Re: opposite of relativistic time contraction

Ben Crowell wrote:
> Suppose we have an intelligent species with control over godlike amounts
> of matter and energy. They can make black holes from scratch, for
> instance. Now let's say they want to make time flow more rapidly
> for a certain observer than for the observers out in flattish spacetime.

It probably wouldn't be useful to these aliens, but I recall reading a 
while back that to a hypothetical observer who's out in the middle of a 
galactic supervoid will have had a significant amount of extra time pass 
since the beginning of the universe due to the absence of gravitational 
effects from nearby matter.

Kind of freaky to think that somewhere out there is a place where the 
universe is already 18 billion years old, or whatever the specific 
number was. Modulo the usual caveats about simultaneity and so forth. :)

For more extreme time-warping that might be possible to do "at home", I 
wonder if these aliens would be able to rig up something like Tipler's 
Omega Point on a local scale. Tipler's notion there was that as the 
universe approaches a big crunch it gets hotter and denser, so 
computational activities can be made exponentially faster, resulting in 
being able to do an infinite number of computations before the universe 
physically ends and thus an infinite subjective lifespan for simulated 
minds. Doesn't seem very plausible to me but maybe if you're willing to 
settle for a finite-but-large number of computations then 
gravitationally imploding a computer-bomb might help.