It's not just really hard, you'd need really good reasons for expanding that long (as opposed to just exploring). As Humanity, we're not even sure about increasing our own population size forever.
In digital form, it's much easier to travel to outer space though. We just need to send transceiver probes in advance. If we want to manifest physically, we just have to print robotic bodies in the destination.
Edit: I just realized that even if we're in digital form, we have to fight for physical energy and resources, assuming that we want to keep expanding the digital realm and the capacity of our consciousness. So, in some form we have to expand physically.
I won't explain how it relates to your comment though - go read all of them!
However, The Baroque Cycle does have some unusual minor elements such as 'magical' gold and an important character, Enoch Root, who appears to me immortal and who turns up in 17th, 18th, 20th and 21st centuries.
Fall gives an explanation of what is going on that I really liked.
On a related note, currently working through 'Gödel, Escher, Bach'.
Most living humans will still argue that consciousness roughly equates to a soul. Leave that nonsense aside, and you’re still left with the mind-body problem: are those two things the same or different? If mind and body are the same — that is, if the experience of being a conscious human is emergent and/or dependent upon a human body — digital uploads are just copies of ephemeral state. Imagine a hell full of James T Kirk replicas, each regretting the time he stepped into a transporter and died, allowing a copy of him to be made elsewhere.
If mind and body are different, you’re picking up the Cartesian problem — how do they influence each other at all? What is the mind made of that it can simultaneously affect the body, yet somehow exist separately from it?
Neal Stephenson published “Fall” last year which treats this as a purely technical problem. Once our scanning resolution is good enough, he supposes, we’ll be able to create perfect digital replicas of brains. That’s tripe, of course. Human consciousness is dependent on much more than our brains. In fact, we have special words for how consciousness presents when disconnected from bodily sensation, words like “sleep” and “coma.” Sensory deprivation chambers isolate us from some of the sensations outside our bodies, but leave all internal sensations intact.
These external and internal sensations make us who we are. For instance, we cannot emulate consciousness without first emulating the billions of gut bacteria, across thousands of distinct species, that affect the physical rhythms of our bodies. Even quadriplegic’s moods and consciousnesses are influenced by their gut bacteria.
How much of the universe do you need to simulate in order to accurately simulate one human being? All of it, it turns out. And even then, there’s no reason to believe that human will be or feel the same as the meat substrate from which it was copied. The whole affair is nonsense.
edit: typo
Scanning sure, that’s a separate consciousness or a copy, but what if you replaced one neuron at a time with a digital/electrical component? Wouldn’t there be a point, around halfway, that you would be more robot than human? And so you can become totally digital if you accept that losing one neuron wouldn’t be enough to end your current stream of consciousness?
Even if this is philosophically possible, that doesn't suggest it is inventible. How do you model and replace a neuron without tearing up and killing the host organism?
I don’t have a complete answer, but a few thoughts:
First, there’s no reason to believe we’ll ever be able to replicate a neuron with non-meat technology. Nanomachines may be able to do this. Are they going to age and die as well, like real neurons?
Second, replacing one neuron at a time looks hard as well. Best case is perhaps a self-replicating nanomachine that chugs through the brain, effectively eating neurons and building new ones. This process is going to change the brain, since it has to be carried out in constant time. How will it change the brain? Who knows?
Third, it’s not just neurons. You’d need to replicate every cell in, and on, a human body. Including, again, the different species of fungus that live exclusively in our toenails.
Fourth, how will this new 100%-technical human interact with its environment? Current thinking is that some auto-immune diseases are triggered by a insufficient challenge to young immune systems, effectively by an environment that’s too clean. Should we emulate this as well?
So pretty quickly I think it’s turns out that we’re not emulating humans, we’re creating new things that are somewhat human and somewhat digital. How will this entity act over the long term?
Ian McDonald wrote, “there are infinite ways of being human.” Perhaps we need to expand our definitions.
Do you?
Don’t get me wrong, the chemical environment of the brain, and the wider body, can alter states of consciousness — I recall stories about people whose gut bacteria produces alcohol and permanently fail any blood alcohol tests as a consequence — but if you know what those chemicals are, do you really need to replicate the fungi making them?
Can you back this up with anything? In ignorance, I could just as well state: "there’s no reason to believe we won't ever be able to replicate a neuron.."
I suspect you are being pedantic with the definition of neuron, i.e. not allowing for simulations that contribute the same/similar net effect but fail to account for every last irrelevant molecule. The fact that you say the whole body needs to be replicated is what makes me suspect this:
> Including, again, the different species of fungus that live exclusively in our toenails
If this where true, elimination all the fungus in my toenails would make me: inhuman or non-conscious?
If it would simply make me (chaos-butterfly style) a different, but still human & conscious version of myself, then I'm not sure why it's necessary.
I think the definition of human can be stretched, and obviously once your body is replaced digitally you have altered the definition. But I think you have chosen an overly strict definition in your "every cell" maxim.
Even if we accept this on its face as possible, we still have no reason to believe that the digital Dodge will act the same way as the formerly-meat Dodge. Developmental trauma is a real thing. How did that experience of awakening change Dodge? If it changed him at all he’s no longer the same Dodge; if it didn’t change him, then he’s just an immutable copy.
And then if we figure out some convoluted way to claim that Didi-Dodge will act/present the same as formerly-meat-Dodge, they’re not in any way the same person. Meat-Dodge is still dead, he just has a very lifelike digital replica.
That's...not at all accurate.
> How much of the universe do you need to simulate in order to accurately simulate one human being? All of it, it turns out. And even then, there’s no reason to believe that human will be or feel the same as the meat substrate from which it was copied.
That's actually much closer to the premise of Fall than your summary was.
Tell me how. My recollection is that Dodge was scanned from a frozen brain. Later in the book, folks were full-body-scanned.
And conceding that we need to simulate a full digital universe in order to simulate one person gives away the argument entirely — there’s still no coherent way to say that it’s the same person, a digital afterlife of the same soul. Stephenson blithely writes as if this is true.
Forgive me, but this sounds like a criticism — is it? Because last I checked that novel was fiction, and that is what good authors do. It’s not like I’d criticise Diane Duane for writing Trek books as if Vulcans were real; if anything its kinda weird when shows like Trek break the fourth wall, which they avoided even in the two episodes which used the “the show is a fiction invented by one of the characters” trope.
None of the scanned replicas in Fall is perfect. They are functional in that they have consciousness, and connected to the original by some fuzzy, vague, and very much incomplete transference of memory and personality, but that's notably imperfect even for the focal information where people most knowledgeable about the process are deliberately trying to carry key information and plans across the transition. That is implicitly (though it is hard to tell how much since neither is a viewpoint character, and the original was progressively becoming insane before the transition) somewhat less the case for Elmo Shepherd/El—the former of which spent enormous time and astronomical resources to achieve that—than anyone else, sure, but there is no indication of anything even vaguely approximating a “perfect digital replica”.
> there’s still no coherent way to say that it’s the same person, a digital afterlife of the same soul. Stephenson blithely writes as if this is true.
No, he writes as though the society of the not-yet-uploaded in the book comes to accept it as tru-ish and those of the imperfect-replicas-who-come-to-understand-their-nature view it as also (but, at least in my reading, somewhat less than the preceding) somewhat tru-ish.
But even the characters in the book, on either side, don't seem to accept it as unqualifiedly true in general with the possible, again, exception of Elmo Shepherd/El. Who is a, or both of whom are (depending on your perspective on continuity of identity) unbalanced megalomaniac(s).
(Even before things get dominated by the afterlife simulation, the book already has a strong focus on the socially-constructed nature of perceived identity and perceived nature of reality.)
This denies things being similar, or multi-dimensional. Apply this same reasoning to hardware/software for example:
"What is software code made of that it can simultaneously affect the physical hardware, yet somehow exist separately from it?"
the mind, and software, are data, or information - and data can be replicated on multiple mediums. This data / medium distinction is no more or less perplexing. The "OK" hand-gesture can represent something in physical form, while the physical hand is distinct from the symbolic message it represents - if you want to get philosophical about symbology and representation I don't think there is a special case to be made for the mind.
> Human consciousness is dependent on much more than our brains
How can you support this statement when you first lead with "We don’t even know what consciousness is [yet]"?
We have words for "god", "magic" and "spirits" too, and don't know what those are either; isn't it possible none of them exist?
> we cannot emulate consciousness without first emulating the billions of gut bacteria
Only is consciousness specifically depends on this aspect.
It's like saying "The setting sun also affect our mood, so that must be emulated too!". That's not true though - It's be possible to emulate a human mind, without exactly reproducing the same personality and emotional profile of a modern human being. Simulating human environments and/or experience to feed a simulation data is a bigger project than replicating a mind. If you are simulating every detail of human existence the question is what you are trying to achieve; post-human AI being don't need to be anything like modern humans phycological; and I doubt the contributions to mood of gut bacteria are considered fundamental in that - and I've yet to hear a modern human consider the diet in questions of consciousness.
For example, We live, and eat, very differently to our ancestors - Does that make us any less human, or conscious?
I don't think so, and as such don't agree that: "All of it, it turns out".
In the game backstory humanity became entirely digital, but found out AFTER that, the energy requeriments are staggering, so they send the player in a robot body to fix the energy issue. (you start building solar panels and thermoelectric powerplants and whatnot until you can build a dyson swarm and finally a dyson sphere).
It's not even genetic variation. Of course there could be genetic variation to reproductive success, but this variation hasn't magically and neatly assorted itself into nationalities or religions in the past few centuries for our convenience.
Fact is that the absence of Human suffering, side effects of wealth and freedom, seem to decrease birth rates overall. No religious fanaticism will overcome this mechanism long enough to matter.
Remember, evolution is not generally a game of "One day, this horse was born with a mutation that enabled it to use oxygen seven times more efficiently than its brothers." It's often a game of very small incremental differences slowly outcompeting the competition slowly over many generations.
A 2.1 birth rate will outcompete a 1.9 birth rate really quite quickly. It doesn't take much difference.
This is just standard evolutionary math, not some crazy conspiracy theory.
It may help everyone involved to remember we aren't really talking about humans. It is a a bit of a crazy idea to assume that every species in the universe will all 100% experience the same effects humanity happens to where as they become prosperous, they tend to have fewer children.
In fact, I've seriously floated that as one of the possible reasons why humanity may actually survive where many of our competition can't. If you consider something like an insect-like species, they may not even be able to get this far without choking out their planet because they may be quite unsuited to "reproducing less in the face of more resources". Human babies are very expensive; it is not at all clear that this will be a universal among intelligent species.
I stripped out the comments about humans since it is distracting people from my main point.
And as those relative differences change and even invert in some cases, there really is no case to make for the idea that this supposed evolutionary effect could reverse what we are actually seeing in the real data.
I have no idea what you are talking about. No such stability is required. No such stability exists in nature, yet evolution persists, right? The completely standard predator-prey recursive relationship intrinsically involves highly variable (successful) reproductive rates in a constantly oscillating relationship, but I don't hear anyone suggest that disproves evolution.
To be honest, if either of us are assuming constant situations that never change forever into the future, it really seems to be you. My entire point is based on variances. I'm arguing against the proposition that no intelligent species will ever spread across the universe because early 21st century humanity in the first world seems to not particularly be interested in it today.
Again, the discussion here is integrated across all possible intelligent species, not "humanity". It only takes one species to uncontrollably reproduce to spread across the cosmos. Science fiction is replete with possible such species. Does the HN gestalt not frequently remind people that aliens can be actually, you know, alien? Not just humans with funny foreheads?
Even Elon Musk might quibble with the idea that nobody in the first world in the 21st century wants to spread across the stars. If Mars were to build a self-sustaining habitat (which I define as a habitat able to build another equally-self-sustaining habitat), it doesn't matter whether there's 12 billion people on Earth uninterested in spreading out into the solar system, if Mars starts building and growing and spreading further. It only takes a few. It would then not further matter if they build a self-sustaining asteroid-based civilization if all the people on Mars decide they've got it made, and nobody ever again leaves Mars. I say the argument that 0.0000000000000000000000% of a species ever wants to spread out into the stars once they have the capacity, just because we happen to live in a couple of decades where most people (not even all, just most) wouldn't be interested in it is not a sensible one. It's parochial even on human terms; it's beyond parochial across the set of all possible intelligent beings.
Of course a difference in relative reproductive rates needs to be stable for the underlying causes to dominate and in turn affect reproductive rates. That's how evolution works. However, that's not how Human birth rates in different countries and communities work, today.
Please stop. HN is not the place for baseless accusations of racism. Please assume good faith in discussions.
It's really not much of a stretch; K strategists generally beat out r strategists in relatively stable conditions, and both intelligence and, with intelligence, increasing technology and prosperity make a wider array of unstable natural conditions more like stable conditions from an evolutionary standpoint through adaptability.
Having more offspring is a trade-off against investing more in each offspring.
A lot of entertaining fiction springs up around premises where things which are fundamentally related are instead treated as orthogonal, so you have spacefaring aliens that want to compete with us for for earthlike planets but are structured like insects despite being human-sized, intelligent, technology advanced, r strategists, but...there's very good reasons that many parts of that are implausible.
Where have I seen that argumentation before... oh yeah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_eugenics#/media/File:Bund...
That was 3-5 generations ago, yet somehow didn't come true.
For this to really work like you state,
* the cultures have to be stagnant
* income has to be stagnant
* zero movement between cultures has to take place and so on.
> Because while a lot of cultures and subcultures are choosing not to have lots of children, it is not uniform by any means.
It is when you control for income, though: The more wealthy nations become, the less children get born. Even inside the US, when you group by income brackets: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
Certainly sounds similar...
Isn't it? How would you prove/disprove this?
> oh yeah: <Nazi_eugenics>
The thing about pseudo-science is it often borrows (and distorts) real scientific concepts to masquerade as such; the existence of homeopathy doesn't discredit conventional medicine.
Its in our genes to be curios explorers, and that has helped the species survive.
Since there is no evolutionary pressure to increase intelligence further, the species does not leave the planet.
I'm fine with the idea of a species -- or whatever definition you want to use here -- expanding beyond one solar system. But without at least faster-than-light communication, I don't think it would be possible to maintain a cohesive civilization at that scale. And without faster-than-light travel, you're also going to have things like species rings developing.
Whether a civilization expand beyond their solar system is entirely depending on if they develop the technology to do so in a relatively short time compare to their life span.
One good reason could be habitable planets. There may not be enough habitable planets left in the solar system.
Extra: some sci-fi look at Kardashev scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
Escaping one solar system with some amount of colonists is probably harder than developing the technology to not need whatever counts as "habitable planet" at the other end.
They'd use the new system's ressources for all sorts of things, least of which would be biological survival.
Not because a big majority are ever gung ho about emigrating. You only need a few misfits or outcasts who want to try something different to start it.
Unlivable is the outstanding question, currently open.
Most people would enjoy romming Mars for a few days, some would enjoy it for a few months. I think only a select few would enjoy being there for longer than that unless it dramatically changed.
I also bet many would enjoy the low gravity on Mars and the Moon. It might even be very health beneficial for some.
Again, that's the basis for permanent medical facilities there.
> there will be zero appetite...
I almost completely agree. There will be very close to zero appetite. Which, over time, results in a colony :)
I feel like there'd be a lot more colonization of Antarctica if international law didn't effectively prohibit it.
No-one wants to build habitats in either b/c there are large up-front costs to building initial infrastructure. once it's there, things may change.
That said, Necessity is the mother of invention; and right now we have no reason to spend resources on developing these environs as there are plenty of more desirable habitats (e.g, nice climate w/ stunning views and wildlife), and the current trend is wanting to live near other humans in high-density cities.
Let underground habitat tech develop a bit more (100% artificial lighting replicating daylight), and planetary populations, and hence competition increase, and there may be more enthusiasm for this stuff.
Expansion is selected for in biological evolution, so it's fair to assume that most pre-civilization species are expanding on their planet. Perhaps some will have an epiphany and stop expanding as their society progresses, but you'd have to argue that that will almost surely happen to every species to refute grabbiness theory.
You'd have to accept the other assumptions that the authors make as well. One is that the grabby species is capable of travelling at a significant fraction of lightspeed. Another factor is unlimited lifetime of civilisations.
> Expansion is selected for in biological evolution, so it's fair to assume that most pre-civilization species are expanding on their planet.
Hm. I'm not sure that biology is the right angle to approach this. There are plenty of examples in human history (and even today) where expansion was not at all favoured by civilisations and human communities.
Isolated tribes on islands and in rain forests are a counter-example, as well as isolationist phases of civilisations such as feudal Japan in the Edo period.
To me the model is basically just another hypothesis based on the Spherical Cow.
Evolution doesn't know or care about space travel. It's separate concerns entirely. One is a function of the environment and adapting to it, the other requires a sapient species to create and apply technology, which - judging from current observation - is neither a common, nor obvious result of evolution.
In layman's anthropomorphic terms, your genes can want to expand on your home planet and say "hell no" when you find yourself in orbit.
Your genes can want you to expand and express this as playing Star Trek explorer video games all day.
In short, it's complicated.
World population is expected to peak at 10 billion at some point during this century, then decrease quite a bit.
The most similar planets we know about are hundreds of light years away, and if we somehow were able to reach them, we would have to overcome issues such as receiving massive amounts of radiation, having no water, etc., so it's reasonable to expect human population to stay below 10 billion for a long time.
The UN expect Asia, Europe and Latin America to start declining in the 2090s, and for zero population growth to be reached around that time. *
They estimate that population will eventually decrease by about 1bn.
Edit: the study that estimates a decline of 1 billion was published by The Lancet, not the UN.
http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2018/05/falling-fert...
As for the reasons: _if nothing else_ the expanding Sun outta do it.
Much harder to establish something that brings back more value than it took to bring it there.
Even just keeping Humans alive there will probably be a very expensive proposition for at least a century or more, before there is a solution to the apparent economic futility of colonizing Mars.
Bringing back stuff from another star? Forget it. The only reason to go there is to be there. Or even more precisely, you send your children/creations there for their children/creations to be there.
Any serious exploration would be a life-like colonization attempt already, because of the challenges.
I don't think that's relevant. All you really need is a segment of the population that wants to go somewhere else, and trade and whatnot can still work well without a communication system that's faster than travelling. That's how the trans-atlantic trade system worked from about 1500-1700.
Precisely. Messengers wouldn't cut it. Ancient empires always struggled to maintain control of their edge territories, because communication was too slow, even with messengers on horse.
All of that said, we're probably less equiped to colonize space than the chimpanzees in Africa are to build boats and sail to Brazil.
Surprisingly less prepared, if you count accidental "boats" http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160126-the-monkeys-that-sai...