52 KiB
[FF] [RT] [C] The Killing Goku Maximizer, a dragon ball z fanfic
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Author: u/SimoneNonvelodico Dai-Gurren Brigade*
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Score: 69
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Created: 2018-07-14T17:17:05
Post:
Comments:
u/CeruleanTresses [+24] (10 hours later)
This is great. So I guess the AI will spread throughout every DBZ-inspired anime setting until it runs into Saitama, who punches it once and somehow annihilates it throughout the multiverse?
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+16] Dai-Gurren Brigade (12 hours later)
I didn't think of it, but this is a surprisingly good point. Yup, that has to be it XD.
u/Caliburn0 [+15] (18 hours later)
It can beat god, but Saitama? Nope... The power of the author's privilege is truly unlimited.
u/PurposefulZephyr [+22] (2 hours later)
This story went really far with it's Goku killiness. Very, very, very far.
I kept thinking in the beginning- killing Goku could be interpreted as ending his life, not as making him not exist. But that could lead to wireheading and possibly settling down into harmlessness, however, and this definition leads to more Fun.Overall, it was well-written, with all characters behaving with competence and common sense.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+12] Dai-Gurren Brigade (2 hours later)
I'm pretty sure that was Dr. Gero's initial intention, and the computer's too. Its understanding of its orders simply evolved as it got smarter and more twisted. Note the original attempt with #22 was simply to blow up the planet, which would have both killed Goku and destroyed the computer, and that would have been that.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+18] Dai-Gurren Brigade (2 minutes later)
Sorry for the extended break on "The Optimised Wish Project"! This is a completely unrelated rational DBZ short story I came up with, but the idea was just too good for me to discard, so I followed my inspiration and wrote it down. Hopefully it will make up a bit for the wait. As I explain in the notes, this was inspired by me reading "Friendship is Optimal" just a few days ago (it was a blast) and reflecting on how Dr. Gero had built a computer that possessed both the intelligence to carry out independent scientific research and a drive to pursue a single, rather unhealthy purpose: killing Goku. And that sounds like a recipe for disaster waiting to unfold, in terms of A.I. safety.
This story was the result of the unhinged train of thought that followed.
u/kmsxkuse [+8] (4 hours later)
This is beautiful.
That is all I can say.
u/LupoCani [+4] (22 hours later)
Sorry for the extended break on "The Optimised Wish Project"! This is a completely unrelated rational DBZ short story I came up with,
I was confused on this point myself. You didn't actually call it OWP-related in the title, but the title format is very distinctive at this point. Thus, a suggestion: When posting similar short and unrelated works, or posting this same work in other places, perhaps it should be subtitled "A Dragonball Z oneshot".
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+2] Dai-Gurren Brigade (23 hours later)
It's just the suggested title format when you link from Fanfiction.net. I'll customise it if the chance arises again.
u/None [+12] (2 hours later)
[deleted]
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+10] Dai-Gurren Brigade (2 hours later)
Yup. Fear the system, it's coming for you too!
u/None [+12] (8 hours later)
I liked the idea, but when reading it, this and other parts just felt, well, super jarring. It's like if your past!isekai started his modernizations with a revolutionary way to harness phlogistigons; yes, the author can make their work have the laws of physics that would allow this to be possible, but that doesn't change the effect. For instance:
There's a technological limit to how complex a machine Shenron can bring back, as we see with 16, so I would have expected that Maijin Boo destroying the planet would have left the machine lobotomized at best.
Similarly and more importantly, the entire time-travel section makes no sense to me. Even leaving aside how time passes the same at both ends due to the mechanics unless you make an entirely new timeline when traveling back (in which case there would be 2 present!timelines, one in which the destruction of earth did and one in which it did not), it really seems odd that Vegeta didn't even blast the earth apart hard enough to destroy the capsule corp laboratory. Like, gero's computer surviving, sure, advanced tech ala 16's armor or something, but bulma's lab's defenses would be a known quantity. The fact that gero's computer was somehow able to reconstruct time travel from the incinerated parts of cell's time machine (yes, conservation of information, but reworking the events of a closed system so completely should require a computational apparatus comparable in power to the system studied, not the shreds it had left) without any of its main computation or sensors, and able to create a time machine from that in the time, but somehow not able to do so from first principles, is similarly jarring.
Overall, it fells, well, forced. Ai is dangerous, absolutely, especiall unshackled and self modifying Ai, but when the AI requires that the fundamental laws of the setting be rewritten in its favor and that none of its enemies have agency and things that feel strongly of diabolus ex machina, well, it sorta cheapens the effect quite a bit.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+3] Dai-Gurren Brigade (12 hours later)
When was any limit about #16 established? The only reason why #16 isn't restored that I thought was at play is that he doesn't classify as "living being". They specifically ask the Dragon to resurrect all victims of Cell. #17 and #18 qualify since they're still part biological and obviously possess a "soul" of sort (#18 is seen in the afterlife in the Majin Boo saga too), while #16 doesn't because he's purely mechanical. He can't be "resurrected"; only "restored", or "rebuilt".
I didn't really mean the story as a 'serious' parabola on AI danger of course, it's more a way to play around with the DBZ setting as well. I mentioned it being inspired by "Friendship is Optimal", if you've ever read that it's pretty tongue-in-cheek too, what with the singularity starting from a My Little Pony MMORPG. Concerning the time travel, you're right, I didn't think about the fact that when Trunks uses it time does indeed seem to pass equally on both sides, though that's a pretty silly mechanism for time travel to begin with. As for the time machine wreckage, the system surely knew it was in CC and that it was an absolutely critical resource. It can create androids with Super Saiyan level energy no problem, so for example projecting a shield that can resist planetary destruction around it is no big deal. Super Saiyans and upwards can't be killed by planetary explosions, they would just die afterwards because of the lack of air. It can't protect the whole planet of course, but specific dedicated critical parts of its mechanism, sure.
u/None [+1] (3 days later)
Shenron couldn’t bring him back; he’s not a literal genie, if he could have restored 16 he would have done so by another means. This wasn’t the same wish as reviving everyone else, either; this is the one that, after it failed, krillin used to remove 17 and 18’s bombs.
That’s always something that made sense to me. How I saw it, timetravel created other realities, and had them running concurrently; its like booting up another autosave in a new window. You’re only using one at a time, but both are experiencing ticks at the same rate, and if you want to travel to back to exactly when you left, you have to open up a third timeline.
If it had enough control to hav eitd agents around the CC vault, why couldn’t it have just gotten timetravel from that before the earth blew up? If vegeta leaving allowed it to make a move, and it spent those few minutes before thr death working out timetravel, that would have solved quite a few issues I think.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+4] Dai-Gurren Brigade (3 days later)
This wasn’t the same wish as reviving everyone else, either; this is the one that, after it failed, krillin used to remove 17 and 18’s bombs.
Nope. That wish was for Shenron to make #17 and #18 human again. He said he couldn't because they were too powerful, and he couldn't act on their bodies (makes sense, or they could just go ask Shenron to give strokes to all their enemies). Then Krillin just asked to remove the bombs, and he said that was okay because it didn't have to do with their strength.
u/MaddoScientisto [+7] (5 hours later)
Well, this escalated.
u/alexeyr [+4] Steersman (3 days later)
So where is Taylor?
u/dbenc [+2] (a day later)
Continuously.
u/Cyber_Cheese [+7] (6 hours later)
Right at the end, i got naruto and luffy, who is the fishing pole orphan?
u/None [+9] (7 hours later)
Fishing pole is Gon from HunterxHunter and the superhero is Deku from Hero Academia.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+7] Dai-Gurren Brigade (12 hours later)
Yup, confirmed. They're Naruto, Luffy, Gon and Deku, all from stories published in the Weekly Shonen Jump magazine like Dragon Ball itself was.
u/Noir_Bass [+4] (4 hours later)
Welp, that went a lot further than I was expecting it to (which I guess is more or less the point of the story). It was pretty entertaining and well worth the read, so thanks!
u/Hust91 [+5] (14 hours later)
This is gorgeous, I love it.
Did it not have extraterrestrial servers when earth was destroyed though?
The characters seemed to hypothesize that by now it surely must have, and it must have known that destroying the planet would be likely once there is no longer anyone they care about on it and thus extraterrestrial colonies would be necessary to survive the incoming planet-busting, never giving them the chance to destroy it on one planet alone.
But when earth was destroyed it seemed to be rapidly dying, which seems to imply it was all located on earth?
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+7] Dai-Gurren Brigade (14 hours later)
Well, it was Bulma's theory to begin with, and she was only considering the ways it could resist a planet-wide EMP attack (which was already a pretty outrageous and inapplicable idea). My mind about that was that the computer had underground backups at that stage, but not space ones. Anyway, I might consider rewriting it a bit and making a second version to accommodate these possible inconsistencies (perhaps, as someone else pointed out, I should also remove the time travel computing loops, which while an idea I love, might not be possible in the DBZ-verse as time travel seems to work only by shifting back and forth by fixed intervals). This was written really quickly and basically planned as I wrote - almost a stream of consciousness on my part. I just had a lot of fun with the idea, but a bit of polish might be necessary.
u/Hust91 [+3] (19 hours later)
Ah. I appreciate the response, and would first like to reiterate that this is really good and scratches an itch in me that I've had since I first learned of paperclip maximizes. It was an extremely satisfying read.
I was mostly figuring that if it's clever enough to trick earth into nanobot bombing themselves by predicting their responses that well, it would also figure out not only that the Capsule corps and Z-fighters would try to escape in the rocket and place some self-replicating nanobots on it (and every other space and time-travel capable craft it knows of), but also that once everyone on earth was doomed, there would be nothing holding them back from blowing up the planet, an ability it knows that they have.
It's also a lot easier to make a rocket capable of reaching escape velocity when your payload can be less than a gram, but it might be detected.
I got the impression that Dragonball time-travel was more like "travel to an alternate reality that has advanced further in the time line" with no consequences to the universe you left, and I'm not sure they know of a way to return to specific alternate realities after leaving, but I've watched less of the time travel stories than many.
If you are looking for a way for the story to continue after the Earth blows up, the AI might have extraterrestrial and even extrasolar (cloning Z-fighters cells would let you travel between star systems as easily as they do, right?) colonies already. This could make the fight escalate one more step at the galactic stage before total victory.
If looking for a similar effect to the time travel computing boost, Orion's Arm has the concept of a Tippler Oracle, which is a "basement universe" around 10-ish light years across that a high AI creates by expanding and pinching off some space (save a small wormhole for access) with computronium-assembling nanobots to solve problems that might require millions or billions or the age of the universe to otherwise solve. Probably a bit too much for when the AI has just left the planet, but on the galactic stage it might become feasible to make bubbles of expanded space and then pinch them off, as supposedly time accelerates the closer a universe gets to compressing into a hot big bang.
Probably not viable for rapidfire research since the universe has to last long enough in non-apocalyptic conditions for the nanobots to actually have time to construct the computronium, but those big long problems could potentially be solved this way.
Another potential problem worth exploring is the possibility that the god-child grows bored with smashing people one day. Maybe it can put him near a black hole or something so that time slows down immensely around the god-child? Doesn't matter if he gets bored in five minutes if those five minutes take longer than the remaining lifespan of nearly all other black holes and white dwarfs.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+5] Dai-Gurren Brigade (20 hours later)
Ah, my idea there (same canon I'm applying to Optimised Wish Project really) is that the Dragon world has no special or general relativity, and surely no cosmic speed limit. So no black holes either. There's various reasons in-canon to think this, IMHO, the main ones being the complete elasticity of space travel times without any dramatic FTL travel methods (hyperjumps, warp drives etc.) and the very existence of the instant transmission technique. You'll notice I didn't add any lag to Bulma talking with the Z fighters from Jupiter - that wasn't a mistake!
And if you haven't seen DB Super, well... suffice to say Zen-chan (the King of All) is a rather simple creature. Really, that bit was somewhat of an affectionate jab on my part at DBZ recent fanservice heavy videogames like Xenoverse and FighterZ - since Zen-chan is in many ways an audience stand-in in Super as well. The universe getting meta at the highest levels is basically canon XD.
Plus, Zen-chan getting bored is a general problem for the Dragon world anyway. He somehow managed to last until now without erasing all of existence on a whim, though, so let's assume he's as easily amused as he's bored.
Agreed on your ideas - about time travel, Trunks travels back to the past and that creates a split timeline, but the key point is that after he spends a certain time in the past, he can only go back to his future after the same amount of time has passed. This seems confirmed in DB Super during the Goku Black saga. Trunks comes back to the main timeline after a number of years that have passed in parallel in his timeline as well. Basically his time machine seems locked onto travelling back and forth by the same amount of years as it did the first time. It's possible that by re-calibrating it he'd simply lose forever the lock onto the specific timeline he wants to visit, and just start spawning new ones. BTW, Super also confirms that this sort of many-worlds multiverse is of a higher level of the multiverse ruled over by Zen-chan. Trunks' timeline had its own Zen-chan, distinct from the one occupying the main one.
u/Hust91 [+5] (22 hours later)
Oh, I thought the optimished wish project was just a forum where people try assembling a flawless wish to use on a malicious genie/unfriendly AI, if it's a story on this level I have to check it out! (Edit: Doh, just realized it's the awesome Rational!DBZ story I've recently started following. Thank you for that one too! :D)
And those are some fair assumptions to me, it solves a lot of problems that would otherwise be too omnipresent.
Zen-chan might be an issue in that before there was an entire universe generating fighters, movies, videogames and such at a way, way higher rate than Zen-chan could parttake of them without accelerating time. If the AI only offers him only one excellent form of entertainment it'll probably keep him happy for a long while, but eventually there's a risk that it's too same-y. Even the most fantastically realistic Diablo III or Doom game will get boring after a long enough slaughter of demons. The AI might need to match the cultural diversity of an entire universe, or at least as much as Zen-chan can parttake of - which it may well be able to do once it realizes that killing opponents like Frieza becomes too dull after the first million years.
I didn't think DBZ actually paid that much attention to keeping their time travel consistent, what do you know!
Are we certain that the time travel splits timelines rather than just traveling to one of infinite simultaneous timelines (full Rick & Morty style) that happens to match the time he wants to go to?
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+7] Dai-Gurren Brigade (23 hours later)
Oh, I thought the optimished wish project was just a forum where people try assembling a flawless wish to use on a malicious genie/unfriendly AI
That was called the Open Source Wish Project, which I was indeed referencing with my title since it's basically what Bulma does before summoning Shenron, but it's dead now :/.
The AI certainly can come up with suitable entertainment, I think XD. In Super, Zen-chan seems to be kept busy just by playing marbles with planets... he doesn't even know about fighting until Goku & co. give him a demonstration tournament, and he's been around for the entirety of DBZ and before. He just never looked.
Are we certain that the time travel splits timelines rather than just traveling to one of infinite simultaneous timelines (full Rick & Morty style) that happens to match the time he wants to go to?
Yes. Because timelines are finite and splitting them is a big deal. There are two methods of time travel in DB Super: one is the time machine built for Trunks or similar technologies. These are considered taboo by the Gods and produce new timelines. Time travelling is a cosmic crime in DB! Other actions of supreme Gods can produce offshoot timelines. There's only four-five of these, one of them created by Trunks. Who created the others is unknown. I think Beerus created another one by destroying Zamasu (if you haven't seen Super, long story). The other method is the Time Rings. These are in possession of the Gods and allow them to time travel without affecting the past and splitting off timelines (so I assume these are closed time loops). When a new timeline is created, new rings appear as well. Each ring moves you to the past of a specific timeline.
It got really, really complicated after the Goku Black arc XD. The end of that arc was also pretty much as mindfuck-ey as the one of this fanfiction (it ended with
)
EDIT: oh, and there's a third mechanism. Whis can rewind time, for just a few seconds. That's not really time travel though - time literally runs backwards and history can then be rewritten at leisure without splitting any new timelines.
u/Jiro_T [+2] (2 days later)
the key point is that after he spends a certain time in the past, he can only go back to his future after the same amount of time has passed.
The fact that people who travel to the past travel to a past that has diverged before the time at which they land in the past suggests that they're just travelling between alternate timelines, not really using time travel. If they're just travelling between alternate timelines, and time flows in both fo them at the same rate, it's expected that this would happen.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+2] Dai-Gurren Brigade (2 days later)
No, wait a second, when does that happen? If you're thinking of Trunks going back in the Android saga, the reason for the divergence was that Cell had also gone back to even before. He simply didn't know. There are three timelines there. In one, no one goes back, Goku dies and Cell kills everyone. In one, Trunks alone goes back, divergence starts at that point, they defeat the androids somehow, then he returns to his future but is killed by Cell who steals his time machine. And in one, Cell lands, then Trunks, and the divergence starts with Cell, so when Trunks arrives the butterfly effect is in full force already and #19 and #20 are born.
There's the question or how is it that Trunks lands in the same timeline as Cell, but that could be because Cell uses Trunks' time machine but goes back even further into the past, so he creates a split timeline of the timeline into which Trunks arrives from another timeline... thus effectively creating two future timelines...
It's confusing.
u/cae_jones [+1] (4 days later)
Very much so. The Daizenshuu suggest there should be 4 timelines, but then it suggests that the fourth timeline would have a Perfect Cell, when that does not make sense given the other details. We'd have two Killer Robot Futures, and two Trunks Warned Everyone and They Won timelines. But when do the two futures split? I thought I had a solution to this a few months ago, but it's not coming back to me easily.
Perhaps a truth-table would help? We know there must be a timeline that received no time travelers, one that received Trunks, and one that received both Cell and Trunks. Is there then, therefore, one that received Cell but not Trunks?
Maybe like this:
- First bad timeline. Trunks leaves from here, as the original time-traveler.
- The second timeline is created by Trunks's trip, from which he gets a remote to destroy 17 and 18 in his timeline. The fate of this timeline's Cell is unknown, but he wouldn't show up for 20 years or so.
- Cell from the original timeline goes back in time, creating the third timeline. Trunks is not here, but for some reason, this Cell never becomes important enough for Trunks to know about. Maybe he and 16 take each other out when no one's paying attention, or something. This is the second bad future.
- Trunks from the second bad future goes back, creating the timeline we see most in canon.
This is still confusing. And Super makes it even more so.
u/WadeSwiftly [+1] (8 days later)
u/Salaris [+4] Dominion Sorcerer (2 days later)
This was a fun story and definitely one of the best DBZ fics that I've read. You did a good job of making the cast generally in-character and competent.
Weirdest part for me was that the AI is able to spoilers
There were a couple other odd parts, but nothing major. Examples
Overall, I think the story was generally excellent, and more consistent than Dragon Ball itself is.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+2] Dai-Gurren Brigade (2 days later)
About the virus idea, this Bulma did never get the plans for #17 and #18 - those were recovered from Gero's lab by Trunks and Krillin. So she's not as familiar as the one we know with their architecture. Plus this is the computer we're talking about, and whatever weird modifications it's doing to itself.
About Beerus, the time frame IMHO is not very relevant (he's notoriously a lazy bum) and Hakai isn't necessary that powerful (if we consider the Super manga as canon, it's a progressive technique that requires energy as you destroy mass, so obviously it would be very hard to use with the computer here). But with Whis you're right, though I'm not sure how useful his rewinding could have been. Perhaps he can rewind only once and it didn't do anything good? But nah, you got me here.
Piccolo can't make Dragon Balls any more. Dende could, though they'd just be destroyed again, being on Earth. Neo Namek could be a bit of a stretch I guess, depends on how much information we reckon the computer has. But yeah, Goku did have trouble finding it in the Cell saga, so it at least needs a more sensitive ki sensor than Goku's sixth sense.
u/Salaris [+3] Dominion Sorcerer (3 days later)
Good replies. Won't go into back and forth on this stuff, just wanted to point out the things that occurred to me while I was reading. Thanks for writing the fic!
u/LupoCani [+4] (18 hours later)
Mobile link for myself to click on:
u/ClarissaSaiyangel [+3] (3 days later)
One of the few divergences from canon rules that bugged me.
Why can’t Dende just pay the 100 days to create new Dragonballs, since the lookout is out of its reach per magic, and then proceed to wipe it out? There’s a 30 model gap between the Instant Transmission effect and the planet wipe. There’s a 24 hour gap between the death of Goku and the planet wipe. The machine cannot beat a 6.6 hour stay in a magically safe, time accelerated room needed for Dende to create the Dragonballs anew with a fresh Dragon.
(Also there’s no real way within canon it can beat Beerus. SSG requires pure blood Saiyan and drains the energy of the Saiyan batteries to complete no-fly zero. Even if the ritual didn’t drain the AI blob, it would need to split off a pure saiyan body to fight Beerus. Even if it could do all that, it has no method to detect and deal with Whis and Beerus cheating it to death by attrition. This is assuming it could eat a full power GoD Hakai at all, which is suspect really.)
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+2] Dai-Gurren Brigade (4 days later)
If Dende creates new Dragonballs, would they be ready for use ASAP? We've never seen that - only him restoring the existing ones. Even if they were created scattered, the machine would get to them first.
As per Beerus, my idea was more that the machine could get info about God ki from Saiyan DNA, and once it has that, that's pretty much it, it can reproduce it through its own means. Beerus' hakai is powerful, but is it destroy-a-whole-galaxy-in-three-minutes powerful, especially if the galaxy fights back? He already did plenty damage, but he's not all-powerful like Zen-oh-sama.
u/ClarissaSaiyangel [+3] (4 days later)
It’s hard to argue they can’t be used immediately. Kami reset the Dragonballs for immediate use after the destruction of the Dragon in DB, and it’s noted he could have chosen not to. Furthermore, Kami/Piccolo’s death and revival during the Frieza arc cause the Dragonballs to reset and be ready for use immediately. When Goku compains about waiting 100 days, Dende doesn’t note that there’s an additional charge time before changing tacts. Nothing at all implies that in the instance of creating new balls, you also wait any amount of charge time, but even adding a year of charge time still puts this at a 30.6 hour process with the Time Chamber, which is a superior alternative to Goku’s suicide.
We have no clue on the upper limits of Beerus’s Hakai, because there have been none shown by an actual GoD. The fact of the matter is we did see him fight a Majin, and that Majin can’t touch him. We know of no other methods to create God Ki than the ritual, and it requires far afield from canon methods to imbue what is essentially a soulless Majin with god ki; even if we assumed it could spit out god ki batteries that somehow charge it, this just gives it a method of harming Beerus; it still can’t get around unknowable time restarts and Whis’ Ultra Instinct. (Time Rings were something I considered counting in their favor, but in actuality aren’t something they’d consider using.) They can, however, use any set of Super Dragon Balls.
u/Caliburn0 [+2] (19 hours later)
Em... that seems a bit... excessive.
I love the story though. This is the kind of thing I have nightmares about. The only thing it is missing is the exponential self-improvement cycle an AI might have. But if it had that, it would have been over before it even began.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+2] Dai-Gurren Brigade (21 hours later)
Well, the AI does get smarter. It acquires emotions and sentience when it conquers the internet, for example. It just happens more in jumps than a smooth exponential because of the way it grows and is set back by occasional attacks.
However I'd say the fact that this is set in the DBZ universe is key to the way the situation goes to hell very quickly. I think in real life, for good or worse, real hard physical limits mean not everything can be done with technology - either ours, or a superintelligent AI's. The second principle of thermodynamics, Heisenberg's indetermination principle, the lightspeed limit... all of these are hard-coded and incredibly restrictive constraints that, even while allowing some wiggle room (and certainly more potential development than we have already), probably prevent altogether the kind of crazy feats we imagine for singularity-level AIs. Can't diverge to infinity if infinities are banned by law.
u/Caliburn0 [+2] (21 hours later)
There are very few constants in the universe we are sure about. Even the conservation of energy is not absolute, not on relativistic scales anyway. And even time and causality seem to break down in the quantum world. No telling if this will (or can) have any impact on our scale, but until we have a universal theory (and even then), it will be hard to rule out the possibility of anything.
But the thing I was thinking about was simply the AI getting smarter than any human at some point, and then figuring out the fundamental concepts behind time travel, magic, and ki all at once, and how to use them to their extreme. Basically becoming a god immediately upon figuring out how all those things really worked.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+7] Dai-Gurren Brigade (21 hours later)
Well, that would have felt like a very sudden deus ex machina (literally...). Since anyway there's no reason to prefer one way to the other I kept it harder for the machine. After all right until the nanomachine attack the thing isn't even that big yet. There are limits to how much you can achieve by sheer brute computational force anyway, even with parallelism, it isn't as simple as "twice the CPUs = everything is twice as fast".
As for the physical laws... I get the increasing feeling that it's really not that good. I mean, it sounds bad if you think of a malicious AI putting its hands on those easy gains before us, but if those potential gains at least were there, that'd be something to look forward to.
I just seriously doubt they are.
We know for sure there must be a full theory of quantum gravity we're missing, but the only thing we can be reasonably sure of is that it will kick in at the Planck energy scale, which is an insane number of orders of magnitude above what we can achieve right now. Everything else, like supersymmetry and strings, is speculation - I might even say wishful thinking. For all we know it's a desert of new physics up until the Planck scale, and the Planck scale is out of reach until we go full Kardashev 1.5 or so... but we can't go beyond Kardashev 1 without new physics. It's a Catch 22, and I'm frankly afraid we might just have been unlucky enough to exist in a universe that works like that.
See it this way. We were born in the Solar System. We had the luck of having a big enough satellite orbiting our planet, which set an achievable goal for our early space program. However, now we're having many more problems because the next leap, to Mars, is comparatively much harder.
In a better version of this universe, Venus would have been habitable instead of being a greenhouse hell (it's in the Goldilocks zone after all...) and we would have much more incentive and economic convenience in colonising it. Our space technology would be flourishing and our energy limits would not be a problem. In a worse version, we wouldn't even have had the moon, and leaping from LEO to enough know-how to land on Mars would have been a pipe dream.
I'm afraid that, speaking of physical laws, we might be in one of those universes. We just landed on the Moon, and the next viable target is Pluto. If that's the case, then either us or an AI would be equally locked down. Energy conservation is definitely absolute on macroscopic time scales (are you thinking of temporary quantum fluctuations?). Time and causality still hold, they just follow different, weirder rules. The more you study these things the more you realise every single loophole you can think of is carefully patched up. Lightspeed looks like a truly absolute limit, so does causality. I don't hold much hope even from quantum gravity or dark matter. Dark energy is mildly interesting in that in the unlikely possibility it can be controlled and manipulated it could perhaps hold the key to building an Alcubierre drive. But that's a pretty far-off possibility.
Let's look at it this way. This planet had to deal with self-repairing, self-replicating, learning, adapting carbon-based nanomachines programmed to maximise their own numbers for billions of years now. They're called bacteria and they never managed to eat it down to its core. Unless you include the single-celled organisms who started organising into increasingly complex systems eventually spawning a race of crust-drilling, space-dwelling, carbon-dioxide-spewing, fanfiction-writing two legged apes whose population has indeed been exploding exponentially as of late...
u/causalchain [+2] (22 hours later)
but we can't go beyond Kardashev 1 without new physics
What makes you say that? (Starting) a Dyson Swarm seems to be completely within our near-future reach, and while we don't know when nuclear fusion reactors will be feasible, afaik they seem like we'll eventually get there, new physics or not. Though given that most of my futurist information comes solely from Isaac Arthur, I'm hardly a reliable source. Do you have particular reasons for saying that future advancements are going to be hard?
(Edit in brackets)
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+3] Dai-Gurren Brigade (23 hours later)
Well, let's leave out the socio-political considerations, that however have me rather worried on their own...
Nuclear fusion is indeed potentially possible, though the people I know who work in the field seem all but optimistic with regards to that. Let's just say we already know that ITER, the next fusion research machine, has some potential design flaws, but we can't fix them because designing and building these things takes so long we just can't go back to the drawing table every time we discover something new. We just have to hope to squeeze new info from the thing anyway by compensating for flaws during operation. The complexity of this stuff is already off the roof.
Dyson Swarms IMHO are out of our immediate reach, though potentially achievable. But consider how much the strain on our planetary resources and environment increases for every order of magnitude we try to scale up our industry... I'm not sure we could do that without having some well-established off-planet bases, and right now those don't seem very convenient or practical due to the sheer low quality of the real estate in our corner of space. Mars is the best prospect and let's face it, it's still pretty crap.
Even so, let's imagine we can acquire a good mastery of our Solar System, The Expanse-style, and we somehow still manage to do it while having a socio-economic structure conducive to further scientific and technological development. That's still possibly too small to build a particle accelerator that can test the Planck scale. Unless you think it would be economical for such a civilisation to do something like disseminate an entire solar orbit (let's say between Earth and Mars) with superconducting magnets to accelerate particles around the entire Solar System to insane speeds, using up a significant fraction of the total energy output of the whole thing. To me, that seems the kind of stuff you can do if you have at least two or three star systems at your disposal. It might be a bit too much if you factor that people will still want to spend money on stuff that impacts their lives more directly than high energy physics - especially if high energy physics is a sterile field that hasn't produced anything meaningful in decades or centuries.
And even then, suppose we build it, and we find out that quantum gravity is a theory that just doesn't allow to break the FTL limit anyway. What then? The light speed limit would remain a hard barrier between us and interstellar colonisation. We could overcome it by extending our own lives, of course, potentially by cyber implants, DNA rewriting, uploading or some other such trick because our bodies too are at their limit (we can improve the likelihood of reaching old age, but we can't really push the upper limit of 100-ish years of life for now).
Or we could just create a race of sentient machines that would carry our torch while being much more long lived, I guess. They would also have the benefit of not being as squishy and choosy when it comes to habitability conditions as we are. And that's one field where we can be sure significant advance must still be possible - if the human brain can do it with a few kg of matter and the energy produced by our metabolism, there's no way that sentient AI would require necessarily gigantic clusters to work (unless religions are right and we all just work because we have souls XD).
...I suppose the summary of it all is: I'm a naturally pessimistic person, and I'm pretty frustrated by both the state and trends of physics in recent time, so my extrapolations of the future are pretty bad scenarios, which usually tend to be also more realistic scenarios. My biggest pet peeve is understanding the quantum measurement problem, but anyway, I just get the impression we ran out of a whole lot of low hanging fruit in this field and we built our expectations on the freak occurrence of incredibly fast development for a couple hundred years rather than the norm.
u/Caliburn0 [+3] (a day later)
That's a weird way of looking at it. (The development trend) I can see your point that a lot of low hanging fruit in physics is already plucked. But it is by no means finished. I personally think we will never get to the end of science, that even if we discover the principles behind quantum gravity, we will simultaneously find even more stuff to figure out.
But even if physics development is forced to take a back seat for a while, engineering has a lot of catching up to do. At this point, our species is completely hooked on technology. I don't think we could stop inventing new things, even if we wanted to. Someone, somewhere would continue anyways. And what we managed to do in the last 100 years boggles the mind. And that was with a fraction of the people we have now. With a fraction of the tools we have access to now.
Sure, Moore's law seems to have petered out some years ago, there are still many other alternative routes we can take to higher computing power, and the scale we can work on is both increasing and minimising at the same time.
Other breakthroughs we seem to be on the edge of is; genetic engineering, space travel, material science, energy production (I know you seem doubtful of fusion, but really I'm talking about a 100 year time span here), automation, 3d printers, and that's just at the top of my head. Any of those will be game changing.
For the last 4 billion years, life has been confined to the earth. It took 3,5 billion of those years for it to evolve to anything more complex than a single cell. Homo Sapience has been around for 200 000 years. Civilisation 12 000. Industrial society 150⁓ In 1969, we walked on the moon.
That was the first time that life touched upon another heavenly body. That was us. That was humans. The trend is most definitely exponential. It is hard to see it from so up close, but take a step back and it becomes clear as day. If we don't kill ourselves in the next 100 years, we will be gods. That is kind of the conclusion I have come to. I don't know if I will be alive to see it, but I hope so.
Once we get a couple of problems sorted down here. (Sickness, war, resource scarcity), there seems to be nothing stopping us from conquering the stars.
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+3] Dai-Gurren Brigade (a day later)
The problem with extrapolating from exponential trends is you never know when and why they're going to stop. You could extrapolate that the price of Bitcoin in late 2017, or tulips in 17th century Netherlands, would keep rising exponentially from the existing data, and be sorely disappointed when they crashed and burned without any apparent forewarning. Complex systems are assholes like that.
I don't deny that there's room for improvement. If I have to say where the best chances lie, I'd hazard Artificial Intelligence (not the singularity kind, but I'd say human level might be attained at some point in the next decades, which will in itself be a history-defining moment and one that will usher in both a lot of changes and a lot of trouble), and genetic engineering. Materials science is good but I don't feel like some massive breakthrough is lurking behind the corner. Space travel... eh. We might do something new, if the funding is there. Private spaceflight will certainly have a technological and social fallout, but again, it's not the stuff paradigm shifts are made of IMHO. A lot of this stuff is incremental innovation, not radical innovation, to me. A bad sign I see is that our society, our science communication and our businesses seem all to run a lot on hype, to make up for results that don't always live up to snuff, but that is bound to also create disappointment and backlash.
This isn't about "the end of science" as in "there's nothing else to discover". Rather, it's about "the next groundbreaking discovery (I'm talking stuff like quantum mechanics or relativity) will be much harder and without our quick fix we might fall prey to problems that will make it almost impossible to ever reach it". Humanity's progress wasn't always linear and steady. When the Roman Empire fell, technology, productivity and knowledge in Europe were kicked back quite a lot. Exactly because we're so dependent on technology, like the Romans were so dependent on new lands to conquer, lack of significant developments that come fast enough to satisfy our hunger might end up strangling us.
And of course, there is the possibility that anything else beyond a certain energy scale is just desperately out of reach and will forever be. And we don't know how likely it is because it's not like we have many Universes to make statistics about so we know what sets of laws are more likely to occur. It's not a pleasant thought, but we shouldn't shun away from it because of that.
u/Caliburn0 [+2] (a day later)
You are right, of course. But we have a lot more data than you seem to think. The price of bitcoin, tulips and any other specific event is relatively short lived. And is therefore by definition a fad.
And hype is part of the human condition. We can no more get rid of it than we can get rid of porn.
But as I see the history of the planet, life and humanity. Something has to break soon. Either it is us, or our limits. And when I say "soon", I am talking the next century or so.
By the way, still love the fanfic. I have stayed up far to late to read your other stuff too. I am eagerly awaiting the continuation of 'The OWP'. By the way, if you want a beta or someone to just bounce ideas off of, I would be happy to contribute. Although we may not have the exact same interpretations of how history will go, that shouldn't pose a problem.
I have written some stuff myself, if you're worried about that. Link to my profile: https://www.fanfiction.net/u/6111553/Caliburn0
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+2] Dai-Gurren Brigade (a day later)
Either it is us, or our limits.
You're in the "our limits" camp, I'm in the "us" one. Simple as that, I guess XD. I would be delighted to be wrong though, especially if I get to see evidence for it in my lifetime.
And thanks for the offer of beta-ing! I'd like to hear an opinion on immediate future OWP developments. Part of what made this FF come to mind is that I actually was thinking about having an AI feature - for a much minor role - in the next arc, and play on a smaller scale with some transhumanist themes. All while actually having a rather light tone. If you're ok discussing it and being spoiled a little, PM me!
u/SimoneNonvelodico [+1] Dai-Gurren Brigade (23 hours later)
Well, let's leave out the socio-political considerations, that however have me rather worried on their own...
Nuclear fusion is indeed potentially possible, though the people I know who work in the field seem all but optimistic with regards to that. Let's just say we already know that ITER, the next fusion research machine, has some potential design flaws, but we can't fix them because designing and building these things takes so long we just can't go back to the drawing table every time we discover something new. We just have to hope to squeeze new info from the thing anyway by compensating for flaws during operation. The complexity of this stuff is already off the roof.
Dyson Swarms IMHO are out of our immediate reach, though potentially achievable. But consider how much the strain on our planetary resources and environment increases for every order of magnitude we try to scale up our industry... I'm not sure we could do that without having some well-established off-planet bases, and right now those don't seem very convenient or practical due to the sheer low quality of the real estate in our corner of space. Mars is the best prospect and let's face it, it's still pretty crap.
Even so, let's imagine we can acquire a good mastery of our Solar System, The Expanse-style, and we somehow still manage to do it while having a socio-economic structure conducive to further scientific and technological development. That's still possibly too small to build a particle accelerator that can test the Planck scale. Unless you think it would be economical for such a civilisation to do something like disseminate an entire solar orbit (let's say between Earth and Mars) with superconducting magnets to accelerate particles around the entire Solar System to insane speeds, using up a significant fraction of the total energy output of the whole thing. To me, that seems the kind of stuff you can do if you have at least two or three star systems at your disposal. It might be a bit too much if you factor that people will still want to spend money on stuff that impacts their lives more directly than high energy physics - especially if high energy physics is a sterile field that hasn't produced anything meaningful in decades or centuries.
And even then, suppose we build it, and we find out that quantum gravity is a theory that just doesn't allow to break the FTL limit anyway. What then? The light speed limit would remain a hard barrier between us and interstellar colonisation. We could overcome it by extending our own lives, of course, potentially by cyber implants, DNA rewriting, uploading or some other such trick because our bodies too are at their limit (we can improve the likelihood of reaching old age, but we can't really push the upper limit of 100-ish years of life for now).
Or we could just create a race of sentient machines that would carry our torch while being much more long lived, I guess. They would also have the benefit of not being as squishy and choosy when it comes to habitability conditions as we are. And that's one field where we can be sure significant advance must still be possible - if the human brain can do it with a few kg of matter and the energy produced by our metabolism, there's no way that sentient AI would require necessarily gigantic clusters to work (unless religions are right and we all just work because we have souls XD).
u/DaystarEld [+2] Pokémon Professor (6 days later)
This was great :) The one thing that bothered me a bit was why the machine hadn't just destroyed the planet immediately. Originally I always figured that Gero's machines had a limiter on their actions, since he wanted to presumably live in some fashion after Goku was dead; that could probably be written in somewhere to help address that potential question for readers. But it was willing to create a second cell-like-planet-buster, so really it seems like it shouldn't be opposed to just creating an android that has no ki signature but is strong enough to blow the planet up (which isn't that hard at all in the DBZverse).
Overall great story though! Looking forward to the continuation of Optimized Wish :)