Posted by ColinWright 19 hours ago
On this read, I noticed Multivac answers 7x adding a few more words, maybe to imply progress toward its final answer:
INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
THERE IS INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER. (4x)
LET THERE BE LIGHT!
The last question God might be for you If you’re super rational and are really into technology.
Belief in God is like a supermarket. Once you decide to enter you’re probably going to find something that works for you.
I mean there’s such a wide selection you can even believe in simulations these days.
Or if that’s still too much there’s always the Pascal’s wager God. Still better than nothing.
Needless to say, I don’t find them at all convincing. This 'nothing' is much better than catching unconvincing unneeded supernatural entities.
It falls apart because, based on what's actually known, there's no reason to think worshipping might be the thing that condemns you to hell, and not doing so gets you into heaven, rather than the other way around.
Putting aside the bidirectional issues of non-interaction, what if mankind, or the universes collection of agents (if there are others and we interact with them) at some future point manages to create a supercomputer or entity in a substrate that exists outside of our time in the causal sense.
As long as we don't apocalypse ourselves or self destruct or get distracted from self preservation and miss the asteroid that ends us - we end up bringing this thing in our imagination to reality, just like all the other stuff we imagined and subsequently made.
Maybe God is real we just haven't made it yet.
This is all imagination of course, a fun thought about possibilities, humans tend to make the things they imagine and desire if it's actually possible.
> He read, "Time to recharge battery:" followed by the spiral hieroglyph, the sign of infinity.
> Thud, said the brain. Kzanol read, "Re-estimate of trip time to Thrintun:" followed by a spiral.
At the brain board he typed: "Compute a course for any civilized planet, minimum trip time. Give trip time."
...
Thud! The screen said, "No solution."
Nonsense! The battery had a tremendous potential, even after a hyperspace jump it must still have enough energy to aim the ship at some civilized planet. Why would the brain...?
Then he understood. The ship had power, probably, to reach several worlds, but not to slow him down to the speed of any known world. Well, that was all right. In his stasis field Kzanol wouldn't care how hard he hit. He typed: "Do not consider decrease of velocity upon arrival. Plot course for any civilized planet. Minimize trip time."
The answer took only a few seconds. "Trip time to Awtprun 72 Thrintun years 100.48 days."
didn't know about ooo, maybe because it's not available on namecheap!
If you go up one level, you can see this story is one entry in a great library of stuff: