edit: i realize this is more a religious debate than a scientific one. staunchly deterministic chaos theorists have been at it against their quantum non-deterministic adversaries since the early 1900s, and the predestination arguements go back long before that. the "long now" vs "singularity" argument is a similar issue of religious entrenchment with nothing but faith supporting either side of the problem, so please dont get too upset over my following views as theres nothing but faith behind them: im pretty skeptical anytime someone says something cant be done due to physical limits. we've been running into the physical limits of our materials for the last 50 years of semiconductor development, and constantly transcending them. first it was theoretical limits on the size of copper traces, based on what we KNEW about the molecular structure of copper. we surpassed it. the use of copper its self was a trump to the limitations of a previous generation of semiconductor limitatoins. similar limits have been asserted as we reached the end of every generation of processors, and we've surpassed them all. we're entering into computing orders of magnatude more advanced than what we had before with our ability to measure and manipulate quantum states. there are researchers even now working on how to perform computing with nothing more than the spin of individual electrons. once we hit the limits of that, there will be some new form of subatomic particle that we can exploit for processing. its not impossible that zero-point or vaccuum-energy will supply power beyond what we know the limits of chemical or superconductive storage to be. sure its "magic" according to our current understanding, but we're constantly redefining our understanding of what physical limits actually are. i dont mean to be too contrary with acgetchell, especially since theres another thread where im debating that there might actually be MORE limits to our useable technology than he is accounting for. but in this case, i think its a different thing entirely. I get that this is coming from the "Long Now" camp, and I understand their arguements. but even if you dont buy into the idea of singularity and transcendance, this is a game that's ABOUT it. unless you'd rather be playing THS, you've got to work within the assumptions that type IV civilizations are possible and that they are able to manipulate energy and mater in ways that violate our current understanding of such.

Whilst not opposing the above as such, it is worth remembering http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_Law ... And, before anybody accuses me of being anti-science or something, note (also on that page) Asimov's Corollary to Clarke's First Law.

remade wrote:

Still - it would be nice for EP authors to have coherent model of their universe. Something like: "physical world is embedded in superuniverse, and those in the know (like some singularities) can reach there for extra juice in this enumerated ways, eventual paradoxes are handled that way, etc", only detailed. Believability, cohesion - that is what differs nice artificial worlds from average ones in my eyes.

Isn't the very definition of Singularity tied to the assertion that what comes after it will be sufficiently distant from humanity as we know it as to defy conception? I'm perfectly fine with the Dr. Who like explanation that the transhuman mind simply lacks several fundamental concepts required to understand the workings of the exurgent virus, Pandora Gates, whatever.

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However, physics still governs technology. Whatever magic device you construct, we can be sure it doesn't violate thermodynamics, mechanics, quantum field theory (QED, QCD, quantum gravity, etc).

The thing is, as you noted in another post, every physics theory has its own domain within which it is valid. The funny thing is that we usually discover these domain limits after formulating the theory. Newton did not know that Mercury's orbit presented anomalies that showed limits to his theory and no one measured at the time that a very fast object would need a different set of laws than Gallileo's. According to Maxwell laws, a diode can not work the way it works today (one needs quantum mechanics to explain it) I think it is fair to say that our current physics models have limits as well, and even some that we currently ignore about. Couldn't the Pandora Gates "suspend" the universe while transmitting its passenger at non-relativistic speed, resuming the universe at the end of the transfer ? Couldn't they be gateways to a smaller universe that has other doors to ours ?