[ExI] MBrain heat rejection

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 1:11 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
>
> Ja, but portions of the inner layers of an MBrain get warmer than that.  I
> have tried to model this a few different ways, and I end up with a
> surprising result: an MBrain cannot collect a large portion of the energy
> from a star.  Otherwise the inner nodes cannot reject sufficient heat to
> stay in the temperature range in which electronic devices we know today
> would work long term.

### What if the swarm of thinkplates allowed elliptical orbits - in
this way a single plate would spend the perihelion part of its duty
cycle in direct exposure to sunlight, supporting high-speed
computations, and then as it recedes towards aphelion its functions
would switch to cooling in the shade of other thinkplates?
Coordination of orbits of trillions of such objects might be
non-trivial but it should definitely be possible to partially equalize
temperatures between the plates. If you include precession in the
model, you could have many interleaved streams of plates, rapidly
passing each other and shortening the duty cycle. You could have
complex patterns of gravitational fly-by maneuvers between streams
introducing yet another way to mix things up without large loss of
angular momentum. And if you add to it using solar photon pressure to
further manipulate orbits, the possibilities would be endless.

Rafal