From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Sat May 11 2002 - 05:24:29 MDT
On Sat, 11 May 2002, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
> Oh, boy.... This is where the rubber hits the road. Are you
> proposing that we throw away all property rights and forcibly
> assimilate people's land and possessions into computronium? If not,
I don't propose it, but it seems rather unavoidable on the long run.
> don't you expect some significant fraction of property owners, not to
> mention countries, might object to having their territory destroyed?
Circumstellar volume will always outgun planetary surfaces by many orders
of magnitude (especially considered that flesh people are an anachronism
at that point). Beings with more and bigger guns ultimately own the
resources.
Corollary: emigrate into space and grab resources (preferrably in shallow
gravity wells) at firstmost possibility.
> Besides, I still propose that we only assimilate the inner 99% of the
> earth and leave the surface the way it is as a lobby and waiting room.
Assuming, that a converted human being occupies about a computronium
volume of a glass of water, and an energy budget ranging from ~kW to MW,
it seems that 6*10^9 glasses of water are a lot less thatn 1% of Earth
volume (not to mention that a Hollow Earth presents rather big engineering
challenges, including concentric shells to maintain the atmosphere).
> The entire planet's mass can be converted except for a hundred feet of
> topsoil, oceans and atmosphere. There won't be a large percentage of
> the mass budget, but would have the affect of leaving the earth
> virtually unchanged. You can have 99% of what you want without
> destroying the earth, why destroy the whole planet for that measly
> last 1%?
If you look at the physics of disassembly, you must start with the surface
(probably first burning off and/or remove the volatiles), so that you can
immediately cool the mined material via radiation into vacuum.
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