The high value matter/energy or real estate is probably a tiny portion of the total, and is probably far from stars, as stellar environments are too noisy/hot for advanced computation.
Can you expand on this?
All computation requires matter/energy. If a civ wants to increase its amount of computation, then eventually it will need to use up that huge majority of matter that resides in stars. I think it was the Significant Digits hpmor fanfic where Harry remarked that the stars were huge piles of valuable materials that had inconveniently caught fire and needed to be put out. Of course, it’s still necessary to have a practical way of star lifting.
One alternative is that advanced civs find a way to use dark matter instead, or some other physics we don’t really understand yet.
The high value matter/energy or real estate is probably a tiny portion of the total, and is probably far from stars, as stellar environments are too noisy/hot for advanced computation.
Extrapolating from current physics to ultimate computational intelligences, the most important constraint is temperature/noise, not energy. A hypothetical optimal SI would consume almost no energy, and it’s computational capability would be inversely proportional to it’s temperature. So at the limits you have something very small, dense, cold, and dark, approaching a black hole.
Passive shielding appears to be feasible, but said feasibility decreases non-linearly with proximity to stars.
So think of the computational potential of space-time as a function of position in the galaxy. The computational potential varies inversely with temperature. The potential near a star is abysmal. The most valuable real estate is far out in the interstellar medium, potentially on rogue planets or even smaller cold bodies, where passive shielding can help reduce temperatures down to very low levels.
So to an advanced civ, the matter in our solar system is perhaps worthless—the energy cost of pulling the matter far enough away from the star and cooling it is greater than it’s computational value.
All computation requires matter/energy.
Computation requires matter to store/represent information, but doesn’t require consumption of that matter. Likewise computation also requires energy, but does not require consumption of that energy.
At the limits you have a hypothetical perfect reversible quantum computer, which never erases any bits. Instead, unwanted bits are recycled internally and used for RNG. This requires a perfect balance of erasure with random bit consumption, but that seems possible in theory for general approximate inference algorithms of the types SI is likely to be based on.
that the stars were huge piles of valuable materials that had inconveniently caught fire and needed to be put out.
This is probably incorrect. From the perspective of advanced civs, the stars are huge piles of worthless trash. They are the history of life rather than it’s future, the oceans from which advanced post-bio civs emerge.
This idea implies a degree of coordination that does not happen in actual ecologies we have seen. Thus we get trees extravagantly sucking up mineral nutrients and building massive scaffolds to hold their photosynthetic structures over their competition, and weeds that voraciously multiply and compete with each other to take up every bit of sunlight and soil they can that the bigger things can’t establish themselves in, rather than a thin scum of microbial mats that efficiently intercepts energy. You are implying a climax community without any other seres, and large amounts of material that while not being used efficiently are not used at all.
Things that reproduce themselves effectively become more common regardless of efficiency, and even multicellular organisms built of exquisite coordination get cancer.
Given that physics is the same across space, the math/physics/tech of different civs will end up being the same, more or less. I wouldn’t call that coordination.
To extend your analogy, plants don’t grow in the center of the earth—and this has nothing to do with coordination. Likewise, no human tribes colonized the ocean depths, and this has nothing to do with coordination.
I suspect you misunderstand my objection and that I may have used only half of the appropriate analogy
A universe in which your proposed ubiquitous low-matter low-energy interstellar computers exist is one in which space-based self-replication and manufacturing is a thing that happens. This implies the existence of a whole slew of ‘ecological niches’. Indeed, the sort that is generally thought of in these circles (more-or-less industrially turning large amounts of matter near stars into stuff that intercepts light and uses the resultant energy for something or other) is rather simpler, is more similar to the demonstrated cases of terrestrial biology / human industry, and has more matter and energy available than what you propose. The low temperature low energy devices would be more akin to crazy deep extremophile lithotrophic bacteria or deep sea fish on Earth, living slow metabolisms and at low densities and matter/energy fluxes, while things in star systems would be akin to photosynthetic plants and algae at the surface, living at high densities at high flux.
In any situation other than perfect coordination, that which replicates itself more rapidly becomes more common. You will have adaptation and evolution. It doesn’t matter if more computation can be done in one place than another—in terms of sheer matter and energy, that which uses high energy fluxes and large amounts of matter will replicate to large numbers and be dominant in terms of amount of stuff and effect on the physical universe. Other stuff could still exist, but most stuff would be of this faster heavier type. Niches will be filled. And a stellar system niche is not akin to the deep ocean if an interstellar niche is compared to the surface of the Earth, if anything it’s the opposite. The deep sea niche may be where you see all kinds of fascinating bioluminescence and long distance signaling epiphenomena that these organisms care about and of a sort you dont see at the surface, but in terms of biomass the surface niche dominates. Furthermore, competition amongst different things mean they often do things inefficiently so as to gain advantages over each other—those that do become more common faster.
The low temperature low energy devices would be more akin to crazy deep extremophile lithotrophic bacteria or deep sea fish on Earth, living slow metabolisms and at low densities and matter/energy fluxes,
Hmm I think you misunderstood my model. At the limits of computation, you approach the maximal computational density—the maximum computational capacity per unit mass—only at zero temperature. The stuff you are talking about—anything that operates at any non-zero temp—has infinitely less compute capability than the zero-temp stuff.
So your model and analogy is off—the low temp devices are like gods—incomprehensibly faster and more powerful, and bio life and warm tech is like plants, bacteria, or perhaps rocks—not even comparable, not even in the same basic category of ‘thing’.
In any situation other than perfect coordination, that which replicates itself more rapidly becomes more common.
Of course. But it depends on what the best way to replicate is. If new universe creation is feasible (and it appears to be, from what we know of physics), then civs advance rather quickly to post-singularity godhood and start creating new universes. Among other things, this allows exponential growth/replication which is vastly superior to puny polynomial growth you can get by physical interstellar colonization. (it also probably allows for true immortality, and perhaps actual magic—altering physics) And even if that tech is hard/expensive, colonization does not entail anything big, hot, or dumb. Realistic colonization would simply result in many small, compact, cold civ objects. Also see the other thread.
Can you expand on this?
All computation requires matter/energy. If a civ wants to increase its amount of computation, then eventually it will need to use up that huge majority of matter that resides in stars. I think it was the Significant Digits hpmor fanfic where Harry remarked that the stars were huge piles of valuable materials that had inconveniently caught fire and needed to be put out. Of course, it’s still necessary to have a practical way of star lifting.
One alternative is that advanced civs find a way to use dark matter instead, or some other physics we don’t really understand yet.
See this post.
Extrapolating from current physics to ultimate computational intelligences, the most important constraint is temperature/noise, not energy. A hypothetical optimal SI would consume almost no energy, and it’s computational capability would be inversely proportional to it’s temperature. So at the limits you have something very small, dense, cold, and dark, approaching a black hole.
Passive shielding appears to be feasible, but said feasibility decreases non-linearly with proximity to stars.
So think of the computational potential of space-time as a function of position in the galaxy. The computational potential varies inversely with temperature. The potential near a star is abysmal. The most valuable real estate is far out in the interstellar medium, potentially on rogue planets or even smaller cold bodies, where passive shielding can help reduce temperatures down to very low levels.
So to an advanced civ, the matter in our solar system is perhaps worthless—the energy cost of pulling the matter far enough away from the star and cooling it is greater than it’s computational value.
Computation requires matter to store/represent information, but doesn’t require consumption of that matter. Likewise computation also requires energy, but does not require consumption of that energy.
At the limits you have a hypothetical perfect reversible quantum computer, which never erases any bits. Instead, unwanted bits are recycled internally and used for RNG. This requires a perfect balance of erasure with random bit consumption, but that seems possible in theory for general approximate inference algorithms of the types SI is likely to be based on.
This is probably incorrect. From the perspective of advanced civs, the stars are huge piles of worthless trash. They are the history of life rather than it’s future, the oceans from which advanced post-bio civs emerge.
This idea implies a degree of coordination that does not happen in actual ecologies we have seen. Thus we get trees extravagantly sucking up mineral nutrients and building massive scaffolds to hold their photosynthetic structures over their competition, and weeds that voraciously multiply and compete with each other to take up every bit of sunlight and soil they can that the bigger things can’t establish themselves in, rather than a thin scum of microbial mats that efficiently intercepts energy. You are implying a climax community without any other seres, and large amounts of material that while not being used efficiently are not used at all.
Things that reproduce themselves effectively become more common regardless of efficiency, and even multicellular organisms built of exquisite coordination get cancer.
Given that physics is the same across space, the math/physics/tech of different civs will end up being the same, more or less. I wouldn’t call that coordination.
To extend your analogy, plants don’t grow in the center of the earth—and this has nothing to do with coordination. Likewise, no human tribes colonized the ocean depths, and this has nothing to do with coordination.
I suspect you misunderstand my objection and that I may have used only half of the appropriate analogy
A universe in which your proposed ubiquitous low-matter low-energy interstellar computers exist is one in which space-based self-replication and manufacturing is a thing that happens. This implies the existence of a whole slew of ‘ecological niches’. Indeed, the sort that is generally thought of in these circles (more-or-less industrially turning large amounts of matter near stars into stuff that intercepts light and uses the resultant energy for something or other) is rather simpler, is more similar to the demonstrated cases of terrestrial biology / human industry, and has more matter and energy available than what you propose. The low temperature low energy devices would be more akin to crazy deep extremophile lithotrophic bacteria or deep sea fish on Earth, living slow metabolisms and at low densities and matter/energy fluxes, while things in star systems would be akin to photosynthetic plants and algae at the surface, living at high densities at high flux.
In any situation other than perfect coordination, that which replicates itself more rapidly becomes more common. You will have adaptation and evolution. It doesn’t matter if more computation can be done in one place than another—in terms of sheer matter and energy, that which uses high energy fluxes and large amounts of matter will replicate to large numbers and be dominant in terms of amount of stuff and effect on the physical universe. Other stuff could still exist, but most stuff would be of this faster heavier type. Niches will be filled. And a stellar system niche is not akin to the deep ocean if an interstellar niche is compared to the surface of the Earth, if anything it’s the opposite. The deep sea niche may be where you see all kinds of fascinating bioluminescence and long distance signaling epiphenomena that these organisms care about and of a sort you dont see at the surface, but in terms of biomass the surface niche dominates. Furthermore, competition amongst different things mean they often do things inefficiently so as to gain advantages over each other—those that do become more common faster.
Hmm I think you misunderstood my model. At the limits of computation, you approach the maximal computational density—the maximum computational capacity per unit mass—only at zero temperature. The stuff you are talking about—anything that operates at any non-zero temp—has infinitely less compute capability than the zero-temp stuff.
So your model and analogy is off—the low temp devices are like gods—incomprehensibly faster and more powerful, and bio life and warm tech is like plants, bacteria, or perhaps rocks—not even comparable, not even in the same basic category of ‘thing’.
Of course. But it depends on what the best way to replicate is. If new universe creation is feasible (and it appears to be, from what we know of physics), then civs advance rather quickly to post-singularity godhood and start creating new universes. Among other things, this allows exponential growth/replication which is vastly superior to puny polynomial growth you can get by physical interstellar colonization. (it also probably allows for true immortality, and perhaps actual magic—altering physics) And even if that tech is hard/expensive, colonization does not entail anything big, hot, or dumb. Realistic colonization would simply result in many small, compact, cold civ objects. Also see the other thread.