X-Message-Number: 15159 References: <> Date: Fri, 22 Dec 2000 12:31:03 +0000 From: "Joseph Kehoe" <> Subject: books and timing >This should be clearly fallacious. First, if we put such a machine >in the real world, it simply won't survive very long. The speed with >which we operate may not necessarily be best, but to work far more >slowly is a guarantee to mishaps which will kill us. If, on the other >hand, we take such a slow version of us and have it live in a universe >which is similarly slowed down, we escape one problem only by putting >ourselves in the midst of another: where does this ENTIRE SLOWED >UNIVERSE come from, and how do we create it? For that matter, just >what is the point of doing so? We want a computer version of ourselves >which runs at least as fast, not one what can survive only in an >artificial universe which we make ourselves. Just finished an interesting book The 5 ages of the Universe Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin pub: Simon and Schuster It is a biography of the universe from whence it came up until its demise. Very good reading. The numbers thrown around are literally mind numbing. The universe may not be infinite but in Human terms it almost may as well be. It describes the pace of life and how life will prob. operate on a slower clock speeds later on in the Universes future "history". Basically we operate at this speed because of the background heat in the universe (vast simplification here). As time goes on the univ. will cool and life processes will slow down by many orders of magnitude. e.g. a single thought will take a couple of millenium but the time scales are so vast that even at this speed life will have many orders of magnitude more time to evolve than we have had (as I said the numbers are mind numbing). Excellent reading. What has this to do with the above. Not much except that our current speed is not the only speed that intelligent life can operate at. If I was implemented as a cloud of nanostuff a couple of light years across (as someone on this list suggested before) then operating at a speed an order of magnitude slower would not matter too much. Survival would not be a problem in this case. Communication with "normal" people would be a problem but that would not make me less alive just hard to talk to! From my perspective I would be normal and biological people would be tiny flecks with a tragically small life span. That being said it would be more useful if we all ran at the same speed. Joseph. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=15159