xkcd toon The Corliss Resolution

[n2doc]

[EarlG]

1. In case anyone hasn't seen the activity this is referring to...

http://vimeo.com/30194013

[Scuba]

4. I predict the next Bond film opens with such sequence. n/t

[WillParkinson]

10. That was...

SOOOOOO freaking cool.

[pokerfan]

2. And no avian society ever develops space travel....

"And no avian society ever develops space travel because it's impossible to focus on calculus when you could be outside flying." (tooltip)

[pscot]

5. That would explain

the way the neighborhood crows have been behaving lately.

[fegi052li]

7. indeed

[Speck Tater]

3. Advanced civilzations have better things to do than colonize space.

I mean, seriously, can you imagine what our video games will be like after another couple hundred years of progress!

They are probably all too busy having fun exploring virtual worlds so amazing and exciting that going outside isn't worth the trouble, let alone building spacecraft. In fact if every highly advanced planet had a population of a few billion and most of those beings were running one kind of amazing simulation or another on their computer that means there would be a couple billion simulations for every real world. In other words, the odds are at least 2 billion to one in favor of THIS world we think of as real being one of those simulations. Some of use are advanced aliens completely immersed in our game of pretending to be human, but most of us are just AI non-player characters who only go through the motions.

This old toon I found sums it up: http://fiziwig.com/toons/index.html

[trotsky]

6. Very true - but what about supporting a growing population?

I suppose if your virtual world technology is real enough, you might be able to get people to stop having real sex - but then if you haven't invented some kind of immortality, your civilization will die out. Even if as individuals are born they are just placed into a pod to experience the virtual scene (a la The Matrix), they are taking up space and resources.

And what if your star is dying? Gotta relocate somewhere, and without space travel you are sunk.

[krispos42]

8. Farmville

At any time in the year, a percentage of the population is in a video game trying their hand at farming... but their playing the game is actually controlling remote-controlled tractors and other farming implements. When a guy is driving a virtual tractor across a virtual field, the field is a copy of a real field, and the performance of the virtual tractor is identical to a real one. So when he spends a day on his console "plowing a field" for credits or gems or magic stars or whatever, he's also controlling a real tractor in a real field.

[trotsky]

11. Yes, that is all pretty clear.

But the real guy controlling the virtual guy still needs a real place to sit, real food to consume, and might just want to have sex with a real person once in a while that may occasionally result in the propagation of our species. And he had better, because unless the real guy and everybody who runs Facebook and the supporting infrastructure are immortal, they will eventually die and so goes his virtual farm and all of Farmville.

[krispos42]

12. The real guy is controlling a real tractor via a virtual interface

The guy who's playing at farming, when he decides to plant an acre of corn... he's really planting an acre of corn. Or he'd be giving orders to the semi-automatic tractor that can do the job by itself once somebody sets the parameters. So he's guiding the tractor in the "game", and in real life he's setting up the auto-tractor to run a certain path, around obstacle, at certain times of the year, etc.

:shrug:

Unlike a real farmer, he'll do it for a hobby, for fun. Maybe for a week he'll be interested in it, then he'll move on. But the population of the planet is such that somebody else will want to try it for a while, so that acre of corn is always attended... but maybe by a dozen different people a season.

The gaming servers would keep track of what fields need attending, so when people logged in to "play" on a tractor for a while they would be directed to do whatever their field requires.

[trotsky]

13. So the people that step in for the real guy when he dies...

are they immortal? Or will they have progeny who continue to monitor the computers and write the games and play the games for them when they die, too? Do any of these people need to eat real food and take up real space?

[krispos42]

14. I suspect that out of billions of people...

...there will be enough to do it. It would be a shifting population, of course. Some people doing it for a day to collect reward points to buy new clothes for their avatar or whatever. Some people will genuinely like it and do it on a regular schedule.

If not enough people are doing it, you entice people with more bars of fairly gold so they can upgrade their body armor for when they shift over to the alien equivalent of "Halo".

People would still have to go out and do stuff, but...

[trotsky]

15. Eventually even billions of people will die.

I can't figure out if you are intentionally missing the point or didn't understand what I said.

[krispos42]

16. I suspect that they will still be able to screw on occasion.

One thing intelligent life doesn't seem to have trouble doing is procreating!

U.S. 312,455,766
World 6,969,496,688
01:42 UTC (EST+5) Oct 20, 2011


The deep resonate tones of the bass guitar just seem to trigger something...

[trotsky]

17. But if virtual sex is better than the real thing... n/t

[ThoughtCriminal]

9. Any civilization that doesn't gets whacked

by an asteroid or some other cosmic catastrophe. Probably right about the time they are about to die out because Sim-Sex becomes better that the real thing.