From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Aug 01 2002 - 22:11:25 MDT
The Fermi Paradox as an exponentiating trap:
Posit that at the Singularity humankind and/or our AIs will transcend to a
posthuman state, and perhaps these superintelligences will find some way to
tunnel entirely out of our spacetime into one that's more convenient,
commodious and safer (an idea used in my latest novel, TRANSCENSION, and
independently in John Smart's analysis and other places earlier).
Now: if that's what happens to most civilizations throughout Many Worlds
variants of the cosmos--if they somehow remove themselves entirely, via the
equivalent of a black hole--might it be that the remnant superpositions
become increasingly reduced to a kind of shadow of the former potential
evolutions of the universal Schrödinger state equation?
Furthermore, if there can be some kind of ghostly but real interference
*across* superpositions (as David Deutsch posits to explain double slit
experiments, and JohnJoe McFadden claims helps explain aspects of
biological evolution [
http://www.geneticengineering.org/evolution/mcfadden.html ] , a notion
similar to Egan's in TERANESIA), might the original multiverse tend to grow
more restricted with the passage of time? It's as if every time beautiful
or brilliant children are born in a slum, they move at the age of 17 to
Hollywood or Harvard, and so their neighborhood allele pool for those
phenotypes is incrementally degraded. That might mean that the probability
of a Singularity happening in *your* universe grows ever smaller over time.
The Fermi Paradox implies that the sky *should* be filled with Spiked
cultures and their cosmic engineering (assuming such engineering is
conspicuous enough to be noticed, not cloaked, etc). There would seem to
have been time for many millions or billions of species to have gone
Singular and vanished, taking their potential quantal reinforcement with them.
At the moment, I'm treating this as a fictional narrative device in a
novel, although I suppose some sophisticated version might even be true.
Any quantum mechanics on the list who might comment?
Damien Broderick
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