X-Message-Number: 20886
From: 
Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2003 10:00:37 EST
Subject: Re: CryoNet #20871 Informationn in the universe

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Francois said:

> I have read about a speculation in physics that once information is created,
> it can never be destroyed. It is always, in principle, possible to recover
> any information, however scambled it may have become. <...>. A sufficiently 
> advanced technology would always
> be able to recover all the information defining us as individuals and use 
> it
> to perfectly recreate those individuals, even after an arbitrarly long 
> time.
> It would also make cryonics a moot point. Wait long enough and you will be
> revived, whatever happenned to your body after your death. Just how firmly
> is that speculation about information established in modern physics, and
> does it state that information recovery is always possible in principle
> only, or in practice also? 

If the universe is finite in space and infinite in time, that is true. 
Unfortunately for that view, there is gravitation, it works on unbounded 
space, so space is either infinite or finite (as a sphere surface) and 
infinitely connected (you can do an infinite number of circling travels 
around it). In that second case, each finite domain has an infinite 
complexity, there are ever and ever smaller structures. So gravitation tell 
us that the universe is infinite in complexity at least on either large or 
small scale. At any time, the information content of the universe is then 
infinite. If from time T0 to later time T1 there is a finite quantity of 
information added, then the information content of the universe remain 
infinite. So you can add continuously informations in the universe, never 
lost anyone but get it more and more scrambled. If your capacity to 
unscramble it grows faster than the scrambling process, then that information 
is available, if you don't cope with the scrambling process, it is lost. Even 
if civilisation survive for an infinite time in a never ending universe, that 
is not a recovery proof for any information. Everything rest on progress 
speed, a domain where we are not too good now.

Put another way: If you wait for a comming technological god, the simple fact 
of wait for it is an insurance that there will be none. If you wait for 
nothing from the future technology, there is an overwheiming probability that 
you indeed get nothing from it and an infinitesimal possibility that, 
locally, you get something.

Yvan Bozzonetti.


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