You've got mail

((ooc note: Uncharacteristically, this log entry is encrypted and only readable by LUMEN officers. Usually -and unless noted differently- Theo's log entries are shared on a public server, since he thinks research notes should be publicly available. But today is different, and non-LUMEN folks would not have in-character knowledge of this unless told by a LUMEN officer.))

The day starts bad, when the first mail in your inbox comes from the Empire's most despised and feared heretic. Well, perhaps I exaggerate - after all there is no shortage of despised and feared heretics. But certainly Nauplius is ranked prominently among them.

He wrote to me directly, to inquire about a slave that he once gifted Yun-Hee Yubari. Miss Yubari is now in medbay. She was found, injured, and suffering from severe cerebral damage for which she is getting treatment. She has memory loss and no recollection of what happened before she was found, let alone of the slave. 

But I know where her slave is. 

Miss Yubari entrusted her to me, about a year ago, right before she vanished. Her disappearance left the slave in some sort of legal limbo, and in order not to let her starve, I gave her some stipend in exchange for doing chores at the Chapel. Just until I could find time to figure out what to do. 

To be honest, I must confess that I had somewhat forgotten about her, until this mail from the heretic.

I think the slave got used to her new situation soon, and enjoyed the relative freedom that came with it. She was smart enough not to try leaving the station. A lone slave without her holder would not have passed the security checks at the interbus terminal without alerting the MIO. So, she kept doing her work at the chapel, and I think she did her best not to draw attention.

That will change now that the Sedevacantists (Nauplius' heretical cult) are looking for her. I am afraid that they will find out about her location and kidnap her. The heretic may even want to use her to perform experimental surgery to find a way to heal miss Yubari faster!

Luna calmed me somewhat, and told me to trust the Lamp's security. She also advised me to discuss it with miss Yubari, as soon as she is healthy enough. Of course I must also talk to the slave, inform her of what is happening...

Entropic signatures of advanced civilizations

Time to conclude my short study on the entropic limits to advanced civilizations. 

In the first part I argued that life, including consciousness, is neither a state of extremely high entropy nor a state of extremely low entropy. Rather, it exists in between, somewhere in the middle of a big stream of entropy from low to high. In the second part, I theorized that even advanced beings that consist only of information, i.e. disembodied consciousnesses, must create entropy purely by the act of thinking and must dump this excess entropy into the big stream.

Without temperature differences, there is no net current of heat - in other words, to have an entropy stream requires a temperature gradient. For us, the source of the stream is the star around which we live, a high temperature object. Deep space is our cold reservoir, at the chilling temperature of the cosmic background radiation, barely 2.7 degrees above absolute minimum. 

It is the temperature at which the civilization operates that sets the physical limits, rather than the temperature of the star. The maximum "bits per second" rate at which entropy can be dumped (and thus thoughts generated) is proportional to the operating temperature squared. The minimal power (energy consumed per second) that is needed for that is proportional to the operating temperature cubed.

The trick to keep the total number of thoughts infinite, while keeping the total amount of energy consumed finite is to let the operating temperature decrease with time in a very specific manner: it should go down faster than the inverse square root of time, but slower than the inverse cube root of time. 

In addition, the operating temperature must be higher than the cold reservoir. So, that means that it should be higher than the temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation, and that could pose a problem at some point. But, I speculate that if that temperature is not low enough, a highly advanced civilization can turn around the heat flow, and use its own star as the cold reservoir. An (artificial) black hole will do just fine - its characteristic temperature can be controlled by its radius, and can be brought extremely close to absolute zero. Excess entropy can then be dumped into the black hole. Manipulating spacetime and creating artificial black holes is something the Talocan could do - perhaps not (yet) the Jove. 

So, one can hypothesize that the hallmark of a sedentary hyper-advanced civilization would be a cold star or black hole with a very specific and rather unnatural power law dependence of its temperature over time. 

PS. I am writing down the calculations in a more orderly manner, and will link them here later for the mathematically inclined.

[[ooc attribution: this builds on Freeman Dyson's speculations. In Science 131, p.1303 (1960), he considers a Dyson sphere's infrared radiation as a signature. That is the radiation that corresponds to its operating temperature.]]

In the news today

There was a bone-chilling current-events documentary on Amarr Certified News today, warning of yet another new threat. 

I quote: 

New Deathless ships are believed to be in development. These ships are capable of fitting breacher pod launchers that include the infrastructure needed to run small virtualities. These virtualities can house a team of infomorphs who then transfer to clone bodies launched in SCARAB Breacher Pods. Dubbed “Shriker clones”, they are a specialized iteration of the Upwell Consortium's workforce clones.

The ink on my previous log entry was not yet dry, or the spectre of disembodied teams of informorps is in the news. Here, the substrate on which to run the infomorph's consciousness seems to be a "shriker". Whatever that is, it does not sound cuddly. The word has the same root as the "shrike". That is a species of small songbird, known to impale their lifeless quarry on sharp twigs.

There was another interesting thing in the news. A short item, under the heading "Minmatar, Gallente, and Caldari militaries pledge to provide further assistance in Pochven." Here, the Empire is conspicuous by its absence. I cannot recall that we recently renewed this pledge. 

Perhaps this is the start of diplomatic relations and negotiations with the Triglavians? What will this mean for Raravoss? Are we abandoning that system, and the brave resistance forces there fighting under the command of commander Arline Kley to its sorry fate in the hands of the Triglavians? 

Entropy of thought

Back to my speculations about hyper-advanced races sealing themselves off from the rest of the universe.

In his masterpiece "History of the Jove", commonly used as an undergraduate textbook, the capsuleer Uriel Paradisi Anteovnuecci states that there existed a branch of Jove that

lived long lives in perpetual cryogenic slumber, developing a shared virtuality in which the conscious infomorphs of the inhabitants could mingle and conduct research.

It seems to me that in the end they would not even need their physical body, or their brains. Let us for a moment consider a very reductionist view, and ignore the important question of the soul. In that view, the neurons are merely a substrate on which to run an algorithm that changes the state of the infomorph to go from one thought to the next thought. Silicon or other physical substrates could be used to perform the manipulations of informorph data, perhaps faster, or consuming less energy.

There is however a fundamental constraint that can not be circumvented. Every algorithmically computed thought, regardless of the substrate, must create a tiny bit of entropy (I have added a technical note below).

In order to live even a virtual life, also disembodied infomorphs must dump their generated entropy in the big entropy stream that flows from their star into the universe. This fundamental limit does not represent a lot entropy, the bar is pretty low: it will be more than about one picojoule/kelvin for one terabyte of thoughts. But it is not zero.

The question up next is: is it possible to think an infinite amount of thoughts, if you only have access to a finite amount of energy (namely, the energy in the star around which the pure-information beings have secluded themselves)?

Technical note: Information theory tells us that there is entropy being generated by manipulating information. Many types of computational operations can in principle be made adiabatic, but the process of erasing one bit of information always must generate a given (tiny) amount of entropy. Eating up information (erasing it) can power a little heat engine! 

Using qubits does not rescue you from the curse of increasing entropy. There, it is the proces of observing one qubit which breaks the entanglement and turns entanglement entropy into 'thermodynamic' entropy. Again, not all types of operations on qubits generate entropy, but some do, and are inevitable in the course of computation. 

Using trits - or three valued bits - does not help either: while it is true that you need less of them to store a given amount of information, erasing a trit generates more entropy in the same proportion as you gained, leading to the same outcome. 

Sansha collections

A strange thing happened today, while I was checking out Sansha data sites. 

There is an incursion in and around Thebeka, and mr. Ivan Firth suggested that we contribute by gathering intelligence. I think we share this trait, that we are averse to battle, and anyway the Indagatrix is not geared for it. There were plenty of data relays and even a backup server. But in all of them there were Talocan or Takmahl artefacts. Well, apart from the occasional chunk of carbon... 

The things we found are not that unusual in themselves, like Takmahl cohere cords or Talocan mechanical gears. But what is unusual is that the Sansha seem to be stocking up on them, at least in this incursion. Mr. Firth thinks it is just coincidence, but I suspect this has got to do with the recent events involving Drifter, Triglavians and the Deathless. 

Perhaps the Atavum devices set the trend, but ancient civilization artefacts are hot items nowadays... 

Firewall

In the margin of the ICC symposium, I have negotiated for interlibrary loan arrangements between Caille University and our library. I thought it would have been difficult, since we have censorship. We do not want our readers to have access to books on the Index. So any access to collections for our readers should be filtered beforehand.

I had expected fierce opposition to censorship, as something that limits freedom. Politically, at least, it is important for them the emphasize that censorship is bad, and people should be free to read whatever they want. 

So I had prepared my case, using the Sanist subculture in the Federation as an example. They have a Sani Sabik music genre - Midna Lyre is the primary exponent of it. It is banned in the Empire, and frankly, I think also most Gallente think their Sanists are weird if not outright harmful.

It turns out I was naive. There is censorship also in the Federation. Not for Sanist music, but for things their courts think is libel, or for propaganda from the State. Moreover, following the general theme of the conference, trade motivations trumped ideological motivations. They made no problem of installing the firewall. 

ICC Symposium

Today I attended a conference promoting Empire-Federation economical relations. It had been organized at the LUMEN embassy in the Aideron building in Luminaire, a very appropriate venue to bring us together.

The main part of the program were keynote speeches. It started with some short and to-the-point talks, by Luna and by James Syagrius. There was also a talk by Kriv Aldent, who offers to facilitate trade, I think a hauling service? I'm afraid I dozed off a bit during the talk, I had spent a long time traveling from Amarr to Luminaire, and did not get my coffee yet.

Lord Garion Avarr also took to the lectern to give a speech. It was quite rousing! He talked about Itzak Barah and his  magnum opus Cathedral of Oceans, and how its translation formed a bridge to the Federation. Books as diplomats. He also outed himself as someone advocating the end of slavery. The Gallente loved it, they had little stars twinkling in their eyes when they heard an Amarr noble talk about ending slavery. Yet, I do not think he did it to butter the Gallenteans up. He meant it. 

He did not say anything unbecoming, he did not advocate revolution. It was all in line with Imperial policies set out by Heideran the Good and continued by the Empress Jamyl and by our current Empress. Nevertheless, outing yourself as a abolitionist is still a courageous thing to do and not without its dangers. There may be a lot of resistance to his stance, and not only outside of LUMEN.

Finally, Isodorus Orissus talked. He was certainly the odd one out. Unsurprisingly, he gave a speech about his knife. All in all, it reinforced the image of favoring trade and money over tradition in order to overcome the hurdles between the Empire and the Federation - that is the "vibe" I got from this conference, overall. 

I do not agree. I mean, I understand that trade can be a good first step to normalize relations between empires. But as an ultimate motivator, profit is a false prophet. It has appeal for a while, but in the end all these possessions stacked around you cannot fulfill the existential need of giving meaning to your life. 

After the presentation, I had an interesting discussion with mr. Kalodote Lafisques in one of the meeting rooms. He is advocating cooperation between capsuleers, in a way that is disconnected from loyalty to our empires, and motivated -again- by profit of some kind. At least, that is how I understand him at this point - I think there was a bit of a cultural barrier and some things got lost in translation...

Entropy and life

Motivated by thoughts about the fate of the Jove, I seem to have dived deep into a rabbit hole. With the help of the Lamp’s library assistants, I have been digging up books about the physical constraints that would apply even to hyper-advanced civilizations. 

In that discussion, entropy plays an important role.

Entropy is a measure of missing information or chaos. That sounds like a vague concept, but physics manages to give it a mathematical definition that allows to put a number on it. The sort of chaos that can be captured by the physical concept of entropy is not about political chaos and not really about the mess of books and papers on my desk. Rather, it is chaos at a microscopic level, in the arrangement of atoms or other (sub)atomic building blocks of life.

Maximum entropy would occur when everything is completely mixed up, a uniformly mixed soup of all sorts of atoms. Low entropy, by contrast, occurs when these atoms are perfectly sorted, for example when they are arranged in a perfect, infinite crystal, frozen down to the lowest temperature.

Both extremes represent death. 

Life, with its complex arrangements of atoms, is neither maximum entropy nor extremely low entropy. It exists somewhere in between the two. It requires complexity and structure, which is neither maximal chaos nor maximal order at the microscopic level. 

The main and most intriguing property of entropy is that it always grows over time. That is known as the second law of thermodynamics. As you live your life and think your thoughts, the processes that occur while doing that will increase entropy. The atoms get knocked out of their original formation, and the chaos and loss of in-formation increases. If you get locked up in a closed box and one waits for a very long time, you will ultimately turn into a nasty, bloody, high-entropy structureless goo. 

This tendency of entropy to always grow certainly is depressing.

But there is also hope! The second interesting property is that entropy can be transported. To maintain your atoms in their formation, you must expel the entropy that is being generated by the processes in your body to somewhere else. Entropy is the ultimate waste that we will always need to get rid of, no matter how advanced we become.

As it turns out, we live on a big stream of entropy coming from our star and going off into space [*], and we can dump our little excess entropy waste into that big stream! As a civilization becomes more advanced, it can perhaps manage its energy consumption or harvesting in a more efficient way, but it will always have to get rid of its entropy. That is true even if we become virtual beings, as manipulating digital information also produces entropy. 

To clarify that, I’ll have to look at the entropy associated with manipulating data next.

[*] Technical details: The stream starts at Amarr's star, which sends us low-entropy radiation characteristic for 4436 K. The higher the temperature of a celestial body, the lower the entropy associated with some flux of energy coming from the celestial body (in fact the entropy is inversely proportional to this temperature). The light from our star powers life on Amarr, and gets re-radiated out back into space at the temperature of our planet, about 300 K. Incoming energy needs to balance outgoing energy to get a planet in thermal equilibrium, but that is not true for entropy. Our planet radiates out high-entropy, mostly infrared radiation. So, we have a low entropy stream coming in, and turning into a high-entropy stream as it moves out. Part of that higher entropy comes from us doing our thing on the planet, and maintaining our microscopic structure, by dumping waste entropy into that stream. 

Specifically, and perhaps just to prove that physics can put numbers on it: our star provides 450 Watt/m^2 of energy flux to Amarr prime, which must be radiated back out to space. This corresponds to about 1 J/K of entropy that is dumped into space per second, per square meter of planet surface.

Stellar spheres

It was nice to recall the story of Saint Khafkan foiling the Sealer's plot. I picked up a book about this bit of history, because I could not shake the idea that in Jove society, their version of the Sealers may have been more successful. Perhaps not with an attack, but by gaining political power.

What happens next? A very advanced civilization will ultimately control all matter in its (sealed-off) star system, and futurists have theorized that they would reorganize this matter into a giant spherical shell surrounding their home star, to capture all the star's energy and let none of it escape into the dark depths of space.

If we add up all the mass of the planets circling our star, from Mikew to Derdainys, and redistribute it evenly on a shell of 1 AU - twice the distance between Amarr Prime and our star, we have about 7 tonnes of material to work with per square kilometer of shell. Enough to build a shell sturdy and thick enough for people to live in.

However, such a sphere would be inherently in danger of colliding with its central star. If the star is not completely at rest with respect to the sphere, it would just keep on cruising towards the sphere's inner surface. Gravity's pull from the spherical shell cancels out inside the shell, so there is no restoring force. 

To create a potential well for the star, one would have to rapidly oscillate the center of mass of the shell around its geometrical center. This way, a (time averaged) potential well can be created to keep the star in place. This would require the sphere to be augmented with rings around its circumference, along which planet-sized masses are rotating at tremendous speed. Angular momentum ought to be conserved, so some counter-rotation by the sphere itself would be needed.

Yes, it would be a sight to behold.

Such a construction is claimed to optimize the amount of energy that can be used by an advanced civilization when restricted to a single star system. All of the fusion energy from the central star can be harvested.

However, it has been argued that ultimately, a civilization does not need energy. It needs to shed entropy. I need to look up another book about that...

ooc: the spherical shell idea was put forward by Freeman Dyson (Science 131, 1667 (1960)), and is called a Dyson sphere. 

The gatekeeper - part 3

Back in AD 21304 it took quite some time for a dinghy to cross the distance between the gate hangar and a freighter thirty-odd kilometers away. Khafkan, mightily angry that someone had gone over his head, was determined to use this time to apply the full might of his administrative prowess to unearth other possible objections against approving the jump.

He sifted through the web of holding companies to find that the owner - the one who must have contacted his superior - was the chapter master of the Order of The Promised Planet, currently under investigation by the Council of Apostles. They were against Amarr's expansion to the stars and advocated that everyone should stay on our home world, the promised planet where the prophet Gheinok led us to. While he found it very ironic that exactly these folk are now in a hurry to get to Hedion, this was not a cause to deny the jump authorization.

Another thing that caught his eye was the ship's manifest. It had not raised any concerns that they were transporting pluche toys, interior house decorations, cosmetics from a line of a famous singer, and class II industrial waste. The paperwork for that was perfectly in order. But they had claimed to be on an emergency. Khafkan failed to see how these items could constitute an emergency shipment. At the very least an inspection was in order.

That is why, after landing his dinghy in the freighter's docking bay, he did not follow the droid to the bridge to get the signature, but took a sudden turn and headed towards the cargo bay. 

What he saw there, was not in accordance with regulations.

The cargo bay was stocked from floor to ceiling with crates of explosives. 

Khafkan did not make it back to his dinghy. Before a blaster blew a fist-sized hole in his chest, he was able to message the gunner the correct codes of the various infractions committed by the terrorists. With his last breath, he added "Jump request still denied". 

When the freighter made a run for the gate, the gunner drew the correct conclusion, and opened fire. The exploding ship damaged the gate, but it did not achieve the ultimate goal of the conspirators: to destroy our first and back then only stable wormhole connection to another star system. They had hoped to permanently seal off Amarr from the rest of the universe. The order, henceforth known as the Sealers, was outlawed and purged.

As for Khafkan, to this very day he is venerated as patron saint of bureaucracy.