From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Fri May 17 2002 - 12:38:01 MDT
On Fri, May 17, 2002 at 10:31:00AM -0700, Hal Finney wrote:
> So in practice the same amount of power comes from outside the shell
> as from the star, and the only difference is that because the shell is
> larger, the temperature is less. The outgoing shell temperature depends
> solely on the temperature of the star, and the ratio of the size of the
> shell to the size of the star.
Well, you can use the energy from the star to drive heat pumps to
redistribute the waste heat in convenient ways. One such way is to keep
it on the inside and keep the outside very cool - it will cost a lot of
energy and of course produce extra waste heat. In the long run this is
unsustainable, since there is only so much thermal capacity inside the
shell to absorb it. Hence the need of the black holes for cooling.
The problem is not energy, but entropy.
If we are not trying to be super-stealthy but just discreet and still
want to cool things, I wonder if one could use neutrinos for cooling.
Imagine that you could send your waste heat into the neutrino emissions
from the star. Oops, they are hard to shield in the original paranoid
scenario too! You better turn off that star before it gives you away;
likely the only "safe" energy source would be black hole mediated matter
conversion if it can be done so that you get no neutrino emissions.
Are we becoming posthuman survivalists? :-)
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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