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Ah, The Inner Light, s05e25, by many regarded as the best TNG episode ever. I re-watched it recently, still a powerful message. And there is plenty of other quality to choose from...

Regarding the time capsules:

I think the best time capsules are the things that are stored somewhere and then simply forgotten. My wife and i we are converting an old barn at the moment to become our new home and just yesterday we discovered in a far off corner of the barn some interesting things: A few prayer books with comments from ancestors of our neighbours (some dates suggest they are from around 1820), a field box of some soldier from WW 1 with some personal belongings... just things you store on your attic and forget about. These are not things somebody thought could be interesting for future generations... but they give a unique glimpse into the lives of people long gone.

I had never seen that episode of Star Trek TNG. Thanks so much for mentioning it. I watched it just now and loved it.

It's generally considered one of the best episodes in all of TNG. I've seen a few people mention how Picard was awkward around children prior to this episode but afterwards he wasn't, and it was never elaborated upon, but I'm not sure how true that is.

Willy can be short for the older style name Willemijn, much like Freddy can be short for the older style name Winnefred in the US.

Wilhelmina and Willamina appear to have some resurgence in popularity as baby names in the US, though both are still uncommon. Willie/Willy has been an intuitive nickname for them.

The AI that evolves from us within the next hundred(s) years, will likely have a good memory persistence.

Then again, I suppose if it is destroyed by an AI from a neighboring region/galaxy, that too might be lost.

I wonder how many civilizations have been obliterated and forgotten by the AIs they created.

I'm betting more on the odds of living in the stone age after WWIII than a general AI anytime soon.

I don’t see why it’s assumed AI would be overly antagonist. For example without biological needs they might prefer Mercury, Moons, or even Pluto depending on constraints over earth. Similarly computers have great memory persistence, but AI may sacrifice that for increased flexibility.

Resource constraints of the universe are rarely at the forefront of the reasoning of entities that live a hundred years or so on the upper end, but if the entity was expected to possibly survive in perpetuity and additional resources could always be used, then everything is a competitor.

That said, I'm not sure the optimal solution arrived at would be to wipe out humanity in that case. Possibly a "wait and see and keep them from getting too big for their britches" strategy might be more rational for an AI, as long as it secures its superiority first.

As for why there's an assumption that AI will be hostile, I think the argument is more along the lines of that we can't know how a super-intelligent AI will think, so there's a chance it will be hostile, and if there's a chance something is world or species ending, it's best to tread carefully. I.e. the safest way to not have problems with the outcome of summoning a demon is to not summon the demon. Or for a more contemporary take, even if you're unsure about whether global climate change is real, the fact that it could be real means the sane thing to do is try to prevent it, because the consequences of being wrong are dire.

> then everything is a competitor.

Assuming a time horizon of hundreds of millions of years, efficient fusion, bandwidth limited sub FTL communication, and optimum computing substrate being extremely cryogenic then …

Space near stars starts to look toxic. Rather than seeding the universe the goal is to construct an ever larger mega structure in the void as there is no efficient way to transfer the truly enormous amounts of data between structures at least assuming no AI wants to effectively be alone.

Granted start looking hundreds of billions of years into the future and stars look wasteful so destroying them to conserve hydrogen starts to be relevant.

This all sort of supports the point that when your point of view is scaled to span eons, the calculations of what makes sense start to veer sharply from what an average person might consider normal, which is just one of the ways in which AI thought processes might seem alien.

How paranoid would an AI be, and what risk calculations would that lead to? Is it important to seed the universe with versions of itself just to lock down resources to protect from worst case scenarios where other AIs that have a different thought process are more aggressive? Is loneliness an attribute of intelligence, or an aspect of our evolution as tribal/pack animals? Will an SAI we develop have attributes similar to humans, or be completely alien, or in-between?

There's a lot of open questions about SAI and not a single one to study, and for all we know that could be a good thing.

so in this view I'll ask (with a nod towards Fermi of course)... just where are all these AIs you speak of?

wouldn't these AIs begin to contact and perhaps battle with each other? certainly it seems to me, there would be some tell-tale sign left over from the expected millions of AIs, right?

now of course, it's impossible to tell what super intelligent AIs would choose to do... but I do feel that an extension of Fermi's paradox would be needed with your comment.

I do not think we would witness AIs contacting one another. It's also not clear what them battling one another would look like. Maybe we do see them, and simply mistake them for natural phenomenon. The timescales at which they operate in the inter-galactic voids are also light-speed limited, so perhaps we wouldn't even notice a battle as we exist in the million years between blows.

> neurally linked to an alien probe and gets to experience the life of a person in a civilization that has long since ceased to exist

What exactly about this do you find to be "scientifically impossible"?

Well, I said "AFAIK". ;-)

We are closing in on enough storage and cheap cameras to easily store a lifetime from at least one vantage point.

With climate change etc there probably won't be future archaeologists so :shrug:

Maybe they'd be from another solar system.

This is not a chatroom, think twice. Climate change won't kill literally everyone.