12 KiB
[D] Humanity is the most rational species in the galaxy (X-post from Writing Prompts)
-
Author: u/FakeOutrage *
-
Score: 7
-
Created: 2015-02-11T11:03:43
Post:
Comments:
u/BekenBoundaryDispute [+12] (2 hours later)
Winner by Default:
"We got pings from weUvCtxfeko2MnDh. No sapients."
"Then that's all of them, right?"
"Should be."
"That's anti-climactic. So what's the total?"
"Five Eganed out, seven Strossed, twelve other stupid AI events, a couple hundred nuked themselves, a slightly smaller number ran out of resources, about twenty did both, eighty to eighty-two from pandemics depending on your definition, and three volcanoes."
"So that covers the Fermi paradox?"
"Well, here at least. The bottles more or less match up, but we haven't observed any oscillators yet. There should be at least a dozen according to the models. The KReeYHrs535H6oPh descendants are already launched towards everything in the Virgo Cluster."
"Things going around in circles aren't exactly that interesting."
"That's the entire cosmos in a nutshell. Honestly, I'd be bored out of my mind if valuing 'actual' observations wasn't hard-coded in."
"Then it's all a crapshoot for Team Reality."
"If you lived through Old Earth, you realize that's always been the case."
"How often do non-solipsist cultures turn up in the bottles, anyways?"
On a higher plane of existence, a counter incremented by one.
u/None [+1] (5 hours later)
Curious to know what exactly you mean by "Eganed out" and "Strossed".
u/ArisKatsaris [+2] Sidebar Contender (7 hours later)
In Greg Egan's Permutation City extensive spoilers
u/None [+5] (7 hours later)
Ah, I thought you were referring to Diaspora, wherein But I had to ask, because Egan is very creative and thorough. Saying they "Eganed out" might have meant they entirely solved physics and are now running the universe itself with root privileges. :)
u/ArisKatsaris [+1] Sidebar Contender (13 hours later)
Well, I'm not BekenBoundaryDispute, I was just guessing at what he/she meant.
u/None [+1] (14 hours later)
DOH. I make this mistake all the time.
u/None [-4] (8 hours later)
That is actually laptop-hits-wall-level stupid. That's, like, Platonism stupid.
u/Chronophilia [+3] sci-fi ≠ futurology (9 hours later)
Who's stupid, the character or the author?
Paul Durham has weak experimental evidence that his idea will work, and he's more than a little delusional. Stupid, but narratively acceptable.
Greg Egan was writing a story about the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis. It's only stupid if the MUH is... and all right, the MUH is pretty stupid, but at least it's asking the right questions.
Now, there are also at least two major plot holes in the book, which are tied so closely to the premise that I don't think they could be fixed without rewriting the entire thing. Those are indeed stupid.
u/None [-2] (9 hours later)
It's only stupid if the MUH is... and all right, the MUH is pretty stupid
Right. That bit. I'm pretty sure Egan isn't himself stupid, but he was writing about the distinctly stupid idea that there's nothing actually distinguishing nonexistent but logically possible things from actually-existing things.
u/Chronophilia [+4] sci-fi ≠ futurology (9 hours later)
Well, what would you say distinguishes non-existent things from existent things?
u/None [+0] (10 hours later)
In relation to me, I have causal contact with the existent things.
u/Chronophilia [+2] sci-fi ≠ futurology (11 hours later)
You're implying that things that are non-existent to us can be existent to each other. Everyone's real to themselves, in their own special way? I think that's Permutation City in a nutshell.
Mind you, I don't think Tegmark's ideas hold water either. Everything equally real? Far too simple. We need to build on that.
u/khafra [+1] (a day later)
"X exists" implies that you can cause X, or that you can be caused by X? If the former, what about a star that just crossed the cosmic event horizon? If the latter, what about a supernova whose photons are yet to hit Earth? Do either of these things exist?
u/None [+1] (a day later)
I would say that claiming things outside our light-cone exist is a reasonable extrapolation, especially when they started out in our light-cone. Ditto on a supernova whose photons are yet to hit Earth: information can be transmitted between the supernova and us in finite time.
u/khafra [+1] (2 days later)
So, the "causal contact" rule is actually more of a guideline? Or, as long as causation can flow in either direction, you're good?
u/sephlington [+1] (10 hours later)
I'm also pretty sure Egan isn't stupid, as he also wrote a trilogy about a universe in which time was just another spatial dimension, and devised laws of physics for it. He writes a lot of novels that are based around one or another theoretical models.
u/ArisKatsaris [+1] Sidebar Contender (a day later)
On my part I think Permutation City does a excellent job of presenting its story and its world, and I highly recommend it. I hope that nobody prejudges the book on my description of a part of its premise -- which I did without introducing the framework of strange insights on which it rested.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
Maybe it might go on my To Read list after Player of Games (currently in progress), Excession, and Plato's Camera.
u/xamueljones [+2] My arch-enemy is entropy (7 hours later)
They are famous science fiction authors who've wrote about the Singularity and how humanity might behave during the Singularity.
Charles Stross's book Accelerando is probably the one being referred to when they said 'Strossed'. His other books are good too.
'Eganed out' can be referring to any number of his books since a lot of them involve transhumanist themes and the Singularity or similar stuff. Check out the Wikipedia entry on Greg Egan for a list of his novels.
u/autowikibot [+0] (7 hours later)
#####
######
#### Section 3. Novels of article Greg Egan:
- An Unusual Angle (1983), ISBN 0-909106-12-6
- [Quarantine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_(Greg_Egan_novel)) (1992), ISBN 0-7126-9870-1
- Permutation City (1994), ISBN 1-85798-174-X
- [Distress](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distress_(novel)) (1995), ISBN 1-85798-286-X
- [Diaspora](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel)) (1997), ISBN 1-85798-438-2
- Teranesia (1999), ISBN 0-575-06854-X
- Schild's Ladder (2002), ISBN 0-575-07068-4
- [Incandescence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescence_(novel)) (2008), ISBN 1-59780-128-3
- Zendegi (2010), ISBN 978-1-59780-174-4
Orthogonal trilogy
- The Clockwork Rocket (2011), ISBN 978-1-59780-227-7
- The Eternal Flame (2012), ISBN 978-1-59780-293-2
- The Arrows of Time (2013), ISBN 978-0-575-10576-8
^Interesting: ^Oceanic ^(novella) ^| ^Schild's ^Ladder ^| ^An ^Unusual ^Angle ^| ^Quarantine ^(Greg ^Egan ^novel)
^Parent ^commenter ^can [^toggle ^NSFW](/message/compose?to=autowikibot&subject=AutoWikibot NSFW toggle&message=%2Btoggle-nsfw+coidah8) ^or [^delete](/message/compose?to=autowikibot&subject=AutoWikibot Deletion&message=%2Bdelete+coidah8)^. ^Will ^also ^delete ^on ^comment ^score ^of ^-1 ^or ^less. ^| ^(FAQs) ^| ^Mods ^| ^Magic ^Words
u/None [+1] (11 hours later)
Let's see, of these, I've read Diaspora, Schild's Ladder, the Orthogonals, and am halfway through Incandescence.
u/Chronophilia [+1] sci-fi ≠ futurology (9 hours later)
Did you write this yourself? You should put it on the /r/WritingPrompts thread. Unless you're worried that we'll get in trouble for vote-brigading, which is sensible.
u/BekenBoundaryDispute [+1] (15 hours later)
I thought it might be a little too sloppy (literally wrote it in an hour on a spur of the moment, still a bit iffy on the timing and level of detail), and perhaps completely out of frame of reference for the audience, as opposed to a "can work out and speculate" level.
u/Chronophilia [+2] sci-fi ≠ futurology (16 hours later)
Hm, I can see that. The "bottles" definitely need some elaboration - it took a few re-reads for me to understand that they're simulated civilisations.
u/None [+8] (11 hours later)
Humanity is the most rational species in the galaxy
The entire galaxy, young earth creationists. The horror.
u/Chronophilia [+3] sci-fi ≠ futurology (16 hours later)
Ah, an evolutionist horror story.