Post by blue tigers on May 11, 2007 22:01:26 GMT -5
hecscrivener said:
"Short life?" He's got the elixir of life, you know.Quick to dismiss, quick to dismiss.
The crux of the problem is that he has limited abilities to store and process information. Assuming he is human, he only has the human brain and human senses. Which are taylored for a short live span, not for sifting through billions of years of data.
Padre touches the topic, but does not realize its significance: "I'm certain he's got a video camera that records his voyage, and a post-it note on the interior of the machine that says "Hey, you're the new me, watch the damn videos"." Well, watching the videos might take a damn looong time. By the time the poor sap is done with all of them, he already forgot most of what he saw.
But even an all-powerfull AI has this crucial limitation. It can't store arbitrarily large quantities of data, and, more limiting, can't process them fast enough. Please realize that processing information must happen in some real time, because flipping bits fundamentally depends on the arrow of time.
Thus the amount of operational knowledge our timetraveler has is just a little patch in the vastity of the universe. Yeah, he'll know more than any given human, but he'll know little at the universe scale.