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One idea I've had about past civilisations is to do with quantum immortality. Suppose you did a Schroedinger's cat type experiment, but you were the cat. If the multiple universe hypothesis is true, then when the box is opened, two universes form, one in which you're alive and one in which you're dead. Since you're not in the universe where you're dead, subjectively, you would simply always survive the experiment. Now, imagine if you linked the trigger for death to a measurement of energy. You create a box that kills you unless some observed material randomly spikes in energy. It's a bit like a quantum suicide version of Maxwell's demon. Subjectively, you get free energy. More than that, this quantum killer Maxwell demon would be a fairy Godmother in disguise. You could make anything happen as long as it is directly observable and has non-zero probability. However, if you do it enough, anyone who isn't in the box with you, will very likely see you die.

So there's the problem. You have a source of free energy or entropy or free anything, but using it will make you appear dead to everyone you care about. The solution would be to get everyone you care about together in the same box.

From our point of view, when we explore the galaxy in the future and we will keep on finding long dead previously civilised planets which had advanced aliens who one day suddenly bundled everyone on onto a massive spaceship and then blew themselves up. Then one day, we'll start bundling ourselves up and do the same.

In practical terms "bundling everyone together" might mean merging into one consciousness (for convenience). Which would make the whole process a lot like "The Last Question" by Asimov.

The Schrödinger's cat is a deliberately absurd argument anyway, and it's widely misunderstood as a serious argument.

The quantum effects will collapse when there are any macroscopic effects: there has to be a detector that will trigger the hammer that breaks the poison.

Wow this is sort of like Greg Egan's Permutation City but actually seems slightly less far fetched and it solves the "where are all the aliens?" problem. In order to hack entropy we erase ourselves from all possible universes where entropy is increasing.

The fun thing is that there's a high probability that the ancient aliens still get to meet us, but a low probability of us meeting them.

Maybe those suicide cults figured this out already.

Maybe everyone who died is still alive in some universe or other. That's a sobering thought.

You speak of singularity as if it is something that can be achieved, while in fact it is just a hypothesis, or a sci-fi thought experiment, that imagines one possible outcome of developing smarter-than-human AI. In particular, singularity proposes that such a discovery would cause a complete qualitative phase-shift in technology and human existence in general, but for this outcome the hypothesis relies on many speculations. As many have pointed out, smarter-than-human AI might not bring about singularity (or is even unlikely to do so).

At our current technological era, speaking of singularity is no different from speaking of other science-fiction ideas like warp drive or even time travel.

Would you say that a very old civilization would have surely developed warp-drive or time travel by now? Same with singularity. We don't know it's possible. We don't even know it exists. We're not even sure what it is.

I'm not sure. What you could say about warp-drives or time travel could have been said about Airplanes, organ transplant too.

Yet they are possible now.

Its very much like some in Newton or Gauss's era talking about a small piece of device made from silicon being able to do some million of arithmetic calculations in one second. You would be considered insane for even having such thoughts.

What is survival without a biological body? If you transfer a brain to a computer, is it still surviving, is it still "living"? or is part of the magic of life in it's uniqueness? Once we can instantly replicate any part of ourselves, what will that mean, are we still living at that point? or just useless machines?

This will open a big philosophical debate.

People whose limbs have been amputated, generally report of phantom limbs. They even experience sweating, itch etc on the phantom limb. Now how come the brain detects all that on a limb that isn't even present? It seems sense originates in the brain and the body parts are just acting mere like sensors and output peripherals.

If that is true you should not worry much about this biological body thing at all. After all we have organ transplants already. Like the argument about Ship of Theseus, you have to ask if a person who underwent organ transplants for more than one organ is actually the original person. If you were to wake that person post surgery, how much less of his original self he is since a good deal of body parts are replaced I am sure to bet he will say nothing changed at all.

Transferring brain to a computer is just brain transplant. If you accept organ transplant you should hardly have any problem with this at all.

I disagree, because the brain itself is the source of sentience and the only thing that really matters. The other organs all have a support role for the brain. Replacing those organs will of course not feel like there's any difference (unless they don't work correctly) because the source of a person's sentience is in the brain itself, not in those organs.

On the other hand, if there was a way to "digitalize" a brain and let it run in a simulation, it could still be conscious and have the same possibilities as the brain of a normal person with a normal body, but it would still be a duplicate of it. I don't think it's ever going to be possible to "transfer" yourself to a copy without dying. Sentience is far too intertwined with the physical aspect of the brain for it to be possible to transfer yourself into a copy without dying.

I share your viewpoint but I think there is a potential solution to this problem (not that I advocate doing it, treat it as a thought experiment): implant the blank slate hardware for the digital copy years before it takes over everyday operation and let it observe your brain to learn. Give the digital copy all the same inputs as the biological brain and make sure the (at first unused) continuous output of the digital copy matches true brain behavior to a desired level of error. Slowly assign control of the biological body to the digital copy over years of time -- somewhere in there "you" may have died but nobody will notice, including yourself. Then when the biological body dies, the digital copy will have already been "you" for quite some time and you're ready to be dropped directly into a mechanical body or a virtual world -- though those would also likely be gradual processes.

(I also think the underlying problem of thinking the digital copy isn't you may even be an illusory one in that our consciousness experiences a discontinuity every night when we go to sleep.)

  Transferring brain to a computer is just brain transplant. 
  If you accept organ transplant you should hardly have any   
  problem with this at all.

Your "uploaded" brain probably won't have any problem with this, but your original physical instance brain probably won't be too happy to have the lights turned off.

John Weldon's "To Be" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc) kind of touches on this. It focuses on teleportation, but I think a brain upload is pretty much the same idea at heart.

I really don't get people who think consciousness emerges from an algorithm basically, that can be transferred to software.

If someone built a gigantic abacus and used to slowly simulate a brain, would that cause a consciousness to emerge?

If you're a materialist, yes, as far as I can tell simulating a brain or running any sort of equivalent software must cause consciousness to arise. Speed is not really part of the question. It's the shape of the computation that determines consciousness.

Life may have started in warmish carbon-water chemistry and humans may currently run on meat brains, but there's no reason to assume we have to stay limited to that sphere.

So far as I'm concerned, anything which computes accurately "what I would think" is a copy of me. And anything which computes a mind and is temporally descended from me is me, even if we wouldn't recognize each other.

Your statement reminded me of the conclusion Rene Descarte reached a few centuries ago: "I think, therefore I am."

That's the kind of wanna be phylosophical question that is based on disagreements about the meaning of words.

If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, eats like a duck and reproduces like a duck, does it matter that's solid state instead of packs of water inside membranes?

"Life originating only after some 15 million years after the big bang, would by any means be extremely super intelligent by now."

Who needs (super) intelligence, when one can be happy?

"Happy" is a biological construct that may not occur everywhere.

I think any entity that has to somehow be attracted to any kind of "food", and be repelled from any kind of "pain", ie, I think, any kind of life, has due to the above, ingrained the concept of "happy".