“If you want a sufficient response to optimism, consider: is the probability that you will persist forever 1? If not, it is 0. If there is any probability of your annihilation, no matter how small, you will not survive for an infinite amount of time. That is what happens in an infinite amount of time: everything possible. If all your backup plans can fail at once, even at P=1/(3^^^3), that number will come of eventually with infinite trials.”
Zubon, this seems to assume that the probabilities in different periods are independent. It could be that there is some process that allows the chance of obliteration to decline exponentially (it’s easy enough to imagine a cellular automata world where this could be) with time, such that the total chance of destruction converges to a finite number. Of course, our universe’s apparent physics seem to preclude such an outcome (the lightspeed limit, thermodynamics, etc), but I wouldn’t assign a probability of zero to our existing as simulations in a universe with laws permitting such stability, or to (improbable) physics discoveries permitting such feats in our apparent universe.
“If you want a sufficient response to optimism, consider: is the probability that you will persist forever 1? If not, it is 0. If there is any probability of your annihilation, no matter how small, you will not survive for an infinite amount of time. That is what happens in an infinite amount of time: everything possible. If all your backup plans can fail at once, even at P=1/(3^^^3), that number will come of eventually with infinite trials.” Zubon, this seems to assume that the probabilities in different periods are independent. It could be that there is some process that allows the chance of obliteration to decline exponentially (it’s easy enough to imagine a cellular automata world where this could be) with time, such that the total chance of destruction converges to a finite number. Of course, our universe’s apparent physics seem to preclude such an outcome (the lightspeed limit, thermodynamics, etc), but I wouldn’t assign a probability of zero to our existing as simulations in a universe with laws permitting such stability, or to (improbable) physics discoveries permitting such feats in our apparent universe.