 
From: mike@highlite.gotham.COM (Mike Wiik)
Message-Id: <9203060607.AA00583@highlite.gotham.COM>
Subject: Hello Hello
To: +dist+~js9b/Public/camc.dl@andrew.cmu.edu
Date: Fri, 6 Mar 92 1:07:20 EST
Cc: mike@uunet.UU.NET (Mike Wiik)

Hello Hello to Corporations Ate my Cat Mailing List.

Sheepishly I admit skipping thru a lot of the CAMC thread.
I take it this mailing list is about future of humanity and
possible high tech intentional communities (or was that a
spinoff(?)). I did once keep some cats, though.

Personally my fave future history is CM's own Hans Moravec's
_Mind Children_. Extrapolating from this in conjunction with
K Eric Drexler's _Engines of Creation_ as well as some other
materials, I envision a future where transcendance drives 
society much more than sci-fi-predicted extension of current
capabilities.

To explain I'll use Dr Tim's SMI2LE formula (don't laff :-)
( naturally, everything below is IMHO and not everything is
  claimed to be original.):

*Space Migration (or Space Travel in general)*:

    All sci-fi dealing with Rocket Ships to the Stars are
    outdated. Interstellar travel for modern day humans is
    ridiculous. Worse than sci-fi, The _Futurist_ magazine
    a couple years ago had a feature on *travel to another
    galaxy* sometime in the year 5000 or some such. They
    even had guys in spacesuits crawling around the outside
    of the ship!

    Instead, I see *intelligent entities* transformed for
    space travel. I see the intelligence to build entire
    colonies on distant worlds the size of a small pebble.
    Near infinite ephemerlization (sp?) reduces interstellar
    travel power requirements to near-zero.

    The idea of transporting "cargo" sounds expensive. The
    idea of shipping information sounds cheap. I think it
    was Arthur C Clark who wrote (paraphrasing) that in the
    history of humanity "ship" will mostly mean "spaceship".
    I think "ship" will mostly mean *transport from one place
    to another* (and I think it does even now)...

    It's fun to read of cylindrical L-5 colonies, but more
    likely (and vastly cheaper and easier to maintain) might
    be open-ended (as in, no caps, no atmosphere, no trees,
    etc) colonies consisting of honeycombed encased brain
    tissue + supercomputers. Energized by the Sun, cooled
    thru the vacuum of space, consisting of trillions of
    intertwined semi-artificial and artificial intelligences.

*Intelligence Increase*

    Dr. Tim acknowledged this as the driver behind the others.
    In some sense he may have implied that SM and LE are the
    "results", the products of increasing intelligence. What
    I'm thinking is that I2 is the most important result it-
    self. It doesn't need the others to justify it. We will
    *transcend* the physical universe long before we colonize
    it. This is why we not seeing more aliens visiting Earth,
    they're all out exploring *other realities*.

*Life Extension*

    Current Science debates how long life can be extended.
    Perhaps the whole question is moot. I think the concepts
    of *life*, *death*, and even *identity* will radically
    change their meaning long before conventional medicine
    would give us multicentury lifespans. We'll be able to
    choose our forms, perhaps even our level of involvement
    with the "physical universe".

*Time Travel* (ok, not in SMI2LE but that would make it SMI2TTLE)

    Outdated Sci-Fi envisions time travel machines which propel
    themselves + occupants back to past eras or forward to
    future civilizations. Massive computational power + nano-
    archiological research trivializes "actual" (whatever that
    means) time travel replacing it with artificially generated
    past + possible future worlds at an atomic level of detail.
    Which of course leads us to:

*Universe Creation*

    Creationism: laffable science but definite possibility. I'd
    do some now if somebody had some supercomputers with a few
    picobytes of RAM to spare. People will be creating their own
    software universes, perhaps some already are. After thinking
    about this for a second or two the thought occurs that it's
    probably already happened and *we're in it*.

CUTE SMI2LE

    Ok, I'll call it *Creation of Universes* and *Time Engineering*
    to make the new CUTE SMI2LE acronym. Imho, economics alone
    dictate the view above: it's vastly cheaper than the sci-fi
    conventional approach.

THAT'S FINE, BUT WHERE ARE ALL THE ALIENS?

    Their nano-ships explore space while they enjoy super-
    accelerated mental masturbation techniques to not only
    gain new knowledge / create various applications but also
    to have fun. Mega-fun.

SO WHAT'S THE MEANING OF LIFE, MIKE?

    The meaning of life is: *to play with electronic equipment!*
    In this way we not only Increase our Intelligence but push
    our global capitalist system to create even newer and better
    toys. It's what all the Aliens are doing. Once we get better
    toys we'll be able to talk to them.

    A rocket ship plods along from point a to point b. The
    spherical nano-wave explores all space simultaneously at
    99.99% c. Older civilizations send us their records allow-
    ing us to improve our simulations of past eras. Eventually
    all matter/energy throughout spacetime combines into the
    vast Universal Mind, then implodes itself forming a new
    Big Bang and a new universe (having run out of things to
    process in the current one). The child process returns
    control to it's parent process. (angelic choir sounds).

--------------------------------------------------------------
All the above is Copyright 1992 by Michael Wiik. Permission
given to discuss and distribute as long as no commercial use
is made of the above material.
--------------------------------------------------------------

Well, anyway, here's something to discuss. I hope it's seems
worthwhile to you.

Re: High-Tech Utopias. An easy way to begin might be to have
an electronic equipment cooperative. I've got some electronic
toys, and am looking for metro dc area residents to share rent
on a studio and establish some sort of cooperative use system.

Think Like Me! Read These Books! :-)

Besides the two nonfics mentioned above I've enjoyed a lot of
Greg Bear's fiction, especially:

_Eternity_ (the sequel to _Eon_, and imho, a much better book).
_Blood Music_ (everyone thinks it's a doom scenario except me)-:
_Queen of Angels_

and of course Vernon Vinge:

_True Names...and Other Dangers_ (I admit I only read the title
novella :-(
_Across Realtime_ (new volume combining _The Peace War_, 
_Marooned in Realtime_, plus a short story).

plus all the usual cbpk, magick, and psychological stuff.

	-Mike

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