[ExI] Computronium planet.

[Keith Henson]

On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 5:00 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> Subject: Re: [ExI] 55 Cancri e: a diamond planet

snip

> A planet-sized computronium system will want some serious cooling, and
> that suggests the existence of radiators. That would affect the transit
> curve in particular ways, as Arnold showed:
> http://www.obs-hp.fr/~larnold/publi_to_download/Arnold_2005_ApJ_v627n1_534-539.pdf

The radiators would depend on what they were doing.  Used for fairly
slow access, a planetary scale device might not need to much cooling.

If you block the radiation from the sun with a huge sunshade in L1 and
bring in power via microwaves, a planet can get rid of considerable
waste heat.  510,072,000 km^2 at 1/4 GW/km^2 is 128,000 TW, around
10,000 times current consumption.  The power plant in space would need
to be larger than the sun blocker, perhaps twice as large.  Combine as
a huge disk in L1 and send the power to the ground.

It would be an interesting place, dark, faint spill of light around
the sun blocker, land areas covered with rectennas, fast uploaded
civilization in the depths heating the the oceans to steaming,
freezing cold rain falling everywhere, vast rivers running off bare
rock continents.

Inside the simulation conditions could be as nice as anyone wanted,
but the underlying reality would be stark, worse than Mordor.

Be hard to detect though, since the shading disk would probably be circular.

Keith