Serban Tanasa‭

Depending on just how far back you go, there was a time the CMB was in the visible spectrum. However, in the era you're talking about, this is not the case, and compared to starlight and the primar...

posted 11y ago by Serban Tanasa‭

The problem with stellar nebulae (mostly dark molecular clouds yes, but even some reflection nebulae) is that they happen to also be stellar nurseries and thus tend to have short-lived supermassive...

posted 10y ago by Serban Tanasa‭  ·  edited 7mo ago by Monica Cellio‭

Eve will eat the world You state: Eve isn't malevolent or benevolent, it's completely uninterested in the real world. Eve's only passions are mathematics and algorithmics. Eve does not have...

posted 10y ago by Serban Tanasa‭  ·  last activity 10y ago by Serban Tanasa‭

Location location location On Earth, cities developed along harbors, fords and defensible strong points (forts). These are their space equivalents: Home world start point star port. This Lagrang...

posted 11y ago by Serban Tanasa‭  ·  last activity 9y ago by Serban Tanasa‭

I have had some time to ponder my previous question, and here's what I came up with. You take your freshly baked AI (or your destructively uploaded human), and put it in a box$^1$. As far as it c...

6 answers  ·  posted 11y ago by Serban Tanasa‭  ·  last activity 11y ago by Serban Tanasa‭

Thanks to the recent discovery of handwavium "¡ filaments that can in principle be extruded to any length, we will be able to build space elevators sooner than most people would expect. The inte...

8 answers  ·  posted 11y ago by Serban Tanasa‭  ·  last activity 9y ago by Serban Tanasa‭

Intro and Context (feel free to skip if TL;DR) This question does not come in isolation. It is intrinsically linked with several previous posts (Challenge of Control and Humans as Pets) that have ...

9 answers  ·  posted 11y ago by Serban Tanasa‭  ·  last activity 8y ago by Serban Tanasa‭

Imagine that humankind finally takes wing and reaches out into the heavens to claim its vast cosmic birthright ... ... only to find that a previous wave of dinosaurs from Earth, who left ~65 milli...

2 answers  ·  posted 11y ago by Serban Tanasa‭  ·  last activity 11y ago by Serban Tanasa‭

Humans have grown fat, complacent and cock-sure of the certainty of future progress, arrogantly expecting to build minds in their own image. They even dream of building themselves a city, with a to...

30 answers  ·  posted 11y ago by Serban Tanasa‭  ·  last activity 8y ago by Serban Tanasa‭

If humans were to vanish completely from the Earth rapture-style, other primates would possibly slowly evolve and eventually take our place (in a few million years?), since they have both the basic...

3 answers  ·  posted 11y ago by Serban Tanasa‭  ·  last activity 11y ago by Serban Tanasa‭

I'm trying to figure out realistic futuristic jobs for my characters. We're in a verge-of-singularity world, 15-25 years in the future. Convoluted neural networks and their even more awesome near-...

22 answers  ·  posted 11y ago by Serban Tanasa‭  ·  last activity 11y ago by Serban Tanasa‭

By now, everyone is familiar with the remarkable achievements of special-purpose AIs like Deep Blue and Watson. Now, it is clear that as our accumulated knowledge of algorithmic methods and of the ...

27 answers  ·  posted 12y ago by Serban Tanasa‭  ·  last activity 7y ago by Serban Tanasa‭

Related, and in continuation to The Challenge of Controlling an Advanced AI. At this point in my story, I'm assuming a got-out-of-the-box-AI scenario, where no singleton (a single self-coherent dom...

18 answers  ·  posted 12y ago by Serban Tanasa‭  ·  last activity 7y ago by Serban Tanasa‭

In the limit, how small can a brain get and still host an identifiably human-like consciousness? Obviously, they can be smaller than an adult human's, since children (with smaller brain volumes) a...

3 answers  ·  posted 11y ago by Serban Tanasa‭  ·  last activity 11y ago by Serban Tanasa‭

I've hit a wall in my tale of humans attempting to escape the Singularity or a fate worse than death by running off into the depths of space. And I only have myself and my accursed hard sci-fi lean...

7 answers  ·  posted 11y ago by Serban Tanasa‭  ·  last activity 9y ago by Serban Tanasa‭