From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Tue May 14 2002 - 07:14:11 MDT
On Tue, 14 May 2002, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> 1 km provides ~4.2x10^9 m^3 of material = ~4.2x10^15 cm^3
> which given a ratio of ~10^5 human brain equivalents
> per cm^3 yields ~4.2 x 10^20 human brain equivalents
The ratio is worse than 1 HE/cm^3.
It's not the processing rate which is the limit, it's the number of state
bits, and complexity of the transformations thereof. I would rather put
the human equivalent at the size of a small orange, or a glass of water.
AI bred from scratch will be considerably denser, though. One
hard-to-quantify factor is the size of the elementary computational cell,
and the fraction of cooling infrastructure, if any (for small blocks,
which might be cooled via radiative heat transfer into few K cold space).
> per 1 km asteroid. Of course this needs to be reduced
> due to power harvesting and heat radiation requirements
> but it is a scary figure to be sure.
People's intuitions are not well equipped when trying to predict the
amount of resources into which km^3 of spaceborne rock might be fashioned
into. Turning space rock volume into well-insolated surface bristling with
nanoware is something unprecedented.
Given that the first commercial entity that succeeds in deploying self rep
machinery on NEAR rocks will rule the entire solar system it's strange no
one gives a damn about initiating a new rush into space, Klondike style.
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