In conformal cyclic cosmology, there are no big bangs.
Once everything in the old universe has been reduced to photons, and all the black holes have evaporated, the universe loses its sense of scale, and resumes operation as a universe the size of a grapefruit (or the size of the earth - I don't think it matters).
I don't know how Penfold thinks this resizing is supposed to happen, for example whether it's instantaneous or a slow process.
I'd love to have a few beers with Penfold; a lot of what he thinks about isn't maths or cosmology, and isn't all fit for publication, but I imagine it must be very interesting.
Could it be we create and always have the big bang by blowing shit up in a particle accelerator, and that is the great filter not just for us, but the rest of the universe since it just starts over?
If so, then "first microsecond of the Big Bang" also doesn't make sense. And that may be the point of the above comment.
The only time reference is the one within the universe that is doing the banging, and within that universe, time has no beginning, right? Every microsecond has another microsecond before it.
Not really? It makes sense to ask what happens in the first minute of The Matrix film, but it doesn’t really make sense to ask what happened one minute before that. That particular domain (a specific film) has a pretty clear “beginning time” and apparently this model of the Universe does as well.
Have you seen Memento? It's a murder mystery that scrambles time. Much better than The Matrix.
There are two interwoven threads in the film, one in colour and the other in black-and-white. The B+W scenes are in chronological order, the colour scenes run backward in time. Colour and B+W scenes alternate. They meet up at the end - the murder scene, which in any sane movie would be near the beginning.
The protagonist has lost his memory, as a result of a bang on the head during the murder; he has no idea what happened "before the beginning".
There can be a point in time where you can't go further back - all directions point to the future - in the same way that there's a point on Earth where you can't go further North - all directions point South.
If we started pursuing nuclear pulse propulsion we could have our first probe arrive in the next star system in a hundred years or so, and eventually get the travel time closer to 40 years.
At least for something like Project Orion, all the individual components are either verified in prototypes or proven technology. We have existing stockpiles of nuclear bombs. Propelling a craft by exploding something behind it is demonstrated in smaller prototypes with TNT. We know how to do radiation shielding, we know how to do shock absorbers.
Or course combining technologies in a new way comes with lots of engineering challenges, but it's a smaller leap in technology than e.g. the first moon landing.
I can't say I'm surprised, but it's still pretty crazy to think about that it took us 44 years to get an object to a place it takes light less than 24 hours to get to. It feels both pretty far and also not far at all at the same time.
Yeah, I had this reaction of like "yeah, only 21 hours? that's not too long"… Then it occurred to me, it's 21 hours at the _speed of light_, something we generally consider effectively "instant" here on Earth. Pretty fascinating stuff. I'm really happy to hear we're still getting transmissions back from Voyager 1 - from nearly 23 billion kilometers away, for that matter!
Also really interesting is the Voyager FAQ, even from the first question (about whether the cameras could be turned back on). "Mission managers removed the software from both spacecraft that controls the camera. The computers on the ground that understand the software and analyze the images do not exist anymore."
> something we generally consider effectively "instant"
We are in one of the very few professions where the speed of light is considered annoyingly slow. Just three days ago there was a thread of people lamenting that the closest Hetzner datacenter is about 50 light-milliseconds away
I don't know enough to say, but it wouldn't surprise me if our speed of thinking (and perhaps also time in general) is indirectly tied to the speed of light; meaning, if the speed of light were faster, we'd be thinking faster, and thus the round trip speed to Hetzner would appear just as annoying. I'll be happy to be corrected.
Not according to this stack exchange answer[0]. It quotes a page from John Hopkins University, although that source page doesn't seem to exist anymore.
> Though New Horizons will also reach 100 AU, it will never pass Voyager 1, because Voyager was boosted by multiple gravity assists that make its speed faster than New Horizons will travel. Voyager 1 is escaping the solar system at 17 kilometers per second. When New Horizons reaches that same distance 32 years from now, propelled by a single planetary swingby, it will be moving about 13 kilometers per second
> Provided Voyager 1 does not collide with anything and is not retrieved, the New Horizons space probe will never pass it, despite being launched from Earth at a higher speed than either Voyager spacecraft. The Voyager spacecraft benefited from multiple planetary flybys to increase their heliocentric velocities, whereas New Horizons received only a single such boost, from its Jupiter flyby. As of 2018, New Horizons is traveling at about 14 km/s, 3 km/s slower than Voyager 1, and is still slowing down.
Thanks for the that link. I just spent an hour in the Eyes on the Solar System web app and listening to Carl Sagan wax poetic about our Voyagers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H92iCnecYGQ
"…and far from home, untouched by these remote events, the Voyagers, bearing the memories of a world that is no more, will fly on."—C. Sagan
Yes that is required to make the Google's text to speech work. There are instructions under the box on how to obtain it. I've also linked to a YouTube demo video (not mine) for getting the same in there too.
I have mixed feelings between your response and the response you are replying to. One one hand I can clearly see how what you're saying makes sense. On the other, I still am inclined to believe that if you really distilled the actual purpose of everything you mentioned, it could be formulated in a way that doesn't require AGI.
I think one thing to consider is the non-stationary distributions in the problem space.
We may be able to formulate our current understanding of what it takes to be a CEO in every feasible future context that we can imagine, and create an agent (not an AGI) that does that.
But then what would happen when the distributions change out of sample in an unforseeable way? Suppose two countries go to war and this drastically changes the operating environment of the business. The agent would need to learn how to operate with human-level capability in this novel environment which it wasn't trained specifically to do. That's why I'm thinking it requires an AGI.
And there's no culture war, because war involves death, bombs and stuff. Right, language, we find it useful to use concepts that don't literally apply because they might help us see similarities.
In that case, you don't need literal shooting and trenches. You can talk of wealth redistribution, where "we'll take from A and give to B" is an attack on A. It doesn't involve guns immediately (though it will if A doesn't "voluntarily" give up the goods), but it's useful as an analogy. What the commenters seem to imply is that, if A does not fight back (again, not literally with guns, but politically), they'll be massacred (again, not literally), their interests will not be considered at all.
