From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Tue Jan 11 2000 - 14:47:51 MST
Robert Bradbury writes:
> approach because (a) getting into space will be "expensive" until we have
> the power output of the sun at our disposal; (b) I believe current international
Access to space will be likely tightly controlled by powerful
corporations until the claims have been established. After the Solar
system turf has been divided, it will be then safe to release the
plebs upon it. Due to initial blueprint and all-purpose assembler
scarcity (for the same reasons), nano is unlikely to be of much
assistance here.
> treaties prevent "claiming" land in space (or at least on the Moon), so if
> you attempted executing this you would be creating a reason for the U.S. &
> Russia to send a space destroyer after you.
This is utterly unenforcible, since you can be literally get lost in
the Oort cloud somewhere.
And it is difficult to wage war physically (i.e. other than
infowarfare) in a remote developed location (say, a processed
asteroid, Luna suface is probably too near). A few hundred km^2 of
photovoltaics surface gives you serious firepower against any large
destroyer. The only way is to try it with stealth, sending a lot of
very black, speedy, hardened nukes which detonate in your midst. As we
already discussed, nukes are relatively useless as means of attack
against a cloud of self-gravity bound distributed objects. You also
could certainly retaliate horribly, Earth is a very vulnerable place.
> An extropic approach, instead of repeating all the examples of previous
> mistakes, should try to focus on those areas where there are "loopholes"
> that people didn't envision due to limited previous meme-sets.
I think it would be wise not to present a physical attack target. A
distributed, largely virtual tribe would do just fine, until access to
space is open.
> Robert
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