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titoyesterday at 10:34 PM3 repliesview on HN

Are there any well thought through stories about what this would look like? For example, I'm thinking about like nutrient flow, decision making, energy input, gravitational force, things like that seem to govern the value and speed of intelligence.


Replies

indiv0today at 12:06 AM

Hard to avoid spoilers here but Vernor Vinge hits on pretty much exactly this in A Fire Upon the Deep. Though he's interested less in the hard sci-fi aspects of how/why and more on the consequences of it (story-wise).

ggmyesterday at 11:36 PM

I think this is a slow version of the quandry behind Quantum Computing: how do you distinguish events from the noise floor? It happens in the quantum context and it would happen in the millenial timeframe completing "operations" which have to be compared to e.g. the stability of orbit around a sun.

kirubakaranyesterday at 11:20 PM

For the opposite, "Dragon's Egg" by Robert L. Forward is a fantastic read