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The right kind of asian mother-in-law is the best invention ever. She thinks I'm amazing because I actually talk to my kids and manage to put up with her daughter (who is a "failure" because instead of becoming a doctor/lawyer she's a physicist), and will cook for us and babysit on zero notice...

Only people with unhealthy amounts of free time think about this. I know legit rocket scientists (cousin at SpaceX) and a couple astronomers. They're much too busy with problems like "I need more thrust without melting this rocket engine" and "The Hawaiian holy men just vetoed the site for my...

Thanks. Is your claim basically that 10^bignumber computations (or whatever large amount you end up with from aestivating) is functionally close enough to infinite for a simulated intelligence? There wasn't a discussion in that paper of subjective time freezing with that label attached to it...

Do you have a handy source on this I can read? Some cursory googling isn't coming up with much. Plenty of theory that sufficiently large black holes experience subjective time stop, but this probably isn't what you're talking about since simulations require time to do anything.

Ok, so we're in agreement that there's an ultimate endpoint on survival no matter what you do, barring new physics? The substrate is going to vanish at a finite point in time unless they discover a way to modify the cosmological constant.

Made of what, since atoms have evaporated due to the expansion of space? "the Big Rip is a hypothetical cosmological model concerning the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the matter of the universe, from stars and galaxies to atoms and subatomic particles, and even spacetime itself, is...

I'd argue that an outcome that can't happen should be excluded. When I say "best case" it's "the best case that can actually happen given our current understanding of matter-based life and physics", not "a better outcome even though it's impossible" or "a better outcome that's contingent on...

Optimality subject to constraint, if your limit is fundamental physics. I was trying to talk about the conclusions that derive from different assumption sets (and, in retrospect, doing a poor job of distinguishing them). My "entertaining" is the acknowledgement of logical possibility, not and...

If we're bringing in unknown physics in this way, then fine. I made my claim under the assumption that our current physics adequately describes the future. I'd just add that if it turns out physics can allow us to survive the expansion of space evaporating atoms, then whatever that tech is...

The point being, if your "failure" includes the best-case outcome I don't think that's a great definition. That's all.

At this point I have to believe you're just not reading very carefully. I didn't say the things you're disagreeing with. Correct, at least as far as resolving the FP, and I never said otherwise. That's 1a/2. Unless there's some really important new physics we're missing (dark matter tech or...

I don't think we're actually disagreeing as much as you think we are, and perhaps that's my fault for making nit-picky points that muddy the discussion boundaries. Let me try again. There is some physics-based limit to the amount of energy that a civilization can control. This is different from...

Who said they didn't? (Hypothetically. I know we don't see current evidence of that.) Entropy kills everything eventually no matter what scale you achieve. Are you really saying that there's no difference between a multi-trillion year culture that's eventually killed by the expansion of space...

Because one of them was killed suddenly and unexpectedly, and that's a very different series of events to experience. If all you care about is the logical constraints of Fermi's Paradox, it's not that different.

On some scale yes, but perhaps not detectable by us now. (Yes, that puts us right back in the Fermi Paradox.)

I also get huge mileage out of a HOSTS file, which basically redirects traffic to known ad networks to 0.0.0.0. http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/HOSTS.HTM

Ahh. That's a shame. I've been around enough that I make a point of not following the real-world personas of anyone who makes art I enjoy.

With a programmatic understanding of DNA the future is going to become unrecognizably weird very fast.

Scalzi's Old Man's War series has a fun take on these ideas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man%27s_War

No, we won't be doing this in the next ~50 years at the very least unless some major new breakthroughs occur.

The max exhaust velocity of a current ion thruster tech is ~50 km/s. Solar escape velocity is ~42 km/s. We can already do it, albeit not by a huge margin. Plus you can use gravity slingshots like we did with Voyager 1, which has already exited the solar system.

For rockets in a vacuum that only starts being true if you're trying to accelerate your object faster than the exhaust velocity of your propellant. So yes, that would apply if you're shooting for significant factions of c, unless you're ejecting your propellant at ~c, in which case you have to...

I have a degree in econ and studied econometrics under a Nobel laureate. As a practical matter, Econometrics is just a fancy name for forecasting with linear regression. Cliometrics is an exercise in hand-picking historical data that generates a model confirming the conclusions you want to...

We had sufficient propulsion tech, yes, which is the only point at issue. You're right that we don't have the actual survival/colonization tech, but no one is claiming we do and I'm unclear why you think arguing against that scores points.

You don't need 0.25c or 1 ton payload. "All" you need is a small von Neumann Probe moving more than ~42 km/s and a lot of time (or what counts as a lot of time to a human but is still an eyeblink on a galactic scale, as khorum keeps pointing out). We've already done it, less the...

I'm trying to draw out a point around this claim you keep making: Infinite energy expansion and infinite survival is not an option. It doesn't matter whether a species pursues aestivation or not. They're going extinct regardless. There comes a point where physics simply becomes inimical to...

You're using a (true) attribute of the end state to make categorical statements about the intermediate state. Over a large enough time horizon everything dies as a matter of physics, and treating that as the only relevant factor trivializes the discussion of our current reality to the point...

In fairness, unless we misunderstand the basic physics of the universe we're eventually going extinct no matter how much energy we control. It's entirely possible that we could achieve a "very long but not technically infinite" period of fixed-energy stability before something goes wrong...

I think we all agree that sending short-lived fragile sacks of meat between the stars is a harder way of doing it. The point everyone else is making is that colonization is most likely not contingent on the transportation technology. What we can already do gets the job done since you can...

Time and technology are funny things. The future looks like it will never arrive, and yet when you look back at the past the sense is always "holy shit, that was fast". My grandfather grew up in a sod hut without electricity or indoor plumbing and rode a horse to school. Within 30 years he was...

I stopped playing at lvl ~130 because the geo-aspect doesn't play nice unless you move around a lot while being able to look at your phone. At 100+ the game becomes much more about hunting bosses, and they're sparse enough that even keeping an eye on your phone while walking the dog or whatever...

We have the tech to get SOMETHING very far away over a long period of time. On the scale of millions of years that time is still fairly trivial. You're right that no humans will be on that trip, but I don't think anyone making the "we have the tech" point is proposing in that context that we...

True; good points. I've also seen the actuarial statistics implying that there's a soft lifespan cap of 700-1000 years simply due to the risk of acute infections or catastrophic accidents, even if you remove all age-related or degenerative causes. (Obviously this extends as medicine becomes...

If you get the anti-senescence part worked out the question is moot.

Now, sure. I'm talking about 100-1000 years from now. As khorum keeps saying, the transport part of the tech exists now. It's just a question of the other necessary components, which are bound to be developed at some point, and a long wait.

I don't disagree that in aggregate we're exceptionally shortsighted. Your claim was about me specifically, though. All it really takes is enough tech scaling (AI, nano/micro machinery, low launch costs, etc.) and one Elon Musk type willing to make some personal investment and at some point in...

Sure I would. I'm not so short-sighted that I need to experience the final payoff personally for something to be worth doing. It's perfectly possible to extract intermediate rewards from a project that exceeds my own lifespan. (Building companies, raising kids, political reform, scientific...

If we had the tech there would be a long line of people willing to launch interstellar self-replicating AI-powered probes. Hell, I'd do it just because it would be the single most awesome achievement in human history.

Thanks, will check that one out. For anyone that hasn't read it, a classic in the same vein is The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. It tracks the experience of soldiers traveling at relativistic speeds to and from a distant galactic battle front, and their experience of months of subjective time...

Average lifespan is only that low because of the inclusion of infant mortality. Once you survive early childhood your odds of living to age 50-70 were pretty good no matter when you were born. Expectancy excluding infant mortality was in the low 60's in the 1700's...