[extropy-chat] will the sun rise?

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Dec 23, 2004 at 02:49:58PM -0500, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:

> So you believe that it would be physically impossible to develop stellar
> disassembly technology within 10^51 Planck increments?  I suppose you feel
> that, say, 10^52 Planck increments or 10^53 Planck increments would be more
> realistic?

Control disappears well before Planck scale. To the best of our knowledge
machines are restricted to condensed phase between 0 and a couple of kK. That limits
the autoamplification rate quite noticeably.
 
> Only your first sentence was relevant.  For the rest, I spoke of a 
> superintelligence disassembling the Sun - not of humans undertaking the job.

If you base your claims on fairy-tale physics, they're not claims.
 
> Never forget that you run on a 200Hz processor.  Your timescale is not the 

You don't "run" on a "processor", and it's most assuredly not "200 Hz". It
doesn't matter how fast you can think, but how you quickly you can move
stuff. Without breaking your machine which does the moving.

> timescale of physics.  Unless you have set forth the physics of stellar 

You have to autoamplify and get out the gravity well to next big pile of
atoms (predispersed material in shallow gravity wells, preferrably, and these are many lightminutes
away) and disperse that into a large circumsolar machine. This is readily
feasible within 20 years. I can't put a lower limit to it, but it could be a
couple of years, and maybe even months (I doubt latter, though).

Assuming controlled disassembly (with lifted material not lost but contained), how quickly
could you lift noticeable amount of material, using the star itself and
external fusion as power input?

Assuming you could catalyze matter-energy conversion (we have no idea this is
ok with physics), would asymmetric explosive stellar ablation (with most material
lost into space) qualify as disassembly?

> disassembly and *calculated* the impossibility, I would not be so eager to 
> make vast bets on the basis of intuition alone.

I don't understand the whole motivation behind betting at all.
 
> I recently read a book on writing fiction which patiently explained to the 
> would-be writer that "But it happened in real life!" is not a good excuse 
> for an unbelievable plot element.  Fiction, you see, must be believable, 
> even if reality is not.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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