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Viliam comments on Crazy Ideas Thread - Less Wrong Discussion

22 Post author: Gunnar_Zarncke 07 July 2015 09:40PM

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Comment author: Raiden 08 July 2015 08:27:14PM 8 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Viliam 09 July 2015 08:20:56AM 5 points [-]

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".

Comment author: RomeoStevens 09 July 2015 11:29:04PM 6 points [-]

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.