If your civilization expands at a cubic rate through the universe, you can have one factor of linear growth for population (each couple of 2 has exactly 2 children when they're 20, then stop reproducing) and one factor of quadratic growth for minds (your mind can go as size N squared with time N). This can continue until the accelerating expansion of the universe places any other galaxies beyond our reach, at which point some unimaginably huge superintelligent minds will, billions of years later, have to face some unpleasant problems, assuming physics-as-we-know-it cannot be dodged, worked around, or exploited.
Meanwhile, PARTY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MILKY WAY! WOO!
This can continue until the accelerating expansion of the universe places any other galaxies beyond our reach
If dark energy is constant, and if no-one artificially moves more galaxies together, then after 100 billion years, all that's left in our Hubble volume is a merged Andromeda and Milky Way. On a supragalactic scale, the apparent abundance of the universe is somewhat illusory; all those galaxies we can see in the present are set up to fly apart so quickly that no-one gets to be emperor of more than a few of them at once.
It seems no-one has thought through the implications of this for intelligence in the universe. Intelligences may seek to migrate to naturally denser galactic clusters, though they then run the risk of competing with other migrants, depending on the frequency with which they arise in the universe. Intergalactic colonization is either about creating separate super-minds who will eventually pass completely beyond communication, or about trying to send some of the alien galactic mass back to the home galaxy, something which may require burning through the vast majority of the alien galaxy's mass-energy (e.g. to propel a few billion stars back to the home syste...
If your civilization expands at a cubic rate through the universe
You're picturing the far-future civilization as a ball, whose boundary is expanding at a constant rate. But I think a more plausible picture is a spherical shell. The resources at the center of the ball will be used up, and it will only be cost-effective to transport resources from the boundary inwards to a certain distance. If the dead inner boundary expands at the same rate as the live outer boundary, we'll be experiencing quadratic, not cubic growth.
You know, you're right. I will change my reply accordingly henceforth - linear population growth, linear increase in energy usage / computing power, and quadratic increase in (nonenergetically stored) memories.
Seriously, why is this post being downvoted? It's a legit question and the OP isn't making any huge mistakes or drawing any stupid conclusions. He's just stating some confusion and asking for links.
I actually feel pretty mad about this.
Upvoted after seeing the comment. I thought about downvoting when I came to the thread and thought of doing so for a minute or three. The problem I had was the title's tone of summarizing once and for all what "the consequences of transhumanism are" and then doing the job really really poorly. I have a vague (but declining?) "my tribe"-feeling towards transhumanism and don't like seeing it bashed, or associated with straw-man-like arguments.
I think a title that avoided this inclination could have been something like "Is immortalist demography bleak?" or maybe "I fear very long lives lead to resources crunches and high gini coefficients" or you know... something specific and tentative rather than abstract and final. Basically, good microcontent.
One thing I've just had to get used to is that LWers are bad at voting. Comments I'm proud of are frequently ignored, and comments that I think are cheap tricks frequently get upvoted. Whatever people see first, right after an article will generally get upvoted much more than normal. Its not because quality comes first when sorting by that, because if you look at ancient posts where the sort o...
Comments I'm proud of are frequently ignored, and comments that I think are cheap tricks frequently get upvoted.
This. Very much this. Not a lot of my stuff gets upvoted. Yesterday I think, I had an existential crisis about it "oh my god, do I suck?". Yes that's stupid, but I often find it deeply disturbing that I am not a demigod.
LW is better than reddit, but yeah.
Another observation is that the downvoters seem to come out first. Posts (articles in discussion, specifically) that end up highly voted usually start out hovering around zero or going negative before rising. This post for example.
EDIT: Actually, I'd really like to see some graphs and stats on this from the LW database. Another thing to get more useful data is to allow people to cast a vote for which of their own comments they are most proud of, and see if this vote correlates with community vote.
This question shouldn't be being downvoted as much as it is- it is a legitimate question although would probably go better in its own set in the open thread rather than a discussion section.
Yes, this has been discussed a fair bit- the main argument in most transhumanist circles when this comes up is that everyone will get the benefits and that birth rates will go down accordingly (possibly by enforcement). In that regard, there's a fair bit of data that humans birth rates go down naturally as lifespan goes up. There are other responses but this is the most common. It is important to realize that it is unlikely that this issue will need to be seriously addressed for a long way off.
A lot of people seem to be shrugging this question off, saying basically, "Transhuman minds are ineffable, we can't imagine what they would do." If we have some kind of AI god that rapidly takes over the world after a hard takeoff, then I think that logic basically applies. The world after that point will reflect the values implemented into the AI god.
Robin Hanson has described a different scenario, that I take somewhat more seriously than the AI god scenario.
This long competition has not selected a few idle gods using vast powers to indulge arbitrary whims, or solar system-sized Matrioshka Brains. Instead, frontier life is as hard and tough as the lives of most wild plants and animals nowadays, and of most subsistence-level humans through history. These hard-life descendants, whom we will call “colonists,” can still find value, nobility, and happiness in their lives. For them, their tough competitive life is just the “way things are” and have long been.
Hanson is describing a return to the Malthusian condition that has defined life since the beginning. The assumptions seem fairly strong to me:
This reminds me. An interesting question is, assuming constant mass/person, how long until the speed of light becomes a limiting factor? I.e. given a fixed growth rate, at what total population would the colonization speed be approaching the speed of light just to keep the # humans per cubic parsec of space constant? It is clear that this will happen at some point, given the assumptions of constant birth rate and constant body mass, because the volume of colonized space only grows as time cubed, while the population grows exponentially.
Here is a back-of-...
Other physical angles:
If the economy continues to grow at roughly the present rate, using more energy as it does so, when will we be consuming the entire solar energy output each year? And if this energy growth happens on the surface of the earth and heat dissipation works in a naive way then how long till the surface of the earth is as hot as the sun? Answers: A bit less than 1400 years from now to be eating the sun, and a bit less than 1000 years from now till Earth's surface is equally hot, respectively. Blog post citation!
The same blogger did a followup post on the possibility of economic growth that "virtualizes our values" (my terminology, not the blogger's, he calls it "decoupling") so that humanity gets gazillions of dollars worth of something while energy use is fixed by fiat in the model. Necessarily the "fluffy stuff" (his term) somehow takes over the economy such that things like food are negligible to economic activity. With 5% "total economy" growth and up-to-an-asymptote energy growth, by 2080 98% percent of the value of the economy is made of of "fluffy stuff" which seems to imply that real world food and real w...
The fertility rate is far more important than mortality. You can calculate for yourself that even if humans were immortal, an average fertility below 1 child per parent does not lead to exponential population growth, while average fertility above 1 child per parent means exponential growth even if people keep dying at seventy.
What makes you think we have meaningful opinions to share on the options available to beings that are pushing the carrying capacity of the galaxy?
I think It's a biggish problem to solve.
The first thing that makes it easier is that I see no reason we ought to increase the number of people very much. I think N billion is enough of a party already. Once we all know each other, maybe we can talk about making more. (for the people who are still alive)
Of course that doesn't make the problem go away. If we want to grow as people continuously, we will eventually hit limits. Especially since we might decide that exponential growth is the only acceptable thing.
We might have to accept that there is a non-infin...
It is unlikely that society will ever neatly divide into "haves" and "have nots"- be suspicious of sharp divisions. There should be lots of boundary cases, and probably a smooth gradient.
The primary question for answering these sorts of questions, I think, is whether modification to existing agents is more or less effective than modification to new agents. It seems more likely to me that genetic engineering can radically increase human lifespans than interventions in already developed humans- and if that's the case, then there won't rea...
My essay on this (go to the original article to see the hyperclicks to some of the references, as I'm too lazy to copy them here)
...One of the most common objections against the prospect of radical life extension (RLE) is that of overpopulation. Suppose everyone got to enjoy from an eternal physical youth, free from age-related decay. No doubt people would want to have children regardless. With far more births than deaths, wouldn't the Earth quickly become overpopulated?
There are at least two possible ways of avoiding this fate. The first is simply having c
I decided a while back that the next time there's a LW census, I'm going to suggest adding a question like this: "Ceteris NOT being paribus, if you could make all the people in the world invulnerable to diseases, cellular degeneration and similar aging-related problems by pushing a button, would you push it?" I would be very interested in those results.
...How would this be achieved? Somehow limiting lifespan, or children, assuming it's available to a majority? Or would this lead to a genespliced, technologically augmented and essentially immortal
The novels Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson bring up this question and proposes an answer, offered here in a simple rot13.com cypher for those who haven't read the books yet.
Gubfr jub erprvir gur ybatrivgl gerngzrag ner fgrevyvmrq ng gur fnzr gvzr.
To me, the real turning point is if and when we learn how to precisely control our personalities - in short, reengineering human nature itself. Of course there's the nature vs nurture matter in this, not to mention all the potential factors than even go into a personality, let alone alter it. But I'm 100% against uncontrolled transhumanism, or even mere unregulated genetic modification or augmentation.
Though, let's suppose there was a way to correct obviously harmful behaviorial defects with at least a partial genetic basis, particularly behavior every so...
I might need a better title (It has now been updated), but here goes, anyway:
I've been considering this for a while now. Suppose we reach a point where we can live for centuries, maybe even millenia, then how do we balance? Even assuming we're as efficient as possible, there's a limit for how much resources we can have, meaning an artificial limit at the amount of people that could exist at any given moment even if we explore what we can of the galaxy and use any avaliable resource. There would have to be roughly the same rate of births and deaths in a stable population.
How would this be achieved? Somehow limiting lifespan, or children, assuming it's available to a majority? Or would this lead to a genespliced, technologically augmented and essentially immortal elite that the poor, unaugmented ones would have no chance of measuring up to? I'm sorry if this has already been considered, I'm very uneducated on the topic. If it has, could someone maybe link an analysis of the topic of lifespans and the like?
Upvoted after seeing the comment. I thought about downvoting when I came to the thread and thought of doing so for a minute or three. The problem I had was the title's tone of summarizing once and for all what "the consequences of transhumanism are" and then doing the job really really poorly. I have a vague (but declining?) "my tribe"-feeling towards transhumanism and don't like seeing it bashed, or associated with straw-man-like arguments.
I think a title that avoided this inclination could have been something like "Is immortalist demography bleak?" or maybe "I fear very long lives lead to resources crunches and high gini coefficients" or you know... something specific and tentative rather than abstract and final. Basically, good microcontent.
One thing I've just had to get used to is that LWers are bad at voting. Comments I'm proud of are frequently ignored, and comments that I think are cheap tricks frequently get upvoted. Whatever people see first, right after an article will generally get upvoted much more than normal. Its not because quality comes first when sorting by that, because if you look at ancient posts where the sort order of comments is forced to be chronological, the very first comment will frequently have many upvotes even when it is inane.
I've been wondering how to "fix it" but I have nothing concrete. I fear that it is just that "typical internet users" are habituated to clicking on accessible "like" buttons because that's how they interact with facebook, and internet communities inevitably decay absent heroically good site design/management, and so on.
Thank you! That was what I was looking for in a title, I just couldn't seem to find the right words. I'll be editing the title in a minute. I also got pretty intimidated - within 10 minutes I'd lost about a fifth of my total karma and no one would tell me why. That seems to me another weakness - we are too quick to vote and seemingly not good enough at debating some topics and explaining WHY something deserves to be voted up/down.