiation tell tale therefore 14 billion years isn't enough to consume a whole star system if you are agressive about using resources wisely, and since proximity to others matters if there's no FTL communication, no intelegent civilization has reason to colonize the galaxy quite yet. they don't have beacons and havn't intentionally tried to contact us yet. we can't see them because they're all hidden. because you can hide and they won't need resources for another several billion years (or way more) they all might be hiding from each other. this requires science we don't have yet and there are exclusitivity issues possibly at play but it's pretty plausable of an explanation TL;DR we see no aliens becvause they use/store all their star's energy and waste heat, and they havn't used enough of it up for it to be worth it yet to colonize another star. 14 billion years isn't long enough to start seeing beyond K2 civs
Liked and commented before even starting to watch as usual, as this oak is the best creator on the internet. I'll probably be back afterwards too, as I will be changed human, and also less hungry by that point, thanks Isaac for reminding me to get something, as I'm sure it will happen. (To the guy on the internet who makes sure I don't get diabetes, and blows my mind like a pro, every week.)
We are already creating the civilization you describe Arthur, with the "Metaverse." I think we will find that our human (and AI) creations will be far more interesting and exciting than the actual universe we were born into (assuming we aren't already in one).
Instead of so many miniature computerized people, why not have a single individual conciousness containing all the knowledge of all the individuals? You wouldn't need as much duplicate copies of the same bits of knowledge, so you could store a larger quantity of total knowledge
So how miniaturizing are we talking here? Like the movie Downsize Me to 1/10 scale of a person or to atomic size, so you can play ball with a hydrogen atom?
I read about them developing DNA based data storage as a more durable alternative to digital data storage. What do you think would be the optimum mix of electrical / optic / genetic computing, given near future tech? Graphene low temperature electrical, laser processing, DNA hard drive, quantum calculation would be on my current list, maybe quantum spin RAM, the lag issue would be the graphene interfaces between systems. 1024 qubits running on multispectral parrallel blue / violet / ultraviolet lasers maxing at 750 THz. On windows 12.
Disconcerting thought - if it turned out to be the case that we were in a VR, I wonder what the likelihood is that we are in a Matrioshka brain already. The architecture of that doesn't quite remind me of Leonard Susskind's holographic findings in all respects but it's got a similar flavor in terms of 2-D spheres within spheres. Clearly just a random thought but one I'm definitely going to file away for later.
Good episode thanks Isaac, quite thought-provoking. Quick note: you pronounce 'ad infinitum' ad in-fin-EYE-tim' (in other words, emphasis on the penultimate syllable, and that syllable is pronounced 'eye,' like what you see with. Rhymes with 'my' and 'tie.'
My money is on intelligent life being short-lived. Life is competitive by nature. Add the intelligence to self-improve and make weapons, and no matter what the creature is, it doesn't have long. We always assume self-improving machines and self-replicating nanobots will lead to disaster, yet that is exactly what humans are!
Sped-up perception of time would also explain why a digitalized species wouldn't want to communicate with us even if they could teleport to us instantly. Humans would be like "wwwweeeeeeeeeee (three days later) cccccoooooommmmee iiiinnnn (three days later) pppppp..." Meanwhile the aliens play space golf to pass the time until we finished our sentence lol
Should've explored the other way They slow down time as they expand to the point of a billion years for them is a second for us That would require far less energy to maintain You could keep some at hyper or normal speed to take of the rest while they live inside their own worlds
5:41 what if they get to the point where in the virtual world they have magic The magic is based on an algorithm where they allow something to happen just by chanting the word so or knowing the intent to the action for the magic to occur this is only in their virtual world where everybody's mind has been uploaded so they can have a better life than what they were born into.
Aww snap here I go only like two minutes in and I’m already backtracking wondering if it wouldn’t be more appealing to a species to speed up perception and move deeper into a synthetic system of existing as opposed to life extension and many many generations moving far out into the void to find what may only be an extremely slim chance of other species or even devoting lifetimes to terraforming a new world… Why not just delve inward?
Say I could copy my mind into a computer program. I wonder how my copy would experience it's virtual existence without a human soul. Without mortal consequences and with time being basically unlimited how moral would my copy be? We can program right and wrong but if we program free will then what stops a virtual copy from say "turning off" another person's copy effectively killing them after their physical body dies? And what would a utopia look like if you live in a digital world devoid of a line between right and wrong? If you could just "turn someone off" what keeps this virtual society going? Rather than the human consciousness becoming infinite I purpose this may very well likely lead to the extinction of anything vaguely human. But let me hear your thoughts on this
Said society might also elect to modify and "fix" all the non-workaholic, obsessive individuals, considering them lazy and non-productive (relative to the hyper-focused few).
"The mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog."
LOL Did you just make that up, or is that from a story? Thank you all for the answers/background.
@@DavidChipman Its from one of the hitch hikers guide books
@@DavidChipman Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. If I remember correctly, this is a random pointless tangent where the protagonist says something seemingly innocuous, but unbeknownst to him a random quantum fluctuation opens a wormhole from a point right next to him into a negotiating room in another galaxy, where his words get misinterpreted as a grave insult to both parties.
Beat me to it!
Small Dog.... 3800.... (from memory please to collect)
The Matrioska civilization discussed towards the end is such a fascinating concept to me. The way the different shells offer different experiences of time and different levels of social connectivity is mind-bending to think about. I mean, imagine how much the societies in each ring could evolve and diverge from one another, some changing thousands of times faster than others. Obviously this would be dampened somewhat by the immortality of individuals, as I assume that would decrease the general population’s propensity for change, but still! It’s crazy to think about, and I’d kill for a nice Sci Fi book that dug into all the implications of it.
Great video as always Isaac!
The reddit story, first contact by ralts touches on this and alot of what isacc has on this channel, it's close to 600 chapters, the writer says it's the story he sees when he closes his eyes to sleep and feels compelled to write it.
I remembered the Story "Perfect State" by Brandon Sanderson is about this episode specifically, it's a pretty compact story, quick read that stays with you, I'd recommend it first.
One of my favourite personal story ideas I keep meaning to write about is a type of medical nanite that posses a gestalt sentient mind. They only live in the human body and are symbiotic with "their" human. Their focus however is on the macro scale, so they don't care much about what their human does in their day to day life but more on how it effects their shared body which is their home.
you should do it! I like robot/ai companions, and one that was actually in the protagonist's body would make an interesting dynamic.
Oooo! A good subplot for a sequel might be that there is a schism among the nanites.
They decide they just can't co-exist in the same meat-ship, so they give the host an overwhelming urge to reproduce in order to create another host for one of the factions to leave in.
This would probably be an easier plot to work with a female host...
That biological clock you hear ticking is all in your head in so many ways!
@@NullHand then the music starts 🎵 bow chicka wow-wow 🎶
I remember reading the bobiverse series wondering why one of the bobs hadn't just decided to dedicate an entire system towards making the largest VR simulation in the entire bob empire.
I believe that Bob is to human to do that. He would need many other replicants. Or be really bored and run into blind alleys do to lack of other points of view.
with them having true realtime communication, they could turn multiple star systems into giant compute nodes and connect anyone anywhere to a staggeringly vast VR simulation, and connect them all to each other.
Well, he did make a nexus, his research station, where bobs could stay before they could move on. No mention on how many Bobs could be supported though.
I think later in the series they were working on it.
@@Eulemunin Nail on the head. He would scoff at that idea, then feel like a hypocrite because he of what he did to a certain star. If ya know ya know 🤣🤣🤣
Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, April 2001, "Cockroaches" by Joseph Manizone had several neighboring aliens living in Virtual Reality on their homeworlds, making "bubble universes" with their VR that connected to other alien worlds in VR space only via hyperspace. Travel in real-space was unheard of. Until they found a new planet, Earth, whose inhabitants were making progress with space probes instead of VR.
Solution for fermy paradox is that civilisations miniturise their colony fleets, that come to earth, but every time they get eaten by a small dog.
Your joke has a source, the distinct echo-location reveals a copy of Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy.
Aliens chased around by hungry pigeons and squirrels ... id watch it.
I pondered on this idea in a less scifi way before. For example i am a large man
Well, yes and no. Do to the square cube law, smaller organisms need to eat more per kilo of biomass to keep up with their larger metabolism, which in turn is necessary to keep their insides the right temperature.
*due
Has there ever been an episode done where, if we were looking out at the stars, what a civilization expanding out past its home star or even a digital civilization look like to our ground based equipment? How could we tell if there was something truly anomalous happening around a star? And how far away can we detect strange activity before it fades into the background?
Kinda, our mega telescopes episode and its companion, alien beacons, both go after those points to some degree or another.
@Gravel Pit Radio signals work just fine after even thousands of light years of distance, that's something we discussed in that episode. You just have to scale up your approach, either in receiving or transmitting.
@Gravel Pit c'mon now
@Gravel Pit don't forget that Earth went through hundreds of millions of years covered in life, albeit not what we call sentient life. Smart monke is only a half million years old, and only learned to read and write a few thousand years ago. There might be lots of planets that for one reason or another don't produce a sentient species, but are nonetheless covered in life. And it maybe be quite tasty when covered in mayonnaise.
This episode dovetails nicely with Anton Petrov's video about a new proposed Kardashev scale where advances in human civilization are measured by greater efficiency of power and greater and more thorough integration into a given environment. Instead of focusing on Dyson spheres collecting a zillion times the energy we can, they start by doing a zillion times more work out of every watt of power than we do now. A Qualitative Kardashev scale instead of a Quantitative scale.
Elements of miniaturization fits perfectly into such a scheme. Also it's about integrating and adapting to our planet, or other environments better before making great expansions further outwards.
ua-cam.com/video/b3xro2jHevk/v-deo.html
Not a new proposition iirc
One thing to point out is that while not unlimited miniaturization to some extent could be done fully biologically. After all humans are primates which compared to other mammals have somewhat done this on evolutionary terms, however we are far from the pinnacle of biological life birds have far more compact brains which use multiple sizes of neurons arranged into neural lattices. This is why birds can be so smart despite being so small compared to us and they still have fully meat brains despite what some crazy conspiracy theorists on the internet might claim.
And bee brains are very dense in terms of neurons per cc.
But isn't the documentary channel Kurzgesagt entirely ran by digitized birds?
@@clovernacknime6984 Yes
Good discussion of the tradeoffs of large Dyson spheres - large size for cooling, small size for interconnectedness. (Or Dyson swarms, but let's not get caught up in that. Dyson called them spheres)
I've often thought that we might do better by using a large sphere as a huge heat rejector and conveying the refrigerant to a smaller inner sphere where the computation is done. Heat transfer by conduction or convection is generally more efficient than radiative heat transfer. One downside would be that it would take many years for the refrigerant mass to make a complete orbit so you're not getting as much use out of it as you could.
Now I'm imagining heat pipes with lengths measured in astronomical units.
I think keeping it radiative would be best.
Innermost shell/swarm (lets just call it shwarm) collects shorter, high energy photons (UV?), extracts some energy, rejects rest as a lower energy visible photons outward to next shwarm.
That shwarm does similar, now radiating out to the next shwarm in the infrared. We do already have photocells that can collect infrared, so make a shwarm for that wavelength.
Possibly you could keep doing this all the way to just above the 2mm cosmic microwave background.
@@atk05003 Cosmic travel via Steampunk pneumatic tubes! :)
I figure there's no reason why a civilization wouldn't be filled up with both the biological, cybernetic, fully synthetic, and people that live digitally full time, part time, or some mixture of all of the above. And even having a lot of the latter would only be a delaying tactic for expansion. You'd still want to head to the stars eventually!
This works in the biological world only where the separate life forms can’t utilise the same resources.
Same holds for human cultures.
Let’s hope that is the case in the future.
You don’t see a lot of stone age cultures still hanging around, though I have heard about this island out in the Indian Ocean...
This works in the biological world only where the separate life forms can’t utilise the same resources.
Same holds for human cultures.
Let’s hope that is the case in the future.
You don’t see a lot of stone age cultures still hanging around, though I have heard about this island out in the Indian Ocean...
This is the best channel on UA-cam.
My favorite too
Wouldn't it be advantageous for the outer rings to run slower and manage the deep space mining/colonization efforts and let the inner rings not have to worry about that stuff? And they could be on rotating shifts so you spend a few years in the outer ring then spend a few centuries in the inner ring or just stay in the outer ring if thats your preference.
I'm pretty sure the inner ring would be for rich people and politicians lmao
@@hil449 If we haven't surpassed the societal problem of income inequality and class divides by then, we might as well just give up at being a civilization lmao, what a pathetic failure
I'm imagining a prisoners dilemma where people defect from living IRL because they can do so much more in a simulation and a further layer where people inside the simulation defect from the main sim to become asynchronous or "desync" because they want to do over events, live in a different time or basically be catered to by their personal reality.
The trouble with that is the digital version of you isn't you it's just something new that is very much like you. Even if the process of digitizing you involves blasting your meat body with enough radiation to accurately fix the position and composition of all your component atoms and vaporizing you in the process, YOU still die. I can't really think of a way to transfer yourself into code that isn't more like having an immortal digital child that's exactly like you. People would still do it to be sure, but I would think you wouldn't get widespread adoption. Of course, since those digital children would be immortal, eventually they would be the dominant civilization assuming meat space people were not immortal themselves.
@@MNewton That's getting into the Ship of Theseus paradox. In my experience, the people who favor digital brain uploads are following the "if it quacks like a duck" philosophy; "If it thinks like me and acts like me, then it is probably me." (Or they haven't thought about it past the cool factor.)
@@MNewton Not necessarily, depends how quickly you do it. Yes, switching out your brain for an artificial computer at once would seem to most people like dying. BUT what if you just install a chip to better interface with your computer? And then another to improve language capabilites? And then another for better logical thinking, another for better memories etc. After a few years/ decades/ centuries your "brain" will consist mainly of chips, after a few more centuries, the "biological" part will be negligable. I don't think most people will feel like they have died in between, since there has not been a clear "cut" - in fact, cells, molecules, neurons in our brain change all the time anyway. It's kind of a Ship of Theseus type of problem.
@@mylex817 hmmm true though I suppose you would have to try it to really know. I suppose at the end of the days all subjective experience.
@@mylex817 hmmm true though I suppose you would have to try it to really know. I suppose at the end of the days all subjective experience.
This video was worth waiting for 500 years!
Wait it was only 500 years for you?
Arthursday = Peak attention mode
i wonder what we really could become in the future. i often think about that transhuman in house of suns, abraham was his name i think. Very cool stuff. good video isaac!!
Abraham valmek. I've read that book multiple times. He is my favorite.
@@mr.wookiesack House of suns is by Alistair Reynolds.
@@MNewton they were referring to a character in the book's name, not the author's!:)
Aaaaaaaah my bad. I should reread that then.
@@MNewton I love Alistair as an author. He comes in second place after Ian m banks for me!
I’m interested in the vertical farms episode. It essentially means all food can be locally produced. More efficient in the end, and it frees up land.
The costs of transportation are greatly exaggerated. The expenses of vertical farming are much more significant.
If you want efficiency, there's *far* simpler ways to achieve this: there's currently about 90 billion animals that serve as livestock.
Reduce that number by a factor of 10 and you save more land than any amount of vertical farming would.
That can be done without turning everyone vegan, too; just reduce the amount of meat consumption (which in turn would have health benefits as well).
@@binaryblackhole8666 Efficiency isn't just about the raw cost of production and distribution. Firstly, it will be greater quality by needing less time to get to markets, and also not needing pesticides, so less waste. By having food production within a city, you also create a tighter trade loop, ideally contained entirely within the city. That eliminates external risks. And most importantly, a vertical farm is more easily automated, and more easily serviced by technicians within the city.
I think that once we understand how the human brain works, I don't think Moore's Law will be a limitation in making a solid state brain:
Smallest neuron type = 4 microns = 4000 nanometers
Smallest feature size in current ICs = 5 nanometers
A neuron integrates inputs from a large number of connections. So, it is more like a "summation" device than a switch. Your point is still valid. But the scale factor might be 100::1 instead of 1000::1.
Got to be careful with the nanometer "feature size" as marketing has cast its reality distortion field over that recently.
A better measure would be "transistor density", which has not been keeping as fast a pace as Moore's law would predict recently.
@@richardgreen7225 The neural network research field is prototyping analog elements to do just this, moving away from binary to store the weightings during network training. There are definite speed advantages to be had by breaking the digital abstraction that neural network CS researchers have been forced into for hardware reasons.
I would like to see a video where you talk about the thinking process you use to tackle these topics. Anyone else?
It might be disappointing, the 'inspiration' for much one of the most recent scripts was me walking around the back of my farm, slipping in some mud, falling on my butt, and thinking "I wonder if civilizations ever feel this way about early space race efforts and say screw it?"
@@isaacarthurSFIA Amazing. Absolutely amazing
I love your work man keep it up please. The Fermi paradox is one of my favorite things to ponder.
Given just blind luck and happenstance to provide an opportunity for life and an observable universe that seems around 14 billion light years in any direction it would seem to me that we must be among the very earliest to develop possibly even the first truly technological civilization.
Give me a moment for this, even starting with say hydrogen and discounting all subatomic activity as factors for simplicity, consider the number of fusions required to produce enough materials to form a human ( I will not even touch the numbers required to produce such an elaborate electromagnetic machine from biological parts) even given a trillion stars per galaxy and a trillion galaxies in the known universe so we have greater chances of success and start with that as our proxy universe.
The deck is stacked in favor of life forming as we have unlimited time to achieve it. What we supposedly know of the universe relies on "inflation" to grant us the space to perform our task. What if it never happened and what we see as the inflationary period was merely due to proximity of mass and time dilation caused by such mass. In other words it just looks like inflation due to our current temporal perspective.
What I am driving at is simply are we a really lucky fast solution or is the universe far older than we think.
@@InterviewsWithTheAncients Damn man, way to just roll through with some dumb garbage in response to such a quality comment.
@@InterviewsWithTheAncients That's a dumb comparison.
@@InterviewsWithTheAncients
No need to be so aggressive that's not helping your case, quite the opposite. As far as we know, we cannot observe any traces of civilization outside of earth, that's the main point of the Fermi paradox, that you seem to be ignoring
@@InterviewsWithTheAncients
Not ignoring anything, to be honest there are some convincing, or rather interesting evidence but nothing that is "rational" in the sense of the scientific method, meaning that we are able to reproduce results of previous testimonies. Therefore, we cannot be sure of anything. The only thing we can be sure of is that, by looking at space around us, we do not see any trace of either civilization or any technosignatures, even though we think we should. That's the only certainty we have right now. It might change in the future who knows, but if I may, you should change your condescending/on the defensive tone, nobody's attacking you here and that's not helping your argumentation
I always love your videos about life in our universe and the lack there of
After doing some research on what future computers will be like I am amazed at what I found these digital empire technologies are awesome.
Post notification gang
For 20 years, I thought that civilizations go into the microcosm long before they go into space. And from the microcosm to the depths of the Universe unknown to us. But Isaac Arthur almost convinced me that a technological singularity is impossible.
aaah, _someone_ will want to stay and explore regular ol' Einsteinian space.
Welcome to another episode of "what would Isaac do if he had unlimited resources and faith"
No one would be able to bend or break him... Cas he's got Faith Of The Heart...
It's been a long road,
To get from there to here.
It's been a long time,
But my time is finally here.
And I can feel a change in the wind right now.
Nothing's in my way.
And they're not gonna hold me down no more.
No they're not gonna hold me down.
Cause I've got faith of the heart.
I'm going where my heart will take me.
I've got faith to believe.
I can do anything.
I've got strength of the soul.
And no one's going to bend or break me.
I can reach any star.
I've got faith,
I've got faith,
Faith of the heart.
It's been a long night,
Trying to find my way.
Been through the darkness,
Now I finally have my day.
And I will see my dream come alive at last.
I will touch the sky.
And they're not gonna hold me down no more.
No they're not gonna change my mind.
Cause I've got faith of the heart.
I'm going where my heart will take me.
I've got faith to believe.
I can do anything.
I've got strength of the soul.
And no one's going to bend or break me.
I can reach any star.
I've got faith,
Faith of the heart.
I know the wind's so cold,
I've seen the darkest days.
But now the winds I feel,
Are only winds of change.
I've been through the fire,
And I've been through the rain,
But I'll be fine.
Cause I've got faith of the heart.
I'm going where my heart will take me.
I've got faith to believe.
I can do anything.
I've got strength of the soul.
And no one's going to bend or break me.
I can reach any star.
Cause I've got faith,
Cause I've got faith,
Faith of the heart
Faith of the heart.
I'm going where my heart will take me.
I've got faith to believe.
And no one's going to bend or break me.
I can reach any star.
'Cause I've got faith,
'Cause I've got faith,
Faith of the heart...
It's been a Long Road...
The galaxy is on Orion's belt.
Here's the thing that never seems to get taken into account with the Fermi Paradox. Humans - Homo Sapiens, to be precise, emerged 300K years ago, but due to evolving during a period of glaciation on the planet, farming was not started until less than 12K years ago. Farming is at the very heart of civilisation because without farming you don't settle down. An alien civilisation that evolved on a planet without an ice age, or during one if its warmer periods could be conceivably 300K years more advanced than us. They're probably advanced past radio so any radio signals they leaked likely reached us when we were still hunter gatherers. It's hardly surprising we hear nothing now.
Several hundred thousand under ice? The record is much more spiked back and forth and we were doing a lot of div-stuff earlier than you assume. You ignore flood-farming and other opportunist adaptions. Your stuck in a very old paradigm. Look up the spanking-new Graeber-Wingrew book ‘start of everything’ or ‘beginning of everything’ … the first of four planned books presenting a wider-angle view on human societies and our flexibility.
Well we don't just rely on radio communication as our only way of detecting another civilization. We also look at heat. If a star is giving off more heat than the light it gives off suggests, that is an indication that the star may have something around it collecting that light for power, but as excess heat must still be radiated away this shows possible advanced technology.
Not to mention that even with a few hundred thousand years head start on us, their signals depending on our relative proximity to them could just now be arriving. An example is if the Milky Way is 200,000 light years across as some now believe and the other civilization started up 150,000 years ago on the far side of the galaxy from us we might have already had their signals pass, they are just arriving, or they have not gotten here yet. As all this depends on when they started using radio and how strong. While they probably would use radio as it is one of the low hanging fruits on the Electromagnetic Spectrum, there is no way to predict if our advancement to it was fast, slow, or average. Nor since we have only sent a few probes out and have no need for powerful communications across stars, just when such a system would be in wide, powerful use. Or for that matter if we ourselves would even use radio to communicate with other stars we ourselves may colonize. This also works with any technology we have developed. It could be we developed farming rather quickly, took forever, or are average as compared to other possible civilizations. With a sample size of one we really can't say how likely many things are.
My personal beef with the Fermi Paradox is it's premise that there should be other civilizations out there. The Fermi Paradox as I understand it is that due to the age of the universe there should be other civilizations out there. This is however not exactly true, but instead how we perceive time. We look at the universe as billions of years old. Because that is ancient beyond measure compared to us. Even by the most radical theories I have heard the human race is still less than half a million years old. So we look to the 13 billion approximate years old and think that is ancient.
In reality the universe is relatively young. Estimates range of star formation continuing from 100 billion to a trillion more years. And some of the smaller stars lasting trillions and some estimate quadrillions of years. To me this puts the universe still in it's toddler years at best. And based on that I think we are the first or one of the first. If any others do exist we simply haven't had enough time to see them yet.
@@davidtherwhanger6795 That's what I think as well, we are basically the first or one of the first.
@@davidtherwhanger6795 just because the universe is young does not change the fact that it is still too old to be empty. If you increase the life span of the universe you don't spread civilizations across time, you just increase their number.
Also we are suspiciously early in the universe, almost as if there is a selection effect against being born late....
@@AwfulnewsFM OK. In your first paragraph you say the universe is too old to be this empty. And in your second paragraph you say we are suspiciously early in the universe. This seems to contradict itself.
I tend to agree more with your second paragraph than your first. Bare in mind that the universe didn't start out day one being able to have life. It took quite some time for even stars to form. Then more time for stars to create the elements in abundance. Then more time for those elements to coalesce into planets. And more time for life to start. The we begin the long climb up that ladder. Which from our one and only example took billions of years. And as that is the only thing we have to go by we must assume that it is average that it takes a long time and has many points along the way in which life can be snuffed out and the process must begin all over again.
All of this points to us being one of, if not the, first in the universe.
ive watched all episodes, and again, thank you Arthur and all that help you
Very interesting. Seems like the beginning steps towards transcendence theory; intelligent species generate a black hole to orbit their star and then surf the event horizon.
what if the blackhole was the size of an atom 🤔
@@grudge7719 Then it would have already evaporated due to hawking radiation :P
Turning into 1mm tall creatures would make resource scarcity almost a non-issue.
Ants suddenly becoming gigantic would be problematic though!
Ever since I was a kid in the 80's I've had this fantasy of being the size of an ant and equipped with power armor to fight off wasps and horse flies and other pesky biting insects.
@@Andrew-zq3ip That's awesome! I used to pretend my TV/VCR remotes were starships and simulated battles between ships and paper tanks I drew myself. Then make up stories about their adventures and write them down.
I think the same limits would be reached just with proportionally higher numbers.
Termites and ants out-mass us humans 2 to 1 here on Earth, but they can more directly consume cellulose.
If you add the biomass of our cattle, which is how WE consume cellulose, we are about even with the termites and ants in biomass.
Everyday physics would also be weird to human perception. Manageable quantities of water (such as what you might want to take a bath in or try to cook a meal with) wouldn't be flowing fluid, they would be jello-like balls sticky with surface-tension, or in larger quantities, a surface you could walk on. Fire would be different (e.g. candle flame instead of campfire). Falling would not be dangerous, but a breeze might blow you into another country. But riding dragonflies could be fun!
Between you and John Michael Godier, I can watch/listen to these videos all day long. Thanks Isaac!
:) I was just on with him last night, catching up and recording a new show for Event Horizon
If I had the resources and authority, I would consider a gardener fleet that created real representations of the most interesting virtual worlds across the galaxy. Art, on the most massive scale imaginable.
Once we have nanotechnology. We will be able to rewrite the physical world as well.
Even if miniaturization is limited, computation is limited by communication. And communication latency is limited by the speed of light.
So a planet-sized computer needs 0.03 s to get a signal from side to side. An eternity.
Therefore if an uploaded society seeks to maximize computation, it will try to be as physically compact as possible.
And taking a ship away from the hive mind, dropping your IQ from trillions to billions would be so painful, that "people" would prefer to stay with light milliseconds from the central quantum computer.
I wonder about that.
The current optimized general intelligence on this planet (us), tend to spend an awefull lot of our time trying to think Less, and Slower.
Add up the money and human-hours devoted to drinking alcohol, smoking ships rigging, playing repetitive video games, chanting repetative mantras/prayers...
Now compare that to the numbers devoted to, say, hunting down more fundamental mathematics of physics.
Maybe it is the case that human level intelligence is a barely tolerable condition, and that gets even worse once it is ramped up to super-human?
@@NullHand One of my speculations is the possibility that intelligence might tend to fragment if/when it exceeds the (roughly) human level. At human level, there's already a bit of this tendency. People with multiple personality disorder, or just authors and RPG enthusiasts who enjoy making up and "being" different characters, and so on. Increase cognitive capacity just a bit, plus grant the ability of minds to "upload," and those alters/characters could genuinely wander off to become their own people. At least, it's (IMO) a good way to have super-futuristic societies with human-level characters instead of un-relatable transhuman/trans-alien god-tier superminds.
I was wandering if our host has heard about the MIT 2040 Doomsday report, it's recent update, and maybe his thoughts on it?
I have my own opinion from a social science background but would like to hear a physicists perspective.
They moved it closer? I’m going to be an optimist and hope it’s still around 2050 any earlier and I won’t be ready
i really like the demo of living at roughly 8x speed at the end
I would imagine any civilization, even digital ones, would find value in having offspring simply from the standpoint of strength through alternative points of view. Any civilization not doing this necessarily falls under the Fermi paradox and explains why we never hear anything about them.
@@InterviewsWithTheAncients I'm specifically referring to aliens who have let their civilization grow stagnant through lack of growth, by not pursuing offspring. My point is offspring benefit society, not only from sheer numbers but from divergence of perspective.
That assumes they value alternative points of view. It's also possible that a hyper-conservative civilization could define "strength" in terms of preserving continuity of Tradition, and (if equipped with digital immortality) might reject procreation precisely because the young might get "crazy newfangled ideas" and become troublemakers.
It would be nothing to edit one's memories, so the mundane experiences are quickly forgotten, allowing a person to experience 40,000 years in a sort of fugue state, disconnected from the true passage of time. Only those events which were novel would "stick", and so they'd never be bored.
Of course, boredom is another mental state, like aggression or the drive to pioneer, which could be switched off, leaving a subject perfectly content to watch the walls rust until his or her actions were needed to preserve the ship and its crew.
The problem with that might be competative time debt.
What if another ”colony ship” headed the same way also at a similar fraction of the speed of causality spent that 40,000 years in research and inovation?
@@NullHand
Why bother? Send a colony off with the means to download and install minds, and bootstrap an industrial base, put a skeleton crew aboard to shepherd it to where it needs to go, and have the rest of your colonists manning a research station, advancing the cutting edge, right up until the day they need to be beamed to the colony ship.
Of course, the problem with this, and with your example, is that during that 40,000 years, the goal, or just the concept of the goal, is likely to change quite radically. The people who arrive are unlikely to be the people who left. What they want will change over the ensuing years. That other colony, after spending 40,000 years in sim aboard a ship barreling through the cosmos, might very well hold a vote and decide they'd all be much happier putting the ship into a highly eccentric orbit around a star, with the apastron being slow enough, laterally, that they can casually mine an asteroid belt for material to expand the ship into a purely digital colony. They might simply no longer be interested in establishing the type of colony they assumed they were taking part in a subjective forty millennia previously.
@@S_RoachI’m assuming that the speed of light/causality is in effect both for ships and beamed communication.
I am also assuming ships can be pushed up to some fair fraction of that, say c/2.
In a 40,000yr colonization race to some destination 20,000 light yr away (galactic core?), three ships from competing companies/subspecies/factions.
Ship one spends the entire voyage in R&D, whether real or simulated. Ship two hits the hibernate button for 40,000 years, they will be up to 40k years of development behind ship 1.
Ship 3 just sends a people printer/downloader. Once they land they begin printing out souls that were beamed 20,000 years ago from the launch civ. So they are potentially 20,000 years behind ship 1. But if the beaming civ is able to advance technologically at twice the rate of ship 1, they will be even.
@@S_Roach
Another assumption. All 3 ships have a very good reason for wanting to be 20,000 light yrs away.
Something like an existential threat. Genocide, enforced obsolescence of your virtuality. Maybe digitalization refusenics who want to stay sqhishy, but all available habitable zones are being ”gentrified” into matrioshka computronium.
@@NullHand I take it you didn't catch that in the video. He was talking about the pilot/crew potentially running on a higher clock, and the ship traveling to a much nearer destination, on the order of lightyears, not tens of thousands of lightyears, while those onboard experienced accelerated time. Not 40,000 light years away, but 40,000 years of subjective time. Since they're running at such a higher clock speed anyway, I'm assuming they're already digital.
Also, at .5C, the passengers will only experience 0.866 of the passage of time of someone who stayed behind. 40 years would feel like 34.6 years, unless the crew was running at a higher clock. Then it'd still be slower than what could be achieved by a stationary facility.
The irony of me literally reading a hello fresh recipe as I get the notification for this video, about to cook some hello fresh :D OK I'm gonna shut up and watch the video now :D
Getting your snack and a drink ready.
This reminds me of what Douglas Adams said about an entire star fleet being swallowed by a small dog as they didn't take the relative scales into account.
Yeah I almost used that for the intro line for the episode but its was a bit too long.
Gonna watch this when I wake up! Night all
6:10 IMHO the current limit is shielding from Cosmic Rays and duplicating functions so that other computers can see and override a corruption event.
Phenomenal and inspiring as always.
I'm a big fan of your channel, Isaac. Particularly the way you present the logical reasoning for your conclusions (I did physics with Open University). I don't always agree with the conclusions, but the point is this site makes me think about them. For example, not convinced that the human brain can be so easily put onto computer: it's been a few years since I read Roger Penrose the emperor's new mind, but the basic argument makes sense. Evolution will find the least inefficient solution. That solution could well be that our brain's can use subtleties in quantum physics, like entanglement or many worlds, that we are only just figuring out. In that case simply replicating the neural connectome will not capture the subtleties.
Also, there does appear to be growing (subjective) evidence that dreams are more than the standard model of neuroscience would have us believe, and that near end of life patients really do appear to connect to "the other side" before death - see publications by Peter Fenwick. I make a point of stating that the evidence is subjective and not objective, but it is statistically significant. To be clear I am not religious, but declare myself as pantheist (regarding the universe as inseparable from spiritual aspects).
No doubt I will post more thoughts on other SFIA subjects as time allows...
Hey man, nice to see you hanging out at home, how cool is that 😀
Great video as always.
One solution to the Fermi Paradox could be that there are vast differences from one galaxy to the next, in terms of the amount of habitable planets that also have strong magnetic fields, or some other factor that permits digital devices to exist free from solar wind damage. And perhaps the Milky Way is middling, or even deficient, in this regard. Perhaps there is a galaxy nearby, maybe even in our Local Group, that is much more digital friendly? Or it could be even simpler. Perhaps, once a galaxy exceeds a certain metallicity, you will find that it is teeming with life. Or perhaps there are factors that we aren't even considering. But if this life friendly galaxy is not the Milky Way, we probably won't find it for many thousands of years.
something that kept coming to mind, is the movie "downsizing". they miniaturized humans in some mysteries way, that was never really looked at. but, it was a main plot point, that they used less of everything, costing that much less, to live day to day. so, if some people have gone smaller, how much easier would it be to send they to colonize, and start production plants, for the "normal" sized humans to come to? sending the tiny scouts, who dont need as much fuel, to bring everything they need, to start making everything that the larger people will need. using that split between, to speed up and make colonizing more planets, solar systems, etc.
but then, you also have the speed they live their lives, and the cultural issues between, since both groups are still meat, not machines, yet.
This sent me out of my tiny mind. And I am ok with that.
I recently saw an article recounting that a fusion reaction has finally produced more energy than it took to activate it! The future is now!!
Has your channel touched on the topic of alternate or parallel dimensions? The existence of these, and the ability to tap them, might explain the Fermi Paradox very neatly. Once a society reaches the level of technology necessary to interact with this alternate dimension or dimensions, they do so and we simply cannot detect them at all with our current tech.
he's mentioned alternate realities & pocket universes a few times but since that depends on science we don't have & don't have any reason to think exists there's not much to talk about. Though it bears mentioning that it isn't a perfect solution as the vast/infinite reasources of a multiversal civilization just trivializes interstellar colonization to the point where it would be hard to explain why no one would at least send probes out of curiosity &/or security
So our Universe is basically a flyover state farming village where everybody leaves for a less boring reality as soon as they get a drivers license.
I think Ian Banks wrote that into his Culture series.
The movie downsizing was an interesting idea about the whole less is more thing
Here's a hot take from a Canadian regarding 'Framejacking':
I find that when I partake of our legal marijuana, I experience time compression. I feel like hours have passed, look at the clock and it's only been minutes. I guess my brain is just really accelerating?
In regards to communicating with people on the other side of the sun / out in space. If the program everyone is living in agreed to shut down once a year for 30 seconds you could turn that 1000 year message into a 1 year message, you could go even further and say once a day we shut down for 1 second to allow messages / mail / orders from the government to populate to everyone?
do you think magic like scarlet witch or dr strange use from marvel is just advanced programmable matter like nanotech, picotech or even femtotechnology with maybe different physical constants due to being from another universe. because nanotech can manipulate any molecules, picotech and femtotech can also manipulate any atoms and sub atomic particles
It's possible. Arthur C. Clarke himself said that any tech sufficiently advanced enough from your own would be indistinguishable from magic.
You should make a video about military/spec ops strategy with the help of FTL/warptech/clarketech and interplanetary large fleet battle (if you think they are plausible) strategy
My example would be Titanfall and Titanfall 2
Ohhh, I love this topic. Happy Arthursday everyone.
Isaac: figures out complex communication strategies for simulated human societies
Me after living for thousands of years in a matter of some real life days: "I'm mister meeseeks look at me! I just wanna diiiieee!"
oh crap he did it. ive been thinking this for a loooong time. the best thing about size is time is relative to size so in theory the smaller you get the more you can do in a shorter amount of time.
The main problem for the digital society, that for them it would be even simpler to travel other solar systems. For them existing in a space ship or on the surface of a planet would be the same, living long enough to see the result of the voyage is expected and so on. And since they need much less resource, they could much easier colonize non ideal solar systems, they only need basic materials and solar energy, probably available in any solar system. Also the much smaller needed space means smaller interstellar spaceships, so once again, simpler and faster travel. The only downside would be losing the access of the original network as the lag grows, but that only an issue if we assume every "individual" in this system is 100% addicted to the network.
those all sounded lk advantages not problems
@@virutech32 They are problems for someone who wants to use the possibility of digital societies as an explanation for the absence of visible aliens and a reason why they would not expand outside their solar system.
13:29 that's how you get IRL NPCs. You may have just explained pokemon's Nurse Joy and Officer Jenny. Pokemon is Rated E Westworld
Issac you're brilliant. And I can't tell, but some of the stock footage and digital assets you use are borderline scary. You're trekking the uncanny valley Arthur
frankly, it's been that way since he started
the intro to this video is basically how I view most of your channel:
what happens when we solve all possible problems to making monuments in space.
While it may not be quite the same, anyone who's played a bit of Stellaris may recognize the benefits of 'playing tall' and using your space to the fullest before you start any earnest expansion, if you do at all. Seems to me that in those terms, a Matryoshka Brain is just the ultimate way for a machine civilization to play tall, sending out mining drones to gather resources for the super-long-term, when their power supply component (the Sun) reaches end-of-life and needs to be replaced.
If they have teck to shrink in size they probably have tech to enlarge resources... Going smaller is not the smartest move in the midst of evolutionary species competition and eventual future wars... Going into virtual worlds seams great but wouldn't the servers be left at the mercy of eventual solar flares, meteorites or alien intrusion ? Unless they created robots to protect them... Edited typos
The Landauer Limit and Planck Length are theoretical limits and the practical reachable limits are orders of magnitude higher.
Dude seriously needs to do a episode on fungus... refer usa and navy tic tac ufo sightings going all the way back to ww2
not sure what fungus has to do with ufo sightings, but seeing Isaac get into mycology would be neat.
What if we make a simulation that procedurally generate a universe ahead of our exploration to the exact laws what the actual universe have except we can implement ways of traversing this distance. In that sense we can achive space exploration as it would be in the real thing with less resources as we only generate the explored areas in meaningfull detail and the distance this algorithm starts to produce significant deviation from the real thing might be so far out in the digital realm that not even our hacks on it would be enough to reach it in a life time (including a digital life time, counting a desire to die into it).
If nothing else this would be a grteat alternative to compensate those generational ship's generations that die trough the voyage but experience the real thing close to death in such a way so effectivelly they wouldn't feel to be just a means to to the end and wastly reduce stress or other complications related to missing fullfillment.
from this episode, I propose the grow-slow solution: intelegent civilizations odn't expand to the stars until they use up all the resources in ther home star, and none have yet. this assumes that the assumption in the paradox of an ancient universe falls apart in the math.
let's assume that population growth and resources used per person growth are small enough to not outgrow their home star yet. let's also assume that waste energy can be reused, maybe not infinitly but enough to allow a star to dissapear and leave no obvious IR radiation tell tale
therefore 14 billion years isn't enough to consume a whole star system if you are agressive about using resources wisely, and since proximity to others matters if there's no FTL communication, no intelegent civilization has reason to colonize the galaxy quite yet.
they don't have beacons and havn't intentionally tried to contact us yet. we can't see them because they're all hidden. because you can hide and they won't need resources for another several billion years (or way more) they all might be hiding from each other. this requires science we don't have yet and there are exclusitivity issues possibly at play but it's pretty plausable of an explanation
TL;DR we see no aliens becvause they use/store all their star's energy and waste heat, and they havn't used enough of it up for it to be worth it yet to colonize another star. 14 billion years isn't long enough to start seeing beyond K2 civs
I wonder if our host has read The Golden Age by John C Wright.
Liked and commented before even starting to watch as usual, as this oak is the best creator on the internet. I'll probably be back afterwards too, as I will be changed human, and also less hungry by that point, thanks Isaac for reminding me to get something, as I'm sure it will happen. (To the guy on the internet who makes sure I don't get diabetes, and blows my mind like a pro, every week.)
Darth "Baker"!! Actually LOL.
We are already creating the civilization you describe Arthur, with the "Metaverse." I think we will find that our human (and AI) creations will be far more interesting and exciting than the actual universe we were born into (assuming we aren't already in one).
Instead of so many miniature computerized people, why not have a single individual conciousness containing all the knowledge of all the individuals? You wouldn't need as much duplicate copies of the same bits of knowledge, so you could store a larger quantity of total knowledge
I really enjoyed this episode. Thanks
So how miniaturizing are we talking here? Like the movie Downsize Me to 1/10 scale of a person or to atomic size, so you can play ball with a hydrogen atom?
What a great compliment by David at the end 😂.
You know it is funny but technically survival of the fittest is a tautology because of how he defined fitness.
Aliens hijacking Sims 5 sounds very interesting
Another great video. Too much compression/noise reduction on your dialogue though. Lemme know if you need help fixing this. I know sound.
Can you please do a video on inertial dampeners and explain how they could or could not work?
Just an FYI, in "ad infinitum", the last "i" is a long vowel sound.
You are amazing as always! Great job.
I read about them developing DNA based data storage as a more durable alternative to digital data storage. What do you think would be the optimum mix of electrical / optic / genetic computing, given near future tech? Graphene low temperature electrical, laser processing, DNA hard drive, quantum calculation would be on my current list, maybe quantum spin RAM, the lag issue would be the graphene interfaces between systems. 1024 qubits running on multispectral parrallel blue / violet / ultraviolet lasers maxing at 750 THz. On windows 12.
Disconcerting thought - if it turned out to be the case that we were in a VR, I wonder what the likelihood is that we are in a Matrioshka brain already. The architecture of that doesn't quite remind me of Leonard Susskind's holographic findings in all respects but it's got a similar flavor in terms of 2-D spheres within spheres. Clearly just a random thought but one I'm definitely going to file away for later.
Good episode thanks Isaac, quite thought-provoking. Quick note: you pronounce 'ad infinitum' ad in-fin-EYE-tim' (in other words, emphasis on the penultimate syllable, and that syllable is pronounced 'eye,' like what you see with. Rhymes with 'my' and 'tie.'
My money is on intelligent life being short-lived. Life is competitive by nature. Add the intelligence to self-improve and make weapons, and no matter what the creature is, it doesn't have long. We always assume self-improving machines and self-replicating nanobots will lead to disaster, yet that is exactly what humans are!
Sped-up perception of time would also explain why a digitalized species wouldn't want to communicate with us even if they could teleport to us instantly.
Humans would be like "wwwweeeeeeeeeee (three days later) cccccoooooommmmee iiiinnnn (three days later) pppppp..." Meanwhile the aliens play space golf to pass the time until we finished our sentence lol
What a great way to start the day
*I for one welcome our new computer empires.*
Should've explored the other way
They slow down time as they expand to the point of a billion years for them is a second for us
That would require far less energy to maintain
You could keep some at hyper or normal speed to take of the rest while they live inside their own worlds
If there's so many potential answers to the Fermi Paradox is it really a paradox?
yes, until we figure out which, if any, of the potential answers are the correct answer.
No, it definitely is not a paradox. That's just the name that stuck.
Thinking fast is one thing, what about moving and communicating fast though?
5:41 what if they get to the point where in the virtual world they have magic The magic is based on an algorithm where they allow something to happen just by chanting the word so or knowing the intent to the action for the magic to occur this is only in their virtual world where everybody's mind has been uploaded so they can have a better life than what they were born into.
Going to cover the DARPA "warp bubble"?
Anyone else feeling an occasional parallel with Isaac Arthur and Terrence McKenna??
Aww snap here I go only like two minutes in and I’m already backtracking wondering if it wouldn’t be more appealing to a species to speed up perception and move deeper into a synthetic system of existing as opposed to life extension and many many generations moving far out into the void to find what may only be an extremely slim chance of other species or even devoting lifetimes to terraforming a new world… Why not just delve inward?
Oh ha yeah I mean Von Neumann probes
Say I could copy my mind into a computer program. I wonder how my copy would experience it's virtual existence without a human soul. Without mortal consequences and with time being basically unlimited how moral would my copy be? We can program right and wrong but if we program free will then what stops a virtual copy from say "turning off" another person's copy effectively killing them after their physical body dies? And what would a utopia look like if you live in a digital world devoid of a line between right and wrong? If you could just "turn someone off" what keeps this virtual society going? Rather than the human consciousness becoming infinite I purpose this may very well likely lead to the extinction of anything vaguely human. But let me hear your thoughts on this
Said society might also elect to modify and "fix" all the non-workaholic, obsessive individuals, considering them lazy and non-productive (relative to the hyper-focused few).
That isn't the extreme upper limits of physical possibility of computing. Reversible quantum computers are almost certainly possible.
Can you please do a video on parapsychology referencing Dmitry vereshchagin (verishchagin)