Crazy Ideas Thread

Gunnar_Zarncke

This thread is intended to provide a space for 'crazy' ideas. Ideas that spontaneously come to mind (and feel great), ideas you long wanted to tell but never found the place and time for and also for ideas you think should be obvious and simple - but nobody ever mentions them.

This thread itself is such an idea. Or rather the tangent of such an idea which I post below as a seed for this thread.

Rules for this thread:

Each crazy idea goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.
Voting should be based primarily on how original the idea is.
Meta discussion of the thread should go to the top level comment intended for that purpose.

If this should become a regular thread I suggest the following :

Use "Crazy Ideas Thread" in the title.
Copy the rules.
Add the tag "crazy_idea".
Create a top-level comment saying 'Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be ideas or similar'
Add a second top-level comment with an initial crazy idea to start participation.

This thread itself is such an idea. Or rather the tangent of such an idea which I post below as a seed for this thread.

Rules for this thread:

Each crazy idea goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.
Voting should be based primarily on how original the idea is.
Meta discussion of the thread should go to the top level comment intended for that purpose.

If this should become a regular thread I suggest the following :

Use "Crazy Ideas Thread" in the title.
Copy the rules.
Add the tag "crazy_idea".
Create a top-level comment saying 'Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be ideas or similar'
Add a second top-level comment with an initial crazy idea to start participation.

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.

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".

9D_Malik11y

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.

1Raziel12311y

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.

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