I didn’t think the implication was necessarily that they planned to disassemble every solar system and turn it into probe factories. It’s more like… seeing a vast empty desert and deciding to build cities in it. A huge universe, barren of life except for one tiny solar system, seems not depressing exactly but wasteful. I love nature and I would never want all the Earth’s wilderness to be paved over. But at the same time I think a lot of the best the world has to offer is people, and if we kept 99.9% of it as a nature preserve then almost nobody would be around to see it. You’d rather watch the unlifted stars, but to do that you have to exist.
No, the probes are instrumental and are actually a “cost of doing business”. But, as I understand it, the orthodox plan is to get as close as possible to disassembling every solar system and turning it into computronium to run the maximum possible number of “minds”. The minds are assumed to experience qualia, and presumably you try to make the qualia positive. Anyway, a joule not used for computation is a joule wasted.
That’s like saying that because we live in a capitalist society, the default plan is to destroy every bit of the environment and fill every inch of the world with high rise housing projects. It’s… true in some sense, but only as a hypothetical extreme, a sort of economic spherical cow. In reality, people and societies are more complicated and less single minded than that, and also people just mostly don’t want that kind of wholesale destruction.
I didn’t think the implication was necessarily that they planned to disassemble every solar system and turn it into probe factories. It’s more like… seeing a vast empty desert and deciding to build cities in it. A huge universe, barren of life except for one tiny solar system, seems not depressing exactly but wasteful. I love nature and I would never want all the Earth’s wilderness to be paved over. But at the same time I think a lot of the best the world has to offer is people, and if we kept 99.9% of it as a nature preserve then almost nobody would be around to see it. You’d rather watch the unlifted stars, but to do that you have to exist.
No, the probes are instrumental and are actually a “cost of doing business”. But, as I understand it, the orthodox plan is to get as close as possible to disassembling every solar system and turning it into computronium to run the maximum possible number of “minds”. The minds are assumed to experience qualia, and presumably you try to make the qualia positive. Anyway, a joule not used for computation is a joule wasted.
That’s like saying that because we live in a capitalist society, the default plan is to destroy every bit of the environment and fill every inch of the world with high rise housing projects. It’s… true in some sense, but only as a hypothetical extreme, a sort of economic spherical cow. In reality, people and societies are more complicated and less single minded than that, and also people just mostly don’t want that kind of wholesale destruction.