Posts by Serban Tanasa
The title is pretty self-explanatory. How powerful does a computer have to be before it has the hardware capability to simulate and emulate a human mind in real-time? I'm leaving the question of ...
In the red corner, a top of the line Main Battle Tank, you can have your pick, but let's say a tricked out M-1A2 'Abrams' with a full Nuclear-Bio-Chem Protection kit. In the blue corner, a Nuclea...
All the recent talk on Worldbuilding about the vast energies available to higher-level Kardashev civilizations, the need for 50,000 year message-systems, and so on, got me thinking. With enough ene...
I want to know if this is physically possible. So at first I thought I was nuts. Then I started reading about Hill Radii, and googled left and right. Turns out a Hill Sphere is the region around an...
One of Alice's interstellar jaunts will take her to a Gold Planet. It's a planet that was recently covered in a meter deep layer of gold dust (for realism, it is mixed with silver, platinum, teensy...
Setup: Earth is the same (somehow, minus the tides -- don't overthink this bit) Moon is 2x the mass Moon is 2x closer Moon contains the derelict fissile fuel-dump of a hyper-advanced civil...
Imagine that, without any aliens having been ever found, we get to a point where we can build sub-atomically precise simulations of reality, spanning at least something the size (if not the likenes...
Birds, as we currently know them, build nests and lay eggs on the ground. People and things with sharp teeth live on the ground. There are also things with claws and beaks up in the air, but fewer....
The Wold (Forest) is one vast, interconnected, possibly digital mind. The mind is primarily built of one cloned individual of a single plant species, but there are over a dozen 'helper' sub-minds a...
Imagine that we live in a setting where there are a trillion humans (see linked question). A bit crowded, I know. Further imagine that at least the entire energy output of the Sun was available to ...
For the longest time growing up with Peak Oil and other such dire predictions, I assumed humanity had just about peaked, in terms of industrial-technological might and capacity to influence its env...
Imagine the speed of light is 100 times that in our universe. Light from the moon takes about 1/100th of a second, the sunlight reaches our eyes in about 4 seconds, from nearby Alpha Centauri in ab...
Every time a rocket is launched into space, debris accumulates. Every time an old satellite runs out of juice, it goes derelict and turns into more junk. Over the years, paint-chips, broken off sol...
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...
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...
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...
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...
I've always loved well-done ghosts. However, I've always hated the afterlife-speculation that they engender if used in a story. So I need a way to get ghosts without the fluffy spiritualistic bits...
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 ...
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...
So imagine this scenario: Sapience (which I define as Human-like intelligence or better) is a relatively common occurence once a life-form is on a specific brain-arms-race path like Hominins have ...
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...
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...
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-...
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...
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