Thanks! Fantastic read. It occurred to me that sending code or AI back in time, rather than a person, is more likely since sending data to the past could be done serially and probably requires less energy than sending a physical body.
Some loops could be organized by sending a short list of instructions to the past to an appropriate actor – whether human or AI.
Additionally, some loops might not require sending any data at all: Roko’s Basilisk is an example of such acausal data transmission to the past. Could there be an outer loop for Roko’s Basilisk? For example, a precommitment not to be acausally blackmailed.
Also (though I’m not certain about this), loops like you described require that the non-cancellation principle is false – meaning that events which have happened can be turned into non-existence. To prevent this, we would need to travel to the past and compensate for any undesirable changes, thus creating loops. This assumption motivated the character in Timecrimes to try to recreate all events exactly as they happened.
However, if the non-cancellation principle is false, we face a much more serious risk than nested loops (which are annoying, but most people would live normal lives, especially those who aren’t looped and would continue through loops unaffected). The risk is that a one-time time machine could send a small probe into the remote past and prevent humanity from appearing at all.
We can also hypothesize that an explosion of nested loops and time machines might be initiated by aliens somewhere in the multiverse – perhaps in the remote future or another galaxy. Moreover, what we observe as UAPs might be absurd artifacts of this time machine explosion.
Thanks! Fantastic read. It occurred to me that sending code or AI back in time, rather than a person, is more likely since sending data to the past could be done serially and probably requires less energy than sending a physical body.
Some loops could be organized by sending a short list of instructions to the past to an appropriate actor – whether human or AI.
Additionally, some loops might not require sending any data at all: Roko’s Basilisk is an example of such acausal data transmission to the past. Could there be an outer loop for Roko’s Basilisk? For example, a precommitment not to be acausally blackmailed.
Also (though I’m not certain about this), loops like you described require that the non-cancellation principle is false – meaning that events which have happened can be turned into non-existence. To prevent this, we would need to travel to the past and compensate for any undesirable changes, thus creating loops. This assumption motivated the character in Timecrimes to try to recreate all events exactly as they happened.
However, if the non-cancellation principle is false, we face a much more serious risk than nested loops (which are annoying, but most people would live normal lives, especially those who aren’t looped and would continue through loops unaffected). The risk is that a one-time time machine could send a small probe into the remote past and prevent humanity from appearing at all.
We can also hypothesize that an explosion of nested loops and time machines might be initiated by aliens somewhere in the multiverse – perhaps in the remote future or another galaxy. Moreover, what we observe as UAPs might be absurd artifacts of this time machine explosion.