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.

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