[pbkhrv]

> but what's to stop us from cloning big chunks of our civilizations... simulating them, but using vastly less power/resources for each simulation? Then writing software to have them pass knowledge among the civilizations? We have just a few hundred countries, what if we had a trillion communicating at the speed of computer circuitry?

The principle of computational irreducibility [1] is what will stop us from "cloning" civilizations. That and chaos theory - any tiny deviation in initial conditions of such a simulation or cloning process could produce unusable results.

"simulating them, but using vastly less power/resources" is a pipe dream.

[1] http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ComputationalIrreducibility.htm...