private_messaging comments on Exterminating life is rational - Less Wrong

17 Post author: PhilGoetz 06 August 2009 04:17PM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 06 August 2009 09:17:59PM 3 points [-]

What are the existential risks for a multi-galaxy super-civilization? Or even a multi-stellar civilization expanding outward at some fraction of light speed? I don't see how life can be exterminated once it has spread that far. "liberate much of the energy in the black hole at the center of our galaxy in a giant explosion" does not make sense, since a black hole is not considered a store of energy that can be liberated.

If you are speculating about new physics that haven't been discovered yet, then "subjective-time exponential" and risk per century seems irrelevant (we can just assume that all of physics will be discovered sooner or later), and a more pertinent question might be how much of physics are as yet undiscovered, and what is the likelihood that some new physics will allow a galaxy/universe killer to be built.

I argue that the amount of physics left to be discovered is finite, and therefore the likelihood that a galaxy/universe killer can be built in the future does not approach arbitrarily close to 1 as time goes to infinity.

Comment author: private_messaging 29 May 2014 04:59:29AM *  1 point [-]

Speaking of new physics, there was the discovery that stars are other suns rather than tiny holes in celestial sphere... and in the future there's the possibility of discovering practically attainable interstellar travel. Discoveries in physics can have different effects.

And if we're to talk of limitless new and amazing physics, there may be superbombs, and there may be infinite subjective time within finite volume of spacetime, or something of that sort.