You are making strong unwarranted assumptions about far future tech. Advanced computers are most likely quantum reversible and are thus not energy constrained—they are mostly mass and temperature constrained. Stars may not be very useful.
Is there writing about that? Last time I thought deeply about reversible computing, it didn’t seem like it was going to be useful for really anything that we care about.
I’ll put it this way.. if you look at almost any subroutine in a real program, it consists of taking a large set of inputs and reducing them to a smaller output. In a reversible computer, iirc, the outputs have to be as big as the inputs, informationally (yeah that sounds about right). So you have to be throwing out a whole lot of useless outputs to keep the info balanced, that’s what you have to do to maintain reversibility, but that’s not really different to producing entropy. I expect life and life-like patterns to have that quality, as computations. Life, by nature, is inextricable from time, but the most precise reductions of the forward motion of time is that it consists of the increase of entropy, or something like that.
Simulation timesteps compute a new similar size model state from previous, and since physics is reversible simulations tend to be roughly reversible as well. And more generally you can balance entropy producing compression with entropy consuming generation/sampling.
Even if stars only make up a small fraction of the matter in the universe, it’s still matter, they’d still probably have something they’d prefer to do with it than this. I’m not really sure what kind of value system (that’s also power-seeking enough to exert control over a broad chunk of the universe) could justify leaving it fallow.
Stars consist mostly of low value hydrogen/helium, but left to their own devices they cook that fuel into higher value heavier elements.
But anyway that is mostly irrelevant—the big picture issue is whether future civs transcend vs expand. The current trajectory of civilization is exponential, and continuing that trajectory requires transcension. Spatial expansion allows for only weak quadratic growth.
Hmm makes sense if you really don’t care about energy. But how much energy will they need, in the end, to reorganize all of that matter?
I don’t think there’s going to be a tradeoff between expansion and transcension for most agents within each civ, or most civs (let alone all agents in almost all civs). If transcension increases the value of any given patch of space by s^t, and you get more space from expansion at s*t^3, well, the two policies are nonexpansion: 2tc vs expansion: 2tt3 :/ there’s no contest. If it’s not value per region of space, if one quantity became negligible relative to the other, that value of expansion is still bigger than the cost of building one self-replicating expansion probe (which is even more negligible), so they do that.
So the EV of continuing spacial expansion is still positive. Unless you can argue that the countervailing value of leaving the stars fallow grows in proportion to the transcension in some way. It sorta looks that way with humans (some sort of moral term resembling diminishing gains on resources, and a love of history and its artifacts (fallow planets) that grows with population size?), but it could go either way.
You are making strong unwarranted assumptions about far future tech. Advanced computers are most likely quantum reversible and are thus not energy constrained—they are mostly mass and temperature constrained. Stars may not be very useful.
Is there writing about that? Last time I thought deeply about reversible computing, it didn’t seem like it was going to be useful for really anything that we care about.
I’ll put it this way.. if you look at almost any subroutine in a real program, it consists of taking a large set of inputs and reducing them to a smaller output. In a reversible computer, iirc, the outputs have to be as big as the inputs, informationally (yeah that sounds about right). So you have to be throwing out a whole lot of useless outputs to keep the info balanced, that’s what you have to do to maintain reversibility, but that’s not really different to producing entropy. I expect life and life-like patterns to have that quality, as computations. Life, by nature, is inextricable from time, but the most precise reductions of the forward motion of time is that it consists of the increase of entropy, or something like that.
Simulation timesteps compute a new similar size model state from previous, and since physics is reversible simulations tend to be roughly reversible as well. And more generally you can balance entropy producing compression with entropy consuming generation/sampling.
Even if stars only make up a small fraction of the matter in the universe, it’s still matter, they’d still probably have something they’d prefer to do with it than this. I’m not really sure what kind of value system (that’s also power-seeking enough to exert control over a broad chunk of the universe) could justify leaving it fallow.
Stars consist mostly of low value hydrogen/helium, but left to their own devices they cook that fuel into higher value heavier elements.
But anyway that is mostly irrelevant—the big picture issue is whether future civs transcend vs expand. The current trajectory of civilization is exponential, and continuing that trajectory requires transcension. Spatial expansion allows for only weak quadratic growth.
Hmm makes sense if you really don’t care about energy. But how much energy will they need, in the end, to reorganize all of that matter?
I don’t think there’s going to be a tradeoff between expansion and transcension for most agents within each civ, or most civs (let alone all agents in almost all civs). If transcension increases the value of any given patch of space by s^t, and you get more space from expansion at s*t^3, well, the two policies are nonexpansion: 2tc vs expansion: 2tt3 :/ there’s no contest.
If it’s not value per region of space, if one quantity became negligible relative to the other, that value of expansion is still bigger than the cost of building one self-replicating expansion probe (which is even more negligible), so they do that.
So the EV of continuing spacial expansion is still positive. Unless you can argue that the countervailing value of leaving the stars fallow grows in proportion to the transcension in some way. It sorta looks that way with humans (some sort of moral term resembling diminishing gains on resources, and a love of history and its artifacts (fallow planets) that grows with population size?), but it could go either way.