[ExI] Moon Bases Not Needed (Kevin) (Dan)

[Eugen Leitl]

On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 05:42:06PM +0200, Stefano Vaj wrote:
> 2011/7/29 Kevin G Haskell <kgh1kgh2 at gmail.com>:
> > If things go horrible on Earth, it will be a quick and easy stop off at the
> > moon by the new AGI species to finish the job and end the rest of us.
> 
> Besides the fact that I do not buy for a second the millennial,
> golem-like fantasies about the "Big, Bad AGIs" chasing down humans out
> of sheer malice (if anything I would be more concerned about

Sufficiently advanced indifference is indistinguishable from malice.

> hypothetical "friendly" entities such as Williamson's Humanoids), the
> issue would not be that of being "unreachable", but rather of taking
> away the pressure both for "us" and for our hypothetically "competing"
> children of the mind arising from the increasing scarceness of finite
> resources, by uncorking the bottle.

Clearly the growth potential at the bottom of a gravity well 
(contaminated with volatiles to boot) is limited, so as biosphere
suffers from HANPP humanity will suffer from MANPP (machine 
appropriation of net primary productivity) but by uncorking
the bottle (assuming, no meddling tentacles reaching down
here) you merely postpone the eventuallly inevitable by a few
decades.

Even minor projects (like massive activity on the Moon)
will pretty much do away with the night and dim the day.
And probably the Earth won't take kindly to more than 1%
of solar constant variation.

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