kinnison wrote:
Rampant idiocy? I'm not sure about that one. Nanotech is possible (if you want an existence proof, look in the mirror), femtotech may be, and smaller scales, who knows? Current scientific ideas indicate that there is structure all the way down to the Planck length. But picotech is probably impossible, as there is nothing on that scale to manipulate.
Biological cells are microtech, with certain aspects being near the nanoscale, but hardly fully autonomous machines like you seem to imply. Femtotech is a pipe dream. Forget that. Anything less is equally out there. When nanotech comes to the point of universal assemblers, then nanotech may be deemed successful as far as most sci-fi enthusiasts are concerned. As it stands now, nanotechnology is NOT what the average SF fan thinks of when you bring the term up.
I can easily imagine thinking entities on the scale they mention - in fact, the stuff they use is conservative compared to theoretical possibilities.
You'll no doubt be able to supply me with a good list of these possibilities from reputable materials scientists, biotechnologists or chemists then, because given nanotechnology scale machines are pushing the limits of physical technology, I baulk at the prospect of femtoscale mechanisms.
What I can't imagine is what they can do - that's the whole point of course. If you want (which I somewhat doubt) my opinion, I think that S1 at the very least may emerge before the end of the century, and possibly before the middle of it - current thought seems to be that your desktop PC will be as smart as you about 2025. Once true thinking AI starts, it won't stop and the Singularity will be here.
That's rather ambitious and optimistic. The Singularity is also a concept that is without any real backing, given the assumption technology will magically keep pushing forward exponentially from an arbitrary point. There is nothing to suggest science will come into a new Enlightenment anytime in the future without whole new laws of the universe being uncovered. Physics, for instance, has been the least progressive of all the sciences in the last century, with quantum mechanics being the only real addition to the repertoire. It may give us quantum computers that
may be able to emulate human neural nets and possibly the personality too, though that is still second-guessing the technology. To believe that nanotechnology will, for instance as Drexler once put it, eradicate the idea of an economy and allow all and sundry to be their own masters by having universal assemblers build them what they want is just pure fantasy on the scale of proper socialism, only with better technology.
Orion's Arm is hardly the only example of Singularity SF - check out Accelerando for something probably better written. The full text is available on the Net.
I prefer to avoid these sites altogether, for they simply cannot do justice to science and technology the way a good author with a good story can. Fantastical technology predictions for the sake of it just come off as wishful thinking on behalf of people who otherwise have little else to offer. At least with good sci-fi should the technology never come to be, you'll at least get a riveting story.
I confess to bias on that one - one of my hopes is that I will be able to upload myself about then or slightly after. My body is pretty much a mess even for my age (48) and I'd like to leave it behind for somewhere else before the obvious.
Before you consider such a thing, I'd suggest checking one of the many threads here on the Ship of Theseus and Locke's theory of self thought experiments.
On the matter of superstrings; I think there is some confusion about terminology here. Superstrings, as I understand it, are entities (closed loops) on the scale of the Planck length, existing in higher dimensions - 11 dimensions seems to be the favourite. I think that you are talking about cosmic strings - which are thought to be linear defects in space-time left over from the inflation era, and do indeed have a mass equivalent to millions of galaxies at the very least. They are not really connected, despite the similar name.
In that case, it's more acceptable. When I hear "superstring", more often than not, the person is talking of the universe sized cosmic variants that likely don't even exist still, same with nanotech and people assuming it means tiny machines rather than anything engineered at the nanoscale. If superstring theory is true, then you may be able to toy with the local metric to an extent, but as Alastair Reynolds elucidated in one of his stories once, do so at your own risk. Attempting to change the gravitational constant on a massive scale or inertia, is a feat you don't want to go wrong lest you have a star system fly into your face at relativistic speeds.
Incidentally, chucking mass down a wormhole into another universe does not necessarily violate mass/energy conservation, on the scale of the multiverse. And in any case, that law may be invalid on the Planck scale anyway. There have been several physical laws in the past found to be so - the law of conservation of parity being one
That does still hinge on how M-theory pans out. If the bulk exists (a term to be used rather than "multiverse", as Necron pointed out. Universe or cosmos being synonyms), then it may be that mass-energy is able to cross from brane to brane freely via natural wormholes (assuming Einstein-Rosen bridges can remain stable enough for large particle transmission and that they can occur naturally).
I know the Kardashev scale from zero to III, galactic energy output control. What are IV and V? I'm guessing clusters and superclusters of galaxies - am I right? I suppose then that class VI would be controlling the entire universe.
You could argue VI is being able to control something like the Great Attractor, which is like a hypercluster of galaxies. The terminology is fuzzy when you get to such levels of development. It's easily on the way to being master of a whole universe, though.
Lastly, please point me at the RPG. I've had a look on the site, and there seems to be much discussion, but no mention of the actual game. is it actually available?
I cannot say. I was under the impression it was online and being played for ages now. That was one of the reasons behind the whole Orion's Arm concept anyway, last I checked.
} but I don't think that there was necesserily one big shield. I'd have to watch Stan's Trial again though.
