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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

The hypothesis is this all happened 10-20k years ago, and they virtualized their society into VR. They somehow managed to eliminate enough of the evidence of their development phase on the surface to the point where we have no conclusive evidence. There is glancing evidence that there were advanced civilizations quite a bit earlier than we thought.

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Where's their datacenters and generation there? If they're in space, they've probably seeding these probes themselves for a long time. If they're on Earth, where would they hide these? Needless to say, any human government will go a great length to do whatever pleases them for peanuts of the knowledge that they have. The issue here is being that humans are catching up and eventually it will all be revealed.

Figure out what physics says about the physical footprint of say 10 million small hominids who want to remain alive but live life entirely in virtual reality pods. I think you’ll conclude that from first principles you can say very well hidden, have a sustained existence as long as you fix the population, if you solve the engineering problems of situating your hardware in a void in the ground. Particularly if you know a priori you only need to do it for a few millennia.

I'm not sure why they would rule over a small void in the ground instead of ruling over the galaxy.

Light speed can’t be overcome and virtual reality can be made so you optimize for minimizing latency between minds and expanding into space strictly for scientific purposes or safety reasons. (Ie, to probe it for knowledge and danger.)

Virtual people don't die of old age so they can go from star to star in "just" thousand years and would now span a great chunk of spiral arm. Also, since they can be copied over (can they?) they will never have to split up, they will just fork() the whole colony and say themselves goodbye.

That doesn’t make any sense to me. I would never risk anything someone told me would move my consciousness into another machine since I would have no way to know a priori if the person on the other side would still be me. Ergo I think civilizations probably just take on the precautionary principle and maintain their minimal biological form to ensure a fully linked chain of confidence they will preserve their own consciousness, but that’s the threshold and they virtualize everything else like their incoming qualia.

Even if you do not trust their authenticity, you can still fork them to shoot into Proxima.

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