[ExI] Computronium planet.

[Giulio Prisco]

Recently a friend observed that if our universe is the fastest machine
able to compute itself (this assumption seems necessary to avoid
causality violation paradoxes), then our matter is _already_
computronium, and we just cannot squeeze more computing power out of
it.

On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 5:35 PM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
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