An Amplified Future

Matrioshka Brain

Increased “Web 3.0” intelligence coupled with NASA and Cerf’s enhanced communication Internet space protocols raises the intriguing possibilities of a “cosmic Internet” discussed in a recent article in the Daily Galaxy that starts to cross over into the realm of Vernor Vinge’s well-known SF novel, A Fire Upon the Deep.

Vinge imagines a galaxy-wide “Net of a Million Lies,” where different species are moving upwards through a series of “zones of thought” as their technology becomes more sophisticated.  To achieve such a network, as the Galaxy article points out, “…we will need to use a lot of power - as much as the entire power of the Sun.

Physicist Freeman Dyson is one of the few people who’s considered the possibilities at such a scale. His “Dyson spheres” would consist of a system of orbiting solar power satellites meant to surround a star and capture most or all of its energy output.  Computer scientist Robert Bradbury took the concept of Dyson spheres and proposed nesting them inside one another like Russian matrioshka or babushka dolls using nanoscale computers — creating essentially a giant brain.

Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, inventor Ray Kurzweil, and others speculate that an advanced civilization may have already created such a brain, and that we humans are simply simulations running inside it.

Is the NASA Interplanetary Internet program the seed of such an enterprise?

“I don’t think of myself predicting things,” says Dyson in a recent New York Times article . “I’m expressing possibilities. Things that could happen. To a large extent it’s a question of how badly people want them to. The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people’s hopes.”  Read more at hplusmagazine.com