[extropy-chat] will the sun rise?

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

Keith Henson wrote:
> At 05:37 PM 23/12/04 -0500, Eliezer wrote:
> 
> snip
> 
>> One suspects that the primary issue would not be speed as such, but 
>> choosing a balance of speed, power expenditure, and material lost, 
>> which minimizes entropy loss and hence maximizes the calculations 
>> performable with the winnings.  Does it take more energy to rush 
>> machinery into solar orbit, than the Sun wastes over that time?
> 
> I remember the results of a calculation someone made (Drexler?) that 
> taking Jupiter apart would require about 3 Sun-centuries of energy.  
> Even if the Sun is burning 1500 tons of matter to energy per second, it 
> is still a slow burn rate.

But you're going to have to shut it down eventually - not necessarily take 
it apart, maybe, but ensure that all that energy goes to perform useful 
computations.  The only question is how much it pays to do it sooner, 
rather than later.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence