From: Charles D Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Fri Jan 05 2007 - 17:35:56 MST
Piotr Szaniawski wrote:
> Danila Medvedev wrote:
>> T...
> ... A 'space empire' spanning a light year would have huge trouble
> maintaining contact with opposite sides of its territory: imagine a
> situation where information the core sends would reach the borders
> after half a year objective time and God knows how much subjective
> time. To call it 'inconvenient' would be a bit of an understatement,
> wouldn't it? ...
>
What this proves is that a centralized control system would be
inappropriate. A distributed system might not have any such problem.
(Well, there might well be distributed systems that don't have that
problem.)
A lot of this discussion is presuming a definition of "I-me" that is not
inherent. To an advanced civilization it might seem like the brain
refusing to dole out energy to the heart. (Well, that's a bit
extreme...but perhaps you get the point.)
I take the discussion about "discount rates" as important, but how you
figure it depends partially on how you organize your system. OTOH, it
does seem reasonable that after only 200 years there would still remain
a large number of isolated "centers of selfishness" that don't identify
with the system as a whole. I don't expect that the projected "space
ship" would contain any large amount of "stuff", possibly not even self
awareness. What it would contain is mechanism to build a communications
link back to the home system, and that once it was activated a download
of various natures would happen.
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