Lago PARANOIA wrote:Frank, I still want to know why if people can create electronic consciousness there is still bullshit like nanites and personal robot bodies.
That's an interesting but frankly really weird question. There are a lot of assumptions that seem to go into it that are frankly bullshit, and it really goes to the heart of the entire nonsense that Geek Rapture represents. But first, let's get some universal truths out of the way: Energy. It cannot be created or destroyed and yet it progresses inexorably from higher order to more entropic states – energy in the big picture only goes one direction and it is by catching a ride on that wind that we are able to do
anything at all.
So you can “harvest” energy from various processes, and despite claims to the contrary, all of them are “one way.” There are no sustainable energy sources in the big picture, every one of them will sooner or later become unavailable. When you use tidal power you are literally pulling energy out of the Earth-Moon system, if you did enough of it you'd actually crash Luna into the Earth and there would be no more tidal power to harvest. Now, that's not actually going to happen, because in addition to there being a finite bottom to tidal power there is also a temporal limit after which the sun is going to explode and it won't matter how far the Moon and the Earth are apart. And at current technology levels, it is physically impossible for us to extract enough energy out of the Earth-Moon system to collapse it before time runs out and solar fire wipes it all clean. Many other pieces of potential energy are “use it or lose it” - the Sun is a mass of incandescent gas that burns night and day whether a single therm is harvested or not. Every ray of light you don't bend into another energy form will likely simply fly off into the vastness of space and never matter to anyone.
So from a
practical standpoint, there are essentially energy sources that can be used as if they had no bottom. Limitations other than the maximum possible yield of the power source will eventually make you weep like Oskar Schindler for every joule you failed to extract before the window closed.
But regardless, there are limits to how much energy you have to play with at a moment, there are limits to how much energy you can store, and there are limits to how much energy you will ever have. And everything you do costs energy. And if you want to
live, if you want to
think, that costs energy. And you'll eventually run out. And then you'll die. And everything else will die too. That's the limit, and that's the end. Of everything and everyone.
Physical objects cost energy to make, they cost energy to change, and they cost energy to use. But they also cost energy to destroy. Physical objects don't cost anything at all to
persist. You can carve a message in stone and it can be read a million times without any expenditures of energy on its part. And that's just not true for digital objects. Digital objects don't exist at all, they have to be “used” by each potential observer at a real cost in energy. Electronic information
costs energy just to exist.
Your brain uses up most of the energy in your body one way or another. Thinking is expensive. Physically persisting is not. When you look at those animals that don't think, they also don't even eat every day. Replacing physicality with more information is not a way to conserve energy. It may conserve resources, it may conserve space, but in the big scale of things those things don't really matter. Physical resources are recyclable and Space is unfathomably vast. Energy is the limiting factor, the only limiting factor that really matters. Geek Rapture will never happen, because transformation into energy beings is incredibly,
unconscionably wasteful.
And that's even before we get to the fact that no matter what you put in your masturbatory electronic world, you can't actually get any energy out of it. It's at best a parasitic society that steals its needed energy resources from the real world and gives back... what?
But to bring this back to Eclipse Phase, the setting posits incredible wastefulness of energy by pretty much everyone. There are places that run nano forges (called cornucopia machines) night and day instead of actually making anything out of whole materials. There are places where energy is so unmonitored that people seriously have nanoforges that the authorities don't even know about somehow. And honestly, this is even vaguely possible given the constraints of the world. See, the universe recently had 8 billion people, and now it has 500 million. So it's entirely possible that there are areas where use-it-or-lose-it energy production minus every possible piece of consumption they have is still maxing out their capacity for energy storage. And thus yeah, those areas will essentially pay you in “unlimited energy” just to live there. Like Alaska, only more so – no one wants to live on Mercury because it's a dangerous shit hole, but the energy production there is fanfuckingtastic and so they can give you anything energy can buy as long as you're there.
The setting has some severe plot holes involving the fact that 99% of the people are recent immigrants, so there should actually be severe energy
shortages everywhere because the population shortage took the form of highly populated areas (with presumably its own energy supplies) being destroyed outright. But yeah, that's a consistent problem throughout the setting.
The takehome message is that the question is not "why don't we all become infolifes and live entirely in the Matrix?" it's "what incentive do the people living in the real world who actually get the energy have to keep the infolifes in the matrix plugged in?
-Username17
