A Future Brighter than 100 Trillion Suns by Tommy Anderberg

That's a very good question. I think there are at least three different aspects to it: philosophical, psychological and practical.

The first category is one which I am more than happy to leave for others to ponder.

Psychologically, I have witnessed vastly different attitudes toward other living creatures: from people treating pets as full-fledged family members, through indifference to outright cruelty. The kinder, gentler attitude seems to be a modern phenomenon, more common the further removed one is from the realities of the food chain (a "fun" factoid I just looked up: some 25 million chickens are slaughtered every day in the US alone, and I think we all know how most of them live; there is nothing kind or gentle about it). There is a widespread belief that kids benefit from growing up with pets, and some evidence that it may actually be true. Based on what I saw growing up with a sequence of dogs, a bunch of birds, miscellaneous rodents and the occasional reptile, I think it would be pretty straightforward (and more humane - I was a lively kid...) to replicate the experience using virtual pets. It may be hard to fool a real dog into thinking that a simulated one is real, but fooling a human is pretty easy.

The practical aspect is the serious one. Flavio Mercati has written an essay which pays homage to currently fashionable views (and which therefore can be expected to do very well in the contest) and advocates "solutions" like only eating game meat, but which also gets some things right. One of them is that there are vast amounts of energy of raw materials awaiting exploitation in space. Another is that the biological diversity of Earth is truly rare, and therefore precious. He is sticking to the 60s script of space colonization, with humans turning other planets into new Earths by terraforming, and in that model, the more species you have to work with, the more likely you are to find a viable mix capable of supporting a robust biosphere in the new environment. The script is dated, but he does have a point: diversity is good.

That won't matter to inorganic Humans 3.0, but it could bite Humans 2.0. Their life support system will need to provide them with things like glucose and amino acids. Ideally, those would be synthesized, but initially at least they could come from a handful of plant species (Soylent is essentially based on rice, oat, canola and microalgae; in The Millennial Project, Savage was big on blue-green algae). Since they will be working with a completely engineered environment, it will be tempting to optimize everything, down to cloning a few particularly productive organisms, and call it a day. The result would be a monoculture, with all that entails: very efficient as long as it works, but very fragile when something goes wrong. So as a purely practical matter, it would be in their interest to maintain a larger selection of species.

You raise multiple objections. Let's disentangle them:

1) Things which exist physically are real, things which do not exist physically are "virtual and thus unreal".

2) In your previous comment you used the words "priceless reality" and "virtual sham". You also compared virtual reality to fantasizing and to "opium dens". I take this to indicate a strong rejection on your part of any experience that is not physical.

3) You point out that experiencing reality "is mostly what matters when it comes to exploring real space".

4) You claim that an artificial body can do the job without virtual reality.

5) You fear that being able to experience what you want in virtual reality will reduce interest in going out and experiencing and colonizing space.

My responses follow separately, since we seem to have hit some post length limit here. :/

1) I guess you are not big on philosophy. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but you should at least be aware that you are implicitly endorsing a particular philosophical position, and that others exist. Plato might ask why you confer greater reality to the imperfect physical world than to the digital one. I will more modestly point out three things:

1a) Objects created in a virtual world have a physical basis too. With enough work, I could point out exactly which circuits and memory cells are used to store the properties of any such object. Those are made of atoms, just like the things you consider more real. You could counter that those atoms don't matter much, since they will be swapped out as the virtual object is moved around in memory; I would counter that the atoms which make up your own body don't matter much either, since they are continuously being swapped out too by your breathing, eating etc. What makes you you is an information pattern, not the particular atoms currently used to store it.

1b) You do not experience physical reality. No, you really don't. What you experience is an internal model maintained by unconscious parts of your brain, puzzled together from inputs provided by your sensory organs; your own biologically generated virtual world, if you will. Cognitive scientists have fun ways to punch holes in the illusion that you are perceiving things as they are, like various optical illusions. You could also ask yourself if the basic building blocks of your experience of physical reality, such as "color", really make sense outside your mind. Sure, a color usually (see that color illusion) corresponds to some set of wavelengths, but your perception of it is an enconding which only exists inside your head, and quite possibly differs from my or somebody else's encoding of the same set of wavelengths.

1c) You seem to be taking for granted that the physical world is not itself a simulation.

As an aside, the first version of my essay included a comic chosen specifically to remind readers of all this. Unfortunately I had to remove it after the organizers got nervous about potential licensing issues. :(

2) I suppose your strongly value-laden choice of words reflects some sort of personal aversion to... actually, I am not sure to what. Right now you are participating in a discussion on a virtual forum which only exists in a computer somewhere, quite possibly (I'm too lazy to check) on a virtual machine spun out to one or more physical machines as the need arises. Is this discussion we are having a "virtual sham" and not really happening, since we are not having it by old-fashioned paper mail? Or would it really need to be carried out in person, using (instantly dispersed) sound waves to count as part of "priceless reality"? How about by phone? There would still be sound waves involved, but along the way they would be converted to analog electric signals, then to digital ones, then to light pulses carried by optical fibers, and then back again by the inverse chain. Would that discussion be made less real by transiting through the digital realm?

Again, my view is that the information pattern is what counts, not the particular substrate currently being used to carry it.

3) If your purpose is exploration, you obviously need to go get the data. Of course, you will generally want to use better sensors than the very limited ones which come with a natural human body, and we already do. But maybe you mean something else; maybe you mean to say that the purpose of venturing into space is something like tourism, to experience the thing firsthand, with your own senses. If so, I am afraid your experience will be a very brief one: pick any currently known destination, and it will be over in less than twenty seconds. That's being optimistic, assuming that you just wanted to experience vacuum. The most physical and survivable experience you could have is the inside of a space suit. The sound would be that of your own body, mainly your breathing and pulse, and of your comm radio. The sight would be what you can expect through a thick visor plus a head-mounted display. Your skin and muscles would mostly be complaining about how surprisingly laborious it is to move inside one of those things. If you have any sense, you will prefer to stay in your shirt sleeves, inside a cozy cabin, and interact with what's outside through machines.

Having said all that, the primary purpose of the expansion into space which I and others have written about would not be exploration. The primary purpose would be economic and ultimately existential, i.e. to ensure our long-term survival. Exploration would be a necessity, just like oil prospecting is a necessity for oil companies and (currently) to keep our technological infrastructure running.

4) Artificial bodies capable of satisfactorily replacing ours are both harder to create and less desirable than the Matrix. They are harder to make because they require the same life support system and BCI, plus a mechanical body (with associated control and sensor systems) capable of powering and carrying them around within the size constraints of a human body, and good enough to match the performance of a natural one. That's a very tall order; I would definitely not be happy with a half-measure like Robocop's body. They are less desirable, because such a body will be at least as bulky as a natural one, probably heavier (so no gain for space), and less secure, less versatile and consequently more expensive than the Matrix.

The Matrix will be created first simply because it's easier, and for reasons which initially will have nothing to do with space. It will then dawn on its creators and residents that the separation of psychological requirements (satisfied by a virtual body in a simulated world) from physical infrastructure allows optimization of the latter for the task at hand. I remind you again that space is not what our bodies are built for. A mechanical body built specifically for space exploration and exploitation would not look like a human being; it would look like a space probe. You could put a human brain in such a body, but that brain would go nuts. The same brain will be quite happy living in a familiar-looking, simulated body, and working a job using whichever hardware device its current task in the physical world happens to call for. It's the difference between driving an excavator and being turned into one.

In case you wonder about the "less secure" and "less versatile" part, it comes down to the same reason we have data centers now: resource sharing. Put a bunch of brains in a common data center, and they can share common shielding, power and life support systems more robust and with more built-in redundance than what would fit in a human-sized body. They can also share physical devices instead of having a full set each; assign them to three 8-hour shifts, and even if everybody needs to use the same kind of device, there need only be 1/3 the number you would need if everybody was soldered into one. And it will always be safer to control a big heavy machine doing mechanical work from some distance, rather than being right next to (or inside) it.

5) Your final objection is analogous to saying that people should not have nice houses, because if they did, they would no longer be interested in going outside. Maybe there is some truth to that, but it turns out that getting and keeping those nice houses requires money, which is typically obtained by getting out the door and/or interacting with others through electronic communication networks (you know, virtually). I guess this objection is related to number (3), i.e. the idea that experience-seeking exploration is the main purpose of expanding into space. But it won't be. Space will be where the residents of the Matrix go to work.

Thank you for calling me delusional (twice) and for clearing up a lingering doubt induced by your dispatch from May 1:

And on a conceptual level, it does seem many of these entries are out of 20th century science fiction. We haven't been back to the moon in forty years and how many of these entries are going on about populating the universe and moving off the planet after we have finished trashing it!!!! Do these people even bother to go out side and look up at the sky and really appreciate just how far away everything is and how little there is that we can actually work with?

The doubt being, of course, whether you had actually read the entries in question.

I would also be remiss were I not to express my deep gratitude for disclosing, after you finally found the time to read my humble contribution, that

while some of your hypotheses may be valid, in the distant future, there are significant hurtles to overcome

This shocking revelation was more than worth the effort of parsing the 615 words preceding it. It goes without saying that my inability to extract any further information from your, I am sure, absolutely brilliant, well argued, deeply knowledgeable and extensively referenced critique is entirely due to failings of my own.

Bandwagon...? Oh well, if you could divine those devilish details two weeks before even reading the thing, I guess you can see a bandwagon coming, too. Two weeks again? I can't wait! :)

How do you propose to keep a disembodied brain happy without virtual reality?

Let's make the thought experiment that I have a magical button which, when pressed, makes your brain work 10^6 times faster than normal. I press it. What happens?

For all practical purposes, your world freezes solid. One second of wall time is now 11.6 days of your subjective time. Unless your brain has been hacked to handle this situation, you suffer immediate sensory deprivation; even sensory neurons firing 100 times a (wall) second to tell your brain what's going on are now only firing once every 2.8 of your subjective hours, so you are effectively blind, deaf and floating in space without a body. Within a few subjective hours you lose the ability to think clearly, you become emotionally unstable and then you start hallucinating. If I let go of the button after just one second, you will have set a new endurance record, but you may now be irreversibly insane.

Let's assume that your brain has been hacked to overcome the sensory problem: when I press the button, you don't go blind and deaf, you just see a still image of the world, and maybe I stream you some music and some faked sensory information to keep you from going nuts. So you feel a little better, but only a little, because you are suddenly locked in concrete. Normally, you are constantly moving. Your eyes dart around, you blink, your fingers twitch, your body shifts back and forth, redistributing the load between muscles. Most of it is borderline conscious until you start thinking about it. Now it just stops. You are completely paralyzed, unable to do anything. Your immediate, instinctive reaction is to fight the force which suddenly seems to be restraining you, but nothing happens. By the time you've rationalized what's going on and calmed down, several subjective seconds' worth of maximum force control signals are on their way to your muscles. Those are between 0.1 and 1.5 meters away, so travelling at 100 m/s, your orders will reach them in 1000 to 15 000 subjective seconds. After half an hour you start getting sensory feedback telling you that your first commands were executed, followed by increasingly painful reports of the consequences, spread out over the next 8 hours. From the outside, it looks like you are having a violent fit, flailing about uncontrollably, and probably harming yourself badly in the process.

You can't control a body with such long lag times. Even without panicking about it, having to wait hours to get feedback on an order to move a finger completely breaks the normal control loop "move a little towards target, compare new position to desired location, repeat if necessary".

Ah yes, shoot for the moon...

Thanks. :)