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Comment by kingcharles | Hacker News Reader

How about the possibility that perfect VR is invented, every person can live inside their own perfect universe, and the whole species just doesn't give a fuck about exploring the (real) universe?

That would stop a civilisation from exporting any spacecraft or signals outside its homeworld.

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The book Diaspora by Greg Egan touches on this.

I particularly like the short story in there "Wang Carpets".

It builds on Wang Tiles, discovered by Hao Wang when trying to solve a tiling the plane problem. He discovered that it is possible to simulate a Turing machine with a given tile set which meant that solving that tiling the plane problem was equivalent to solving the halting problem. ... but you can simulate a Turing machine with tiles.

If that piques your curiosity, Andrew Glassner's Notebook: Recreational Computer Graphics has some examples of tile sets that can solve math problems.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Andrew_Glassner_s_Noteb... (page 216 and page 217)

I think there is always going to be diversity in how humans choose to live. Just like the Amish, whom have neglected much modern technology in their world, there will always be cultures that choose a different path. Some will want to never leave Earth, avoid the Matrix for the real world and experiences, not want to become a cyborg, etc. Diversity of opinion really is beautiful and is the modern evolution.

Edit: and some will want to dedicate their lives to the expansion of life throughout the universe

This is my main theory. Humans will eventually abandon their own bodies and live in a VR world. I think you'd still have massive energy requirements in the real world to deal with of course.

"Humans will eventually abandon their own bodies and live in a VR world."

Those who "abandon their own bodies" are effectively killing themselves. Any "copies" which might exist in VR are separate beings, not the ones who chose to die in the real world.

I feel nothing but sadness towards the possible future as you paint it. It would mean the end of the human race.

Nothing would be sadder to me to see us stagnate forever. As a non corporeal being, I think you could live nearly forever and learn far more. I think creating "children" could be possible too if we had the technology to digitize people in the first place. I don't think we would give up on exploration either. Just build a ship, send it somewhere, and transport your consiousness over the distance. If you wanted to go back in the physical world, I think you could, or at least a copy of you.

Of course it goes without saying that this is all basically magical sci-fi gibberish.

"I think you could live nearly forever and learn far more."

But it wouldn't be you living forever. It would be some copy of you (at best).

What’s the difference?

that one can't discern the difference, yet would undergo this procedure themselves, is telling in and of itself

Can you elaborate? I think sharding yourself (breaking yourself into clones, not pooping on yourself) would be pretty interesting. A lot of problems could be worked on simultaneously. There are of course philosophical implications. I think it is fine as long as it isn't forced.

Would your shards have rights to spend your money?

Only if I created them myself

How does anybody tell? Tattoos?

There was a great documentary[0] on this a few years ago. They specifically talked about the energy requirements and how they solved them.

[0] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0133093

Yeah there is really no “need” to explore other than survival. If vr can provide an exponentially better world for life, the entire planet goes dark.

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