From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Sun May 12 2002 - 05:28:40 MDT
On Sat, 11 May 2002, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> a thousand years or so of gradual adaptation of humanity
> to the "singularity". That makes the whole concept of
> a singularity, particularly the hard takeoff scenario
> (at least in the physical realm) rather questionable IMO.
I don't think anyone claims there's a steady state in the physical realm
immediately after the Singularity. There are clearly kinetic limits to the
rate of growth, though exponential processes ramp up very quickly in
capabilities by today's standards -- it will not take many years to dim
the Sun, if you start with easily accessible (already predispersed, and in
shallow gravity wells) material first. In scenarios like these the small
rocks go first, the Moon et al. go soon after. We might need more than
Mercury's mass to actually utilize the entire solar output, but there
seems to be a surplus of matter in the local system -- largely as hydrogen
in the gas giants, which might be utilizable via fusion (lunatic fringe
stuff like nanosingularity-catalyzed matter-energy conversion excluding).
There might be high-threshold technologies (e.g. requiring access to the
entire energy output of a star or several of them -- nanosingularity
fabbing might be one of them), and it will take time to pass each such
bottleneck, if any.
But there seems to be a degenerate state of organization in mature
(several iterations after passage of the first pioneer wave) stellar
systems. If all the atoms are caught up in a food web, and you've
maximized the utilizable energy flux at maximum bitrate and the magic
physics grapes hang too high, what else do you do?
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