and there is always the discussion of how quantum mechanics may play into conciousness as well, something entirely non-deterministic.
Time Travel in a Traveller campaign
- Thread starter Werner
- Start date
That is what you need data compression for. You don't need to track every single atom, the cell is the "atom" of biology, what is going on within the cytoplasm of every single cell has little to do with what you are thinking or what your memories are. Brain cells vary in size from 4 to 100 micrometers, molecules are on a nanometer scale, so they are 1000 times smaller than a human brain cell, which means each brain cell contains over one to twenty billion atoms. You don't need to keep track of those billions of atoms, only the brain cells, and there are ways to abstract what state they are in, just as there are ways to model the weather without keeping track of every single air molecule.
and we've seen how good those forecasts are! (okay, I do live in the mountains and that does mess with things more as we also have a LOT of microcells. but this summer pretty sure the forecast was correct on rain less than 50% of the time. I've already limited mental ability - not sure I can afford a 50% cut due to rounding issues!)Fairly decent for the next few days, over a longer period, the accuracy tends to drop off a bit. If you roll two dice and I roll two dice, we will tend to get different results most of the time. I think a lot of the decisions we make and the thoughts that we think have an underlying random basis, a lot of it is rational and predictable but alot of it is intuitive, an idea just pops into our heads, for no particular reason, and sometimes it makes sense. If we can't make optimal decisions, we sometimes make random decisions, because sometimes making any decision is better than making no decision.
We could probably reproduce the information in our heads, but our thoughts are not completely deterministic, on one given day when faced with the same set of inputs we will make a different decision than on another day. We role dice in our heads do to speak, we can reproduce those dice, just not the results the rolled all the time. We can produce similar random results, but not the same ones.
Straybow
SOC-14 1K
"But it doesn't matter. There still isn't a way to reconstruct a macroscopic object molecule by molecule in a span of seconds."
How do you know? This is science fiction, if we knew all the stuff that would make the science fiction possible, we would be living in that world. Do you know how to build a jump drive? Can you build an air/raft?
Straybow
SOC-14 1K
Gravity and FTL are macroscopic phenomena, and we can posit macroscopic machinery to do the work. Wave your hands like you just don't care. But going to the molecular scale is problematic. Over recent decades, the notion of nanobots has been widely abused to create magical, nigh instantaneous effects in scifi. I certainly find it incredible.
Creating molecules out of nothing requires mc² energy, a few billion TJ for the average human. Start with a molecular stock of some sort? Even so you'd have to get the right molecules together, and you can't grab them and snap them together like Lego blocks. We can use existing molecular machinery to duplicate RNA and DNA molecules, but it takes hours to make a detectable amount.
We have a primitive precursor. You can use a 3D printer to make stuff. It takes hours to make a single useful part. It creates thin layers but not molecular scale. The finer the scale, the longer it takes. Posit a macroscale machine that can do nanoscale assembly and it will necessarily work exceedingly slowly due to the scale of the effort, with ~10^23 operations making mere grams of matter.
If you want to have a pool of nanobots, and the necessary raw materials in usable form (perhaps in liquid solution) from which your freshly assembled simulacrum emerges, that isn't very much like Star Trek matter transporters. It would probably still take hours, not seconds, to do such a complicated assembly.
Then the big question: is it alive? Would it function as intended just because it has been correctly assembled to the molecular scale?
What's the difference between a human one second before death vs one second after death? The tissues continue to live (functionally) for a period of time, yet every effort to revive the patient might fail. Just making a functional copy might still not be alive in that sense. A transported/assembled person might have to be revived from this non-living limbo. Doesn't work? Download the data again and rebuild until you get a copy that works?
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you can solve the problems on the assembly end of the transaction. Who is going to volunteer to be disassembled here to get to there? How is that going to be accomplished without being a nightmarish, unthinkable process?
Or, perhaps, instead of being disassembled, the sending machinery merely scans the subject down to the cellular level? Now what do they do with the original when the copy is made? Who is going to volunteer to have duplicates running around, perhaps with the thought that they have rights to everything you have and are?
Yes, Clarke's law applies, but Clarke's law does not guarantee that the putative "sufficiently advanced technology" can actually exist. I think Clarke's law has a corollary: that sufficiently advanced "technology" really is magic, as it can only exist under different laws than we observe.
Creating molecules out of nothing requires mc² energy, a few billion TJ for the average human. Start with a molecular stock of some sort? Even so you'd have to get the right molecules together, and you can't grab them and snap them together like Lego blocks. We can use existing molecular machinery to duplicate RNA and DNA molecules, but it takes hours to make a detectable amount.
We have a primitive precursor. You can use a 3D printer to make stuff. It takes hours to make a single useful part. It creates thin layers but not molecular scale. The finer the scale, the longer it takes. Posit a macroscale machine that can do nanoscale assembly and it will necessarily work exceedingly slowly due to the scale of the effort, with ~10^23 operations making mere grams of matter.
If you want to have a pool of nanobots, and the necessary raw materials in usable form (perhaps in liquid solution) from which your freshly assembled simulacrum emerges, that isn't very much like Star Trek matter transporters. It would probably still take hours, not seconds, to do such a complicated assembly.
Then the big question: is it alive? Would it function as intended just because it has been correctly assembled to the molecular scale?
What's the difference between a human one second before death vs one second after death? The tissues continue to live (functionally) for a period of time, yet every effort to revive the patient might fail. Just making a functional copy might still not be alive in that sense. A transported/assembled person might have to be revived from this non-living limbo. Doesn't work? Download the data again and rebuild until you get a copy that works?
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you can solve the problems on the assembly end of the transaction. Who is going to volunteer to be disassembled here to get to there? How is that going to be accomplished without being a nightmarish, unthinkable process?
Or, perhaps, instead of being disassembled, the sending machinery merely scans the subject down to the cellular level? Now what do they do with the original when the copy is made? Who is going to volunteer to have duplicates running around, perhaps with the thought that they have rights to everything you have and are?
Yes, Clarke's law applies, but Clarke's law does not guarantee that the putative "sufficiently advanced technology" can actually exist. I think Clarke's law has a corollary: that sufficiently advanced "technology" really is magic, as it can only exist under different laws than we observe.
Proneutron
SOC-13
Post o' the Day
Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Yourdictionary.com quotes:
Anonymous saying, this is an inversion of the third of Arthur C. Clarke's three laws : "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." It has been called "Niven's Law" and attributed to Larry Niven by some, and to Terry Pratchett by others, but without any citation of an original source in either case, and the earliest occurrence yet located is in Keystone Folklore (1984) by the Pennsylvania Folklore Society.
Proneutron
SOC-13
I don't think it was Niven. Sounds more like Pratchett. Niven used to live near me and I got to talk him about his works and questions I had about them. Nice guy
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Magic could be subversion of existing universal laws, or their manipulation.
One alternative is you could send someone who never really existed in the first place, call it a human body simulation, you simulate a person from the moment of conception. You simulate a fertilized human egg cell dividing and dividing again. You store the simulation program within the processors of an android robot, you run the simulation of the developing human being within the processors of a line of robots. There are a whole series of robots ranging from infancy all the way to adulthood. When the simulated child goes to sleep, you can upload his program and then download it to a slightly larger robot to represent growth. When the robot child is old enough, you send it to school and you raise it as a human being. It grows up thinking it is human, it gets educated, and when it is ready, you send it through a wormhole where another robot body is waiting for you to download its program into.
Two thoughts:
1. The slow assembly time would certainly work against living results: a half-built person would die long before the other half was "printed."
2. As for scan and copy tech, it reminds me of Alan Budry's Rogue Moon where they used exactly that to explore an alien something that killed in accord with strange but exact rules--he postulated that after the (2) copies were made, there was a time when they had a telepathic link, so that the living copy could remember what the dead copy had chosen and experienced. (Of course, it's been a long time since I've read it . . . hope I remember it right!)
Wikipedia on Rogue Moon.
How about low berths? That's a thing in Traveller. Scan him while frozen, then reassemble him while frozen, and then thaw him out.
True! OTOH, does this process give a DM penalty to reviving the copied corpsicle?
Straybow
SOC-14 1K
Doesn't sound like Pratchett to me. I've been hearing it for at least 40 years, always attributed to Clarke.
Maybe not, but you can re-roll as many times as you have backup frozen dead bodies on hand.
There is a difference between low berth passengers and frozen corpses. The advantage is dead people have nothing to lose, also there is a rejuvenation factor. Lets say an 80 year old man dies of lung cancer in 2005 AD, and he was a cronies patient, his body is later stored on Titan several decades later, and his body remains there with a bunch of others until someone discovers them in 1105 Imperial, they try to copy and animate those corpses, since they used cloned cells, the 80-year old comes back as a 20 year old, except his body is built out of 0 year old juvenile cells, this guy looks 20 years old for the next 40 years. The man was a World War II vet that stormed the Beaches of Normany in 1944.
The World War II vet wakes up in a hospital on Terra, a blonde haired woman walks into his hospital room holding up a hand Translator, 'she asks, "Is your name Christopher Benford? That is what our records indicate. My name is Cybelle Gardner, Baroness Cybelle Gardner, you are at my hospital in what you know as Columbia, South Carolina, a lot of things have changed, since you were frozen, but I see you have some military experience, and I am looking for a body guard. Are you interested in this position?"
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mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
It is still not 'you' that wakes up.
It is a copy with the memories and personality that thinks it is you, but it isn't.
Then there is the question of how much the personality and memories begin degrading upon death or even prior to - having watched my father suffer from dementia if someone were to copy him now it is too late to save the personality and memories that used to be him.
It is a copy with the memories and personality that thinks it is you, but it isn't.
Then there is the question of how much the personality and memories begin degrading upon death or even prior to - having watched my father suffer from dementia if someone were to copy him now it is too late to save the personality and memories that used to be him.
Well for the purpose of my campaign, it doesn't matter whether he was the original World War II veteran, the point is, he thinks he is, he begins the campaign in that hospital room, with those skills.
