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Nov 19, 2012

The Kline Directive: Technological Feasibility (2f)

Posted by in categories: general relativity, philosophy, physics, policy, scientific freedom, space

To achieve interstellar travel, the Kline Directive instructs us to be bold, to explore what others have not, to seek what others will not, to change what others dare not. To extend the boundaries of our knowledge, to advocate new methods, techniques and research, to sponsor change not status quo, on 5 fronts, Legal Standing, Safety Awareness, Economic Viability, Theoretical-Empirical Relationships, and Technological Feasibility.

There is one last mistake in physics that needs to be addressed. This is the baking bread model. To quote from the NASA page,

“The expanding raisin bread model at left illustrates why this proportion law is important. If every portion of the bread expands by the same amount in a given interval of time, then the raisins would recede from each other with exactly a Hubble type expansion law. In a given time interval, a nearby raisin would move relatively little, but a distant raisin would move relatively farther — and the same behavior would be seen from any raisin in the loaf. In other words, the Hubble law is just what one would expect for a homogeneous expanding universe, as predicted by the Big Bang theory. Moreover no raisin, or galaxy, occupies a special place in this universe — unless you get too close to the edge of the loaf where the analogy breaks down.”

Notice the two qualifications the obvious one is “unless you get too close to the edge of the loaf where the analogy breaks down”. The second is that this description is only correct from the perspective of velocity. But there is a problem with this.

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Feb 9, 2011

Questions

Posted by in categories: cosmology, ethics, existential risks, futurism, human trajectories, philosophy

Will the universe as we know it, with mankind in it, disappear in a false vacuum implosion in a few years or a few millennia? Will our comfortable big bang universe reverse course and die in a big crunch, billions of years from now, perhaps to be reborn, phoenix-like, out of its own ashes? Or will galaxies, planets, sentient beings, and even our very atoms be torn asunder in a big rip, their mangled shreds blasting outward for eternity?

Will the matter in the universe be transformed by super-intelligent computers into computronium — matter that computes — or does matter already spend its picoseconds and its megamillenia computing? And will we upload our minds into this computronium, or will our brains — already computronium incarnate — suffice going forward as they have sufficed, more or less, before?

And what of mankind? Will we someday meet our match among the stars, or will the Fermi paradox — the apparent lack of other intelligent race — be our future instead? And will we destroy ourselves in years or decades, or will we change by self-imposed genetic engineering until we are…something, but not humans as we know them today? Or will the mists of time and the forces of nature, working over tens of millions of years (not much, in the scheme of things), change us…into what? Into beings that as much resemblance us, their forebears, as we do our forebears the apes, the first mammals, the fish and the roundish flatworm?

And does it even matter…is that ball of rock and iron thousands of miles thick we call the Earth better, worse, or even particularly different for our existence? Does that emergent property we call emotion define its own significance as a phenomenon in the universe? Will our occupancy of a tiny slice of eternity change the distant future as the flapping of a fragile butterfly’s wings changes the course of hurricanes years after the butterfly returns to the dust from whence it came? Or will our existences as paupers, kings, and as a species fade away like a sunspot, something that happened, but then vanished, leaving no trace
in the vastness?

And if we matter not, what of it? Does that very question then matter not as well?