I opened the link to your blog and had an initial negative aesthetic/readability reaction, which is a typical problem I've encountered when jumping away from Less Wrong. LW is highly optimized for clean readability. How does your cathedral background image help quickly communicate the ideas of your post? Also, the italicized text in particular is hard to read. The visual jump from LW to your blog's layout is jarring, and this immediately sets up an internal negative 'ugh' reaction. I'm attentive to these aesthetic details because I've encountered the same problem in my own blog.
Your post is long and intertwines a number of distantly related complex ideas. I scanned it and quickly came to a decision to commit perhaps a couple of minutes to skim/speed read and then reply here.
I am not immediately put off by equating super-intelligences to gods, mixing in some theological references/analogies, or even all the unsubtle connotations of the blog title "Computational Theology". However, I'm pretty certain I am atypical for LW in these regards. I have a general interest in evolution of religions, early Christianity in particular, and the similarity between transhumanist visions of the future and some strains of Christian Eschatology, for strategic reasons if nothing else.
I take Simulism somewhat seriously, and suspect that the Simulist cosmology could be the next major copernican worldview shift. On the other hand, I don't have much interest or place much credence in psi-phenom. So given all that I jumped down and mainly tried to find your justification for the planetarium hypothesis.
From my understanding of future technological capability, a physical planetarium will always be an extraordinarily expensive endeavor. What's the point?
If the point is intervention, to alter the developmental trajectory of a planet, there are vastly cheaper options: small levers with huge future effects. And even if the desired intervention is of a specific variety along the lines of "let humanity develop as if it was the first civilization", that could be achieved by constructing an alternate universe tweaked for that future at a tiny fraction of the cost of building a planetarium.
How does your cathedral background image help quickly communicate the ideas of your post?
On the main page it seems unmotivated—vague connections to God and architecture—but if you click "About" you see more of the photo. The photo was selected because it implies God but its emphasis is architecture, and the highly organized structure of the architecture is supposed to evoke formalism and technology, thus linking God to computationalism. I couldn't think of anything better, and honestly I quite like the photo. Any suggestions?
And yes, if you're...
Here.
Long story short, it's an attempt to justify the planetarium hypothesis as a solution to the Fermi paradox. The first half is a discussion of how it and things like it are relevant to the intended purview of the blog, and the second half is the meat of the post. You'll probably want to just eat the meat, which I think is relevant to the interests of many LessWrong folk.
The blog is Computational Theology. It's new. I'll be the primary poster, but others are sought. I'll likely introduce the blog and more completely describe it in its own discussion post when more posts are up, hopefully including a few from people besides me, and when the archive will give a more informative indication of what to expect from the blog. Despite theism's suspect reputation here at LessWrong I suspect many of the future posts will be of interest to this audience anyway, especially for those of you who take interest in discussion of the singularity. The blog will even occasionally touch on rationality proper. So you might want to store the fact of the blog's existence somewhere deep in the back of your head. A link to the blog's main page can be found on my LessWrong user page if you forget the url.
I'd appreciate it if comments about the substance of the post were made on the blog post itself, but if you want to discuss the content here on LessWrong then that's okay too. Any meta-level comments about presentation, typos, or the post's relevance to LessWrong, should probably be put as comments on this discussion post. Thanks all!