I have to tell you all, I think a lot about the future. And I think a lot about advanced alien life and technology. Why not?
Fermi’s Paradox specifically occupies my mind. I mean advanced alien life has to be out there. So where are they all? And don’t tell me that they can’t get here. Wormholes and warping space and time are already know to us at this point in our development. Think about it.
Anyway, while thinking of many hypothetical futures for both us and the ET’s, I have come to one (of many) conclusions. Advanced intelligent races may be totally virtual.
Think about it. After removing the brain, from the troublesome body (so many things can go wrong with the body after all), we may some day just live on a virtual plane. More space that way too. And if we meet up with other alien races, that’d be the way to go too. Different races have different gravity and atmospheric pressure requirements. And don’t get me started on alien microbes. These would be no issues on a virtual plane.
BTW I DON’T believe in UFO phenomenon. Anyone else have any thoughts on the future?
“Everybody hasbeen uploaded” is a standard item on the checklist of possible Fermi Paradox solutions. I personally have major doubts about the possibility, though. Trying to recreate the function of an organic brain in microchips seems to be similar to trying to fly a jumbo jet by fluttering it’s wings like a bumblebee. Electronics (as we know them, at least) are orders of magnitude less compact and energy efficient than a living brain. With our current technology, the world’s most powerful supercomputer is still a very long way from being able to simulate a single human mind. And there is very little wiggle room left for making conventional microchips faster. So unless the aliens have invented something profoundly different than our electronics, I don’t see it happening.
If the cap is light speed, I really don’t see corporeal organic forms making it here. Not even brains in vats. I can see colony ships for other habitable planets maybe, but for getting here? No.
I think we have to assume some sort of advanced technology that behaves profoundly differently from our modern computers. Otherwise it’s like trying to design a modern jumbo jet by extrapolating Wright Brothers balsa wood and internal combustion engine technology. A modern 747 requires technologies that were unimaginable (or at least highly speculative) to people in 1903 (materials, jet propulsion, computers and advanced avionics, etc) and couldn’t be built by simply adding more engines to a bigger wood and paper airframe.
Assuming such technology is possible, would such a civilization even appear as “life” to us? At best, I suspect that they would appear simply as some sort of massive abandoned machinery like a Dyson sphere or some other massive construct. Or maybe we would assume that the various probes they use for resource collection and protection are the “life” part when in actually, they are just relatively dumb automatons (like the squid-things in The Matrix).
And there is no reason to think the aliens virtual life would be recognizable to us. Given the ability to manipulate every possible aspect of their virtual universe (including the fundamental laws of reality), I expect that it would evolve in strange and unpredictable ways very quickly. When we think of “virtual worlds”, we tend to think of something like a MMPORPG or battle royale game. These environments are grounded in the real world (maybe with some fantastic or creative adjustments) because we are ultimately grounded in the real world. Sure, you can add stuff like teleportation, aliens, monsters, flying castles, or a second moon or whatever. But most current conceptions of VR involve stuff that is generally recognizable on some level.
What if it were just you and your consciousness for all eternity with a blank slate to do or create whatever you want? Sure, I might start off with basically a VR version of what I know (but with maybe a bigger apartment on a higher floor). But then maybe I decide I want the Empire State Building to be purple. Then I want live on a flat Earth (or maybe some other planet altogether. And then I decide to spend a hundred years as a house plant because that looks relaxing. Then maybe I just come up with whatever random shit.
The point is, I think it’s unlikely that some aliens will upload themselves into VR and keep everything frozen in their version of 1999 for ever.
Then again, we don’t really know how such a thing would work, what would be possible or how one would experience it (let alone how aliens would). Like would your mind reject anything that strayed too far from what it could accept as “normal”?
I agree with what msmith537 said, but in addition the host of a downloaded personality doesn’t have to be a conventional microprocessor. You definitely want to implement neurons in hardware, and replicate them on one or several chips. Having each neuron talk to any other neuron would be a routing nightmare, but we can replicate how our brains do it already.
As an example the Bell Labs chess machine Belle wasn’t implemented on just a computer, but had custom ASICs (or FPGAs, I forget) designed for it. It is better to go standard once the standard processor is fast enough - or if the market is too small to justify custom design - but that won’t be an issue for downloaded brains.
As for the OP, there are still going to be some kind of processing power hosting these virtual entities, and probably some living beings doing maintenance. So it might seem 100% virtual to the downloaded people it wouldn’t really be.
An alternative would be if you could build small enough mobile computers to download yourself into, and have super networking with other such. That way you could travel around, and interact with others inside a simulation that seems just as real as reality. That’s way beyond anything known to be possible.
