Accelerating Future

Iapetus:

Enceladus:

Titan:

Dione:

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H/t to Space Elevator blog.

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In the long term, I am concerned that we will fuse all the light elements and break apart all the heavy elements. This course of action would lead to an overabundance of iron. With an atomic number of 26, iron consumes more than three times as many protons, neutrons, and electrons more than our favorite element, carbon. Iron is a waste. Carbon is superior because of its versatility, but more importantly, because it can form the strongest bond in all of chemistry - the hallowed sp², or carbon-carbon bond. This powerful bond will allow us to build extremely small, rigid structures suitable for nanocomputers, which we’ll all call home someday.

One thing is certain. We must build a Shkadov thruster - a stellar engine - and head for IRC+10216 (CW Leo), the closest carbon star. CW Leo has relatively low gravity because it is a red giant, so it is constantly spewing carbon material out into the interstellar medium. The star is almost 500 light years away, so we’d better get started soon. Even if it takes billions of subjective years, we must go there eventually, because otherwise we will run out of carbon to build fun stuff. When we get there, we can start siphoning off the carbon-rich atmosphere of the star, and keep withdrawing carbon until we can withdraw it no more.

We should avoid the scenario where we fuse all our light elements into iron prior to making it there. Unless we desperately need the energy more than the free carbon, it would be foolish to pursue fusion past a certain point. It seems plausible that we can drastically reduce our energy consumption by implementing ourselves on almost-reversible computers, so it seems a higher premium will be placed on matter (particularly carbon) than energy. In a worst-case scenario, if we collectively run out of energy by devouring the Sun and fusing everything up to carbon, we might need to agree on a civilization-wide shutdown until we make it to CW Leo, or find some way of getting energy from the vacuum.

Edit: all the above is mostly pointless because I now realize that any star can be artificially compressed into a carbon star. Natural carbon stars require no extra effort, though.

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Mind uploading will make space travel useless. If my mind is running at a million times human speed, then the Moon, Mars, and Proxima Centauri look far more distant than they were previously. It becomes pointless to visit them.

When minds are sped up, subjective time slows down. There are no philosophical conundrums inherent in this. It’s quite straightforward. There is no necessary link between cognitive speed and the external world. No necessary feedback cycle, or whatever. Obviously, if I think a million times faster, the present-day world would be an incredible bore, but technological changes do not happen in a vacuum. If we get the technology to make cyborgs or uploads with a million times brain speed, then we’ll also have technologies that can modify the environment on that timescale and other individuals with the same brain speed that we can communicate with. This technology sounds advanced, but it will follow quickly as a consequence of molecular manufacturing and atomic-resolution brain scanning. Nano rod-logics - no nanoelectronics or femtotechnology necessary - already offer millions of times, if not billions of times faster speeds compared to the human brain, as long as we can transfer minds from meat to machines, which we assuredly will.

And if you disbelieve in causal functionalism (the idea that the mind is substrate-independent) then I would advise hitting the “unsubscribe” button right now because I am just going to keep saying things you find totally implausible, I’m afraid.

If our mind operates a million times human speed, suddenly the Moon is 2/3 light years away. It takes an eight month journey to get there, even if I’m traveling at the speed of light the whole way. If I’m being beamed there in the form of photons, I’m dead for eight months. If I go by spaceship, it could take several subjective years. I think this is small enough that it’s likely that the Moon will be swallowed for computronium and be integrated into the Terra-Luna Supercomputer which is where the human race will spend the next subjective million years or so of time after uploading.

The problem for space colonization for uploads is that the other planets, not to mention extra-solar stars, are too damn far away. Once we have the technology to accelerate brains by a million times, we’ll use that advantage to invent the technology to accelerate them by a billion times, and so on, until we hit ultimate physical limits. Around this time, the Sun looks really, really, really, really far away. 8 light minutes becomes 8 light billennia, or 8 million light years. It would be useless to go there unless we run out of resources on this planet completely. Because we’ll eventually be able to code a single bit for every atom, and the Earth contains about 10²⁵ kg of matter, with around 10²⁵ atoms per kg, the Earth will be able to store something like 10⁵⁰ bits, which is absolutely huge. Even if it takes 100 atoms to implement one computation per second (highly conservative), we have 10⁴⁸ ops/sec of computation available, enough to store 10²⁰ entities of size 10¹⁸ ops/sec, which is roughly a hundred quadrillion individuals.

One could argue that people won’t want to upload, and maybe a minority indeed won’t, but the majority assuredly will. There will be a slippery slope of economic, social, and personal pressures. Uploading will be far more appealing than, say, computer adoption because uploading will enrich outside life and deep experiences while computers only enrich a portion of experience and are exclusively indoors. People who choose not to upload will become irrelevant to the flow of history, frozen as statues while the uploaded society pursues science, technology, love, relationships, and unique experiences on nanosecond timescales. A mighty spaceship launched from the surface of the Earth will be laughed at by uploads, as they see it creeping along a few feet per subjective year. People need to realize that they will eventually have to choose between uploading and space travel, and it will be practically impossible to forgo the appeal of uploading. No one will force anyone to do it, but you’ll want to. In space there are maybe a few dozen stars and a couple hundred planets within 100 light years, but in virtual reality there will be millions of stars and billions of planets available as quickly as they can be generated by evolutionary algorithms or coded by hand. Spore will just be the beginning.

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I don’t quite understand why some people are getting all worked up about the news of a possibly human-hospitable planet 20.4 light years away in Gliese 581.

First, we have a human hospitable planet right here that we’ve barely even begun to use. In a post last September, I outlined how the Earth could easily hold 100 billion people, if not more, by colonizing the deserts and highlands. I didn’t even talk about the oceans, polar regions, underground, or low Earth orbit. To those desperate to get off the planet post haste, I ask: where’s your creativity? Do you realize that we could hollow out regions the size of cities underground, reroute sunlight from the surface down into them, and have a perfectly nice living environment, with none of the inconveniences of outer space such as: lack of organic chemicals, ice cold temperature, ionizing cosmic rays, lack of gravity, lack of water, deadly vacuum, etc? If living underground isn’t your cup of tea, then there is the possibility of ocean colonies, powered by the temperature differential from the deep ocean and the surface, or polar domed colonies, or airship-supplied mountain colonies, or… really, the sky’s the limit, and by sky, I mean space habitats at an altitude of 200km.

Second, even if we did need to leave the Earth, there is a tremendous amount of raw materials for space colonies right next door in the form of carbonaceous asteroids, which make up about 75% of known asteroids. The asteroid belt contains about a million asteroids of 1km diameter, and a great big planetoid (Ceres) about 1000km in diameter, all there for the taking. Some of these asteroids wouldn’t even need to be reprocessed entirely, but could be turned into viable colonies simply by hollowing them out, pumping them full of oxygen, and getting them spinning. The rock is a natural cosmic ray shield. Through exploitation of the resources of our Solar System in this way, we could create colonies for billions of billions of people, if not more.

Third, I submit that we should think carefully before sending off colonists to far-away places without ensuring that they’re capable of protecting the fundamental freedoms of their citizens, and not degenerating into the primitive tribes that humans seem automatically programmed to create in the absence of a checks-and-balances infrastructure. How are we going to make sure that they don’t accidentally create a Blight that the home system is then helpless to deal with? With the matter-energy resources of an entire star system, it would be a Class 1 hassle for us to come up with defenses against a malevolent entity of that category. Even the possibility of such difficulties may make it undesirable for us to expand too fast too soon.

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The pictured colony is certainly a big one. Kalpana One is currently my favorite space colony design, in terms of relative feasibility and usefulness. One might ask, “what’s the point of spending tons of money on building a space colony when Friendly AI could build us one for free, and when unFriendly AI could easily take down such a colony?” The reasons are, 1) governments will spend money on space colonization whether we want them to or not, so we might as well keep an eye on the field, 2) space colonies are an insurance policy against pre-AI disasters, 3) the prospect is inspiring in general, and even if such colonies are never produced en masse in the real world, they’ll still be featured in the fictional worlds we choose to inhabit.

The pictured colony looks really, really huge. Probably would weigh trillions of tons. Seems to be about 50km across at the torus, maybe 1000km across total.

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