Diaspora

by Greg Egan

in the end most would discover that they valued familiarity far more than any abstract distinction between real and virtual flesh.

Of course, even for the heaviest elementary particles the Schwarzschild radius is far smaller than the Planck-Wheeler length, so quantum uncertainty would disrupt any potential event horizons, and perhaps even smooth away the singularity as well.

At times it still felt like a tightrope walk, though, trying to classify every act of simulation into those which contributed to an understanding of the physical universe (good), those which were merely convenient, recreational, esthetic (acceptable) … and those which constituted a denial of the primacy of real phenomena (time to think about emigration).

Before the launch, “alien solipsists” would have been the most unpalatable idea imaginable,

“In a rotating reference frame, the centrifugal force for a given amount of angular momentum acts like an inverse-cube repulsion.”