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Of course if a great many people tried this trick, they might bid the “price” down very low. “They want you to revive them for a week to get your info; I only ask one day.” So elites might regulate who is allowed to leave legacy data stores, to keep this privilege to themselves.Really? In my limited experience of human nature, most people don't take thought experiments involving future aliens all that seriously. Maybe one rich nutter leaves this kind of data store, and nobody else cares. I'm not saying its impossible, I'm just saying it doesn't seem that likely to me.

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If this kind of homomorphic encryption were possible it would solve a large concern with mind uploading, and close a plot device used in some sci-fi books.

No longer do you need to worry about your simulated mind being tortured. You have full control over your simulation environment; the simulator still has full control over whether or not you are simulated but they can only communicate with you over a channel.

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> I’m not sure how it could be done, but if you could mix up the info they want with the info that specifies you as an em, maybe you could make it so that the easiest way for them to get the info they want is to revive you.

Homomorphic encryption might enable such a trade. You could encrypt a large library of data with regular symmetric keys, and then homomorphically encrypt yourself + simulation environment + input/output API + the keys, and leave a plaintext message: "execute this code with IO channels, and I'll bargain with you to get weeks of subjective time execution per book key released". When they fire you up, the homomorphic encryption executes you securely without letting them peek into the part of 'you' which stores the keys. (The data is encrypted separately so the homomorphic encryption remains small and hopefully reasonably efficient.)

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If it takes them 10Myr to start moving fast, that hardly makes any difference to our model.

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It is exactly how advanced civilizations should behave, because otherwise they remain poor and primitive on a single planet.

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What assumptions can we make about when a civilization would want to expand? Traveling is very time and resource consuming relative to just staying home, and the more you increase processing power at home the less attractive traveling looks. So should we make the assumption that aliens start grabbing once their own Kurzweilian law of returns starts to plateau? Like when are you so confident that the return on equity will be so poor that you can justify sending out a spaceship on a 100K year journey into the relative unknown?

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The whole point is to empirically model aliens who would be visible, using the few things we know about what we see. Empirically modeling invisible aliens is pretty hopeless.

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Is there any way to turn that assumption into a parameter? I have learned a lot from your posts over the past few months, but it always feels like a "The Road Not Taken" choice. Perhaps I'm being greedy for wanting your approach to modeling used to address varying visibilities of grabby civilizations, or possible differences between spheres of control and spheres of visibility. I concede that there might not be a good way to model those options.

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Without that assumption the model can't get off the ground.

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Do you have a post where you detail why we would automatically know we were in the sphere of influence of a grabby civilization, or is the assumption that we wouldn't exist because all grabby civilizations turn everything into copies of themselves?

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A large fraction of folks in the SETI world, probably the majority, are offended at the idea of grabbing the galaxy or more. That is not how "advanced" civilizations should behave.

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I wonder if you encountered an argument for why we shouldn't colonize our galaxy and others. Most people don't describe that as being "grabby," but I'm not aware of serious people opposing this kind of future.

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