Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Peter F. Hamilton's _The Sleeping God_ featured an entity (the sleeping god of the title) which had been created by a vastly advanced race to help them explore the universe, and whose sentience resided in patterns of quantum vacuum fluctuations. It's structure allowed it direct access to and control over a good deal of the observable universe. As it put it "For me, thought and action are one and the same." I had to stop and think about technology advanced enough to manipulate and control quantum vacuum fluctuations. Can you say "Sense of Wonder"?
Hamilton also postulated a race that existed in a post-scarcity economy. They had achieved molecular level replication, ala Star Trek. Any adult member of their species could have any material object it desired by simply asking a Universal Provider to make one. If a pattern was in the Provider's database, it could, and these beings had been pretty much everywhere and analyzed pretty much everything, so the pattern was likely to exist. A Provider had no problem creating an ice cream cone for a human child that wound up on their home world, because they'd been to Earth at one point, too...
That made me ponder as well, because our notions of economic systems get turned on their heads if you can do that. The beings actively traded with others, but for knowledge, not goods. While they no longer roamed the galaxy, they were explicit that they had deliberately kept their technology, because it enabled them to pursue what had become their real interest: how the universe worked, and why.
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Dennis
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Glad to have stretched you mind. It won't take that level of technology to cause the questions of abundance. We're doing it right now, right here, at MR. It's the endless debate on copyright in the digital world. After all, when you can make copies of digital files for basically nothing, is that not the same, in the limited world of digital files, as the Universal Provider?