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Comment by jeff_petersen | Hacker News Reader

> The future is software. For entities that live purely as software, and aren't so picky as us meatbags are about continuity of consciousness, "traveling" from place to place by sending data is the most practical method.

Sure, but for entities that live purely as software the concept of "being" in a "place" is probably completely unimportant.

There's no reason to assume that software entities would have any reason to want to interact with meatspace, especially when they can conjure every possible world (and every impossible world) out of nothing.

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Once you've maxed out your abilities with the resources available in one place, then you'd probably start specializing for different abilities in different places to the extent you can gain additional value through comparative advantage. With that in mind sharing the unique results of the different specializations means location is still important in the absence of instantaneous communication over arbitrary distance.

P.S. Your name seems strangely familiar. /s

I'm the evolved-into-a-software-being version of you, of course

Well, at some point the local system will run out of unclaimed matter and energy (Dyson swarm consuming all output of the local sun, built using all available matter in the system). So if you want to expand, you will have to leave.

There would also be some astronomical phenomenon that aren't easily reproducible locally, so it might be useful to travel to them instead.

That is a fair point. Exploration for resources (including non-consumables like hard-to-reproduce phenomena) certainly would still make sense

I wonder if such software civilization couldn't automate the exploration process away, so that the beings themselves don't care about it day to day. From the outside perspective, the whole thing will look like a weird blob of something, expanding in the direction of usable resources at speeds close to c. And beings inside may not even be aware they're consuming some "real world" around them.

I guess I've just sketched a sci-fi story. I wonder if someone wrote it already.

_Accelerando_ by Charles Stross: one of the stories is about a civilization that grew so much in complexity that it couldn't afford the physical cost to leave its system, but its star was being consumed so it couldn't afford to stay either.

They could colonize not to actually interact with the environment there, but for computing resources and redundancy.

Where you are affects the latency of your communications, and less crowded areas may have more computing power available.

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