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Raiden comments on Crazy Ideas Thread - Less Wrong Discussion
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I always thought that the "most civilizations just upload and live in a simulated utopia instead of colonizing the universe" response to the Fermi Paradox was obviously wrong, because it would only take ONE civilization breaking this trend to be visible, and regardless of what the aliens are doing, a galaxy of resources is always useful to have. But i was reading somewhere (I don't remember where) about an interesting idea of a super-Turing computer that could calculate anything, regardless of time constraints and ignoring the halting problem. I think the proposal was to use closed time like curves or something.
This, of course, seemed very far-fetched, but the implications are fascinating. It would be possible to use such a device to simulate an eternity in a moment. We could upload and have an eternity of eudaimonia, without ever having to worry about running out of resources or the heat death of the universe or alien superintelligences. Even if the computer was to be destroyed an instant later, it wouldn't matter to us. If such a thing was possible, then that would be an obvious solution to the Fermi Paradox.
If humanity did this, at least some of us would still want to spread out in the real universe, for instance to help other civilizations. (Yes, the world inside the computer is infinitely more important than real civilizations, but I don't think that matters.)
Also, if these super-Turing machines are possible, and the real universe is finite, then we are living in a simulation with probability 1, because you could use them to simulate infinitely many observer-seconds.
This is probably true. I think a lot of people feel uncomfortable with the possibility of us living in a simulation, because we'd be in a "less real" universe or we'd be under the complete control of the simulators, or various other complaints. But if such super-Turing machines are possible, then the simulated nature of the universe wouldn't really matter. Unless the simulators intervened to prevent it, we could "escape" by running an infinite simulation of ourselves. It would almost be like entering an ontologically separate reality.
Seems to me that this "obvious solution" has exactly the same problem as the original one... "it would only take ONE civilization breaking this trend to be visible".
It's possible that exotic physics/computation offers such ridiculous benefits relative to interacting with normal matter AND that its discovery is very obvious along all lines on the way to tech that colonizes normal matter star systems that all civilizations escape into it.
This looks like Tipler's Omega point. Except that it's singular in the universe and for not clear reasons, it will resurrect us all in a simulated heaven.