I was at TransVision 2010 in Milano, meeting up with my fellow transhumanists. Giulio Prisco was of course the cornerstone, organizing everything. In principle the conference occurred simultaneously in meatspace and teleplace (despite occasional glitches - this was the first time I felt *I* got disconnected when the internet connection went down, rather than the virtual part of the conference being disconnected: a good sign!) Some of the videos are becoming availableMy own talk was about the thermodynamics of advanced civilizations. Basically my argument was:
- Civilizations are physical objects, and nearly any ultimate goal imply a need for computation, storing bits and resources (the basic physical eschatology assumption).
- The universe has a bunch of issues:
- The stelliferous era will just last a trillion year or so.
- Matter and black holes are likely unstable, so after a certain time there will not be any structure around to build stuff from. Dark matter doesn't seem to be structurable either.
- Accelerating expansion prevents us from reaching beyond a certain horizon about 15 gigalightyears away.
- It will also split the superclusters into independent "island universes" that will become unreachable from each other within around 120 billion years.
- It also causes horizon radiation ~10-29 K hot, which makes infinite computation impossible.
,,,,,continua ALEPH ANDART