psychologically, i.e. by interview or memoir writing on the extraction side and "brain-washing" on the implanting side,

I would expect recreating a mind from interviews and memoirs to be about as accurate as building a car based on interviews and memoirs written by someone who had driven cars. which is to say, the part of our mind that talks and writes is not noted for its brilliant and detailed insight into how the vast majority of the mind works.

The problem is throwing mass into other mass hard enough to make a black hole in the first place.

Hawking radiation isn't a big deal. In fact, the problem is making a black hole small enough to get a significant amount of it. An atom-sized black hole has around a tenth of a watt of Hawking radiation. I think it might be possible to get extra energy from it. From what I understand, Hawking radiation is just what doesn't fall back in. If you enclose the black hole, you might be able to absorb some of this energy.

Is it possible even in principle to perform a "consciousness transfer" from one human body to another? On the same principle as mind uploading, only the mind ends up in another biological body rather than a computer. Can you transfer "software" from one brain to another in a purely informational way, while preserving the anatomical integrity of the second organism? If so, would the recipient organism come from a fully alive and functional human who would be basically killed for this purpose? Or bred for this purpose? Or would it require a complete brain transplant? (If so, how would neural structures found in the second body heal & connect with the transplanted brain so that a functional central nervous system results?) Wouldn't the person whose consciousness is being transferred experience some sort of personality change due to "inhabiting" a structurally different brain or body?

Is this whole hypothesis just an artifact of reminiscent introjected mind-body dualism, not compatible with modern science? Does the science world even know enough about consciousness and the brain to be able to answer this question?

I'm asking this because ever since I found out about ems and mind uploading, having minds moved to bodies rather than computers seemed to me a more appealing hypothetical solution to the problem of death/mortality. Unfortunately, I lack the necessary background knowledge to think coherently about this idea, so I figured there are many people on LW who don't, and could explain to me whether this whole idea makes sense.

Can anyone link a deep discussion, including energy and time requirements, issues with spaceship shielding from radiation and collisions, etc., that would be involved in interstellar travel? I ask because I am wondering whether this is substantially more difficult than we often imagine, and perhaps a bottleneck in the Drake Equation

It can, as long as you don't mind that you won't get it back when you're done. You have to constantly fuel the black hole anyway. Just throw the fuel in from the opposite direction that you want the black hole to go.

I thought this sounded familiar

Would it be possible to slow down or stop the rise of sea level (due to global warming) by pumping water out of the oceans and onto the continents?

According to http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0503520 we would need to be able to boost our current orbital radius to about 7 AU.

This would correspond to a change in specific orbital energy of 132712440018/(2(1 AU)) to 132712440018 / (2(7 AU)). (where the 12-digit constant is the standard gravitational parameter of the sun. This is like 5.6 * 10^10 in Joules / Kilogram, or about 3.4 * 10^34 Joules when we restore the reduced mass of the earth/sun (which I'm approximating as just the mass of the earth).

Wolframalpha helpfully supplies that this is 28 times the total energy released by the sun in 1 year.

Or, if you like, it's equivalent to the total mass energy of ~3.7 * 10^18 Kilograms of matter (about 1.5% the mass of the asteroid Vespa).

So until we're able to harness and control energy on the order of magnitude of the total energetic output of the sun for multiple years, we won't be able to do this any time soon.

There might be an exceedingly clever way to do this by playing with orbits of nearby asteroids to perturb the orbit of the earth over long timescales, but the change in energy we're talking about here is pretty huge.

My own favorite hypothesis goes like this: Our universe is most likely to be the simplest one that contains me (us, observers, conscious beings, whatever your favorite rendition of the anthropic principle). It is not likely to be much larger than necessary for creating me. The reason it is as large as it is, then, is that that's what it takes. The answer, then, is that something like me exists only once. More would be a waste of universal size and/or complexity, and Occam forbids it.

Is this as crazy as it sounds?

Also, seeing stuff like this really bugs me:

top of page 2: "Recent analyses of the Kepler statistics showed that about 20% of all Sun-like stars have Earth-sized planets orbiting within the habitable zone [Petigura, Howard and Marcy 2014]."

2nd paragraph of page 3: "Analyses of the Kepler results shows that 7-15% of the Sun-like stars have an Earth-sized planet within their habitable zone [Petigura et al., 2014]"

That's a pretty glaring error to be making. This isn't a top journal, but it isn't an obscure one either. http://eigenfactor.com/rankings.php?bsearch=International+Journal+of+Astrobiology&searchby=journal&orderby=eigenfactor