When The Universe Tries To Block, Show It That You Rock!

I’ll admit that I’ve been bandying this question around in my brain for a bit, but I’ve almost been afraid to ask it simply because of the magnitude of the matters involved themselves, but here goes:

If, after all is said and done — all the Science has been scienced; every nut, bolt, and fundamental particle has been accounted for in both position and momentum; every possible problem and impediment except the Very Last One has been surmounted, and the Empire has root access to the very source code of the Universe — it turns out that Perfect Liberty and Perfect Negentropy are fundamentally incompatible… well, what happens next?

Easy. Punch a hole out of the universe into the embedding brane and its primordial cacoastrum, step outside, and then tear down the universe and build a new, improved, all-around better one where they are fundamentally compatible! (With blackjack! And hookers!)

And if the bulk isn’t going to play ball, then they’ll just have to figure out how to tear down and replace that too.

Failure Is Not An Option.

(And, after all, we already have one major negentropic event to work from, and what has been done? Can be done.)

 

7 thoughts on “When The Universe Tries To Block, Show It That You Rock!

  1. More to the point, and more seriously: If it honestly did come to a point where the only viable option for defeating entropy is to create a computing network so dense that the resulting entity would effectively be a “Universe Brain” where the required network density demands that everyone (or a significantly large fraction of the whole, at least) effectively merge into a hive superconsciousness to even have a reasonable chance, with no “third option” presenting itself no matter how many layers of the onion you peel:

    Uno: How many Imperials would be willing to willingly and voluntarily sacrifice their own pre-Fusion personality to construct the thing; and

    Dos: What would be the appropriate response to those who wouldn’t be willing to do so if not enough people volunteered?

    • On the latter: Well, you know how their ethics run by now, and the Imperial culture tends towards the Rorschach view on ethical adherence: “No. Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise.”

      On the former: Mu. The question is unanswerable. With the best will in the world, I can’t predict what the culture I’m writing about “now” might do trillions to decillions of years downtime in the face of conditions I can’t find particularly plausible. (I am, you may have noticed, not a great believer in no-win scenarios. Only hard-to-win scenarios.)

      The best I can give you is my thoughts on the spirit with which such an end might be faced, in the form of my favorite Giambattista Marino quotation:

      “We fought against the empire of heaven. We were – that I will not deny – vanquished in that conflict: yet the great intention was not lacking in nobility. Something or other gave them victory; to us remains the glory of a dauntless daring. And even if my troop fell thence vanquished, yet to have attempted a lofty enterprise is still a trophy.”

    • (Especially, I should probably add, when for “culture” in this plus-aeons scenario, one could equally well read “deus est machina with brain the size of a galactic supercluster”.)

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