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Comment by curiousjorge | Hacker News Reader

Kinda depressing just how small we are and that we can't get around places to explore space without some groundbreaking invention that will transfer information from the atoms to another location instantly (something like spooky action except that after you are finished copying the atom data, the old copy must be deleted to prevent endless dopplegangers appearing) by appending some complex 3d position information (move all of my atom by appending some coordinates that could never be reached with even light travel). Something like http://hansonlab.tudelft.nl/teleportation/

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I just can't help but think that we'll reach a wall when it comes to exploring the real world. Even if we get to travel at the speed of light, we're still limited by it. In 20 years of light travel we'd only visit relatively close clusters. All the other stuff is thousands of light years away. Not to mention exploring other galaxies which are millions of light years away.

Quality of life in the virtual world will perhaps be better than that of the real world. In fact, this is my explanation for the fermi paradox. Most aliens out there have essentially "given up" the idea of exploring because everything is just too far away and they simply can't bend the rules of physics. So they're all living in the matrix.

With time-dilation, from the point of view of those on board, it's actually possible to travel as far as Andromeda with constant 1g acceleration (decelerating at 1g half way), within a few decades. Of course, time back on earth would have gone by a few million years...

Huh, but if light takes 2.5 million years to get to Andromeda, how does it take us a few decades? You're saying that from the point of view of the photon, it takes much less time?

Yes photons do not experience time, it's all the same instant for them

So a photon can get anywhere it wants instantly to them?

From the reference fram of the photon, yes

This is a great article (for laypeople, it's not supposed to be too technical) that explains it and makes it easy to understand: http://zidbits.com/2011/04/why-cant-anything-go-faster-than-...

I'll quote the relevant bit, "Imagine for a moment that you are a happy little photon created by a star in another galaxy some 4 billion light years away. From my perspective here on Earth, it took you exactly 4 billion years to travel from that star till you reached my retina. From your perspective, one instant you were created and then the next, you are are bouncing off or being absorbed by my eyeball. You experienced no passage of time. Your birth and death happened instantaneously.

This is because time slows for you as your get closer to light speed, and at it, it completely stops. This is also another reason why nothing can go faster than light. It would be like slowing down a car to a stop, and then trying to go slower than completely stopped."

It's super interesting that the speed of light is exactly 282,xyz (can't remember) miles per second. What're the chances? I'm just unable to comprehend the idea that a fundamental universal constant could be an exact whole number amount of an arbitrary measurement unit like that. You'd think there'd be a few decimal points or something.

You're misremembering. The speed of light in miles per second is ~186,282.396. The speed of light in meters per second is 299,792,458, but the meter is defined using the speed of light:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light

Not only this, but due to space compression to the photon the star and your eye are also exactly the same place!

Yes, that's how relativity works.

Plus, as in Egan's Diaspora, virtual entities can hibernate, or live at far lower clock frequency.

I've not read Diaspora (yet!), but this sounds more like Permutation City

I haven't read Permutation City yet, but virtualization in Diaspora is far more advanced. The default, as I recall, is ~800 times meatspace. I recommend reading Stephenson's Anathem first, however.

Edit: The Planck Dive is a follow-on.[0]

[0] http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PLANCK/Complete/Pla...

Fermi paradox is interesting because if aliens did have the ability to teleport they would've done so. The matrix does sound reasonable. What if we could have everything in this virtual world? The argument that we are in a matrix right now is moot because it kinda sucks. Great for the 1 percenters tho.

There are already plenty "solutions" for the Fermi paradox, one of those is the Multiverse hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse another one is the Holographic principle http://motherboard.vice.com/read/there-is-growing-evidence-t...

what if . we invent a way to not reach out, but however reduce the space, that is how einstein will think.

> Kinda depressing just how small we are and that we can't get around places to explore space without some groundbreaking invention that will transfer information from the atoms to another location instantly

If that ever happens, you'd better hope that the Novikov self-consistency principle [0] holds, or be ready to deal with the inevitable causality violations.[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_princ...

[1] http://www.askamathematician.com/2012/07/q-how-does-instanta...

> after you are finished copying the atom data, the old copy must be deleted to prevent endless dopp[el]gangers appearing

Why would we need to prevent this?

Play Sims 4 with the "Get to work" expansion. Having 8 me's in a house is a real problem.

Well when you want to comeback home , you don't want to come across a clone of yourself who already married your lover, had kids, settled down and your ex lover says "you were never around what did you expect and besides it's not like I'm cheating on you because it's a copy of you". I'd imagine time travels faster when you are out exploring deep space and having a blast while the copy of you is living his life on earth. Yeah, still worth it.

The Agent Smith problem. Right now if an entity in meatspace wants to copy itself it has to breed, and for anything complex the copies are not the same and have to go through a growing process. With copy teleportation it's not really any different than Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V on your computer. As long as you have the energy you can build entire armies of yourself. There many be plenty of good scenarios for this to happen but I can think of far more downsides.

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