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Michael J. McGuffin's avatar

The time-extended society is preferable to me because each generation will have more opportunity to study, learn from, and build on the discoveries and inventions of the past, allowing them to reach higher in their achievements, and to more enjoy the process of discovery and invention. In the time-extended society, each person has more opportunity to be one of a small number of the best of their generation at a given specialty, craft, or art, and to stand out among their contemporaries. If I compare myself to Newton or Einstein, I don't feel so bad because I can tell myself that they had low-hanging fruit to discover. If I lived in a world with a trillion people, and a hundred people as interesting as Robin Hanson, and a hundred times as much scientific literature being produced each year, I and many others might feel discouraged that there are no interesting intellectual topics left to contribute to, no way to do anything new.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Personally, I'd need to know a bit more about the mechanisms of:

a) Cultural replication

b) The extinction event.

With regard to the time-extension civilization--I think that a lot of people need to pay more attention to what goes into making such civilizations "sustainable." On earth, as Jared Diamond notes, the island nation of Tikopia was sustainably run for like a thousand years with virtually the same population. However, this sustainability wasn't just all hippy rainbows and unicorns. In reality, it practiced very strict population control that involved serious instances of infanticide on a regular basis--as well as instances when any accumulation of "excess population" was told to build some boats and row off into the ocean with the hope that they might find some land to settle on.

In other words--it was sustainable because it accepted the orderly elimination of what was an "unsustainable" population.

Now.. if you add that into the mix--which seems rather necessary given our biology and cultural habits--then I'm not sure the time extension civilization seems quite so appealing as before. Yes, it lasts a long time--but it does so in a rather brutal manner.

Of course--you can argue that this 100k civilization is not like that at all and it has perfect technology and social habits and the like--and it is just living in eden for a billion years--but then it seems like the deck is being stacked...

Yours,tricstmr

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