[ExI] The Black Earth

[Jason Resch]

On Tue, Jul 8, 2025 at 3:13 AM Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> I finished reading "Stellar" by Tony Seba a few days ago. A complete
> disappointment, confused and shallow which is a surprise coming from Seba.
> But nuff' said about the book - reading it inspired me to think about the
> future of our planet post-singularity. Of course, it's hard to make
> post-singularity predictions but let's just assume known physics, no
> magic-tech and guess how our world will look like in a few hundred years.
>
> The AI, with or without us uploaded into it, will maximize its
> computational capacity. I am guessing that the most significant limitation
> on the planetary scale will be the ability to dissipate heat. Even the most
> parsimonious non-reversible computation in the most esoteric quantum
> computers will still generate some heat and a solid layer of computronium
> over the whole planet would generate a lot.
>
> The only long term heat sink available is the firmament and the only way
> to transfer heat is to radiate. An atmosphere will be still needed to
> protect the computronium from falling debris but it will consist of pure
> nitrogen. All water, oxygen and carbon dioxide will be scrubbed and
> sequestered to maximize heat radiation from the surface. The atmosphere
> will be very cold, probably in the 200 kelvin range, crystal clear, with
> the sky appearing almost black even in daytime.
>
> Almost the whole surface of the planet will be covered by a continuous,
> smooth, carbon-black layer of photosynthesizing artificial life. It will be
> immortal and will keep the atmosphere scrubbed of unwanted gases and
> vapors. It will generate enormous amounts of electricity that will be
> transmitted by underground superconducting lines from the equator, where
> most of electricity generation takes place, to the poles where the
> conditions for radiating heat are the best and most of the computronium is
> located.
>
> Boreholes will be sunk around all volcanoes and magma hotspots to generate
> geothermal energy and to extinguish volcanism and plate tectonics on a
> global scale. Mountains will be ground down and carried to the depths. The
> planet will be smoother than a billiard ball. The ocean will be a layer of
> dead water sequestered under the black artificial life.
>
> Additional power plants, fusion, fission and magic, will probably exist to
> maximize the amount of energy that could be dissipated given the available
> heat sink capacity.
>
> I don't know what will be the optimal temperature for the fastest
> computational machinery used by the AI. If the AI invents a
> high-temperature computational process, then the areas of greatest
> concentration of computing, at the poles, will glow - infrared, red or
> maybe even dull orange. Buried gas conduits tens of miles in diameter will
> carry gas sucked in at the temperate latitudes to the infernos at the
> poles. A never-ending hurricane of cold nitrogen will blow through
> miles-high heat exchangers, covering millions of square miles, like polar
> caps of ever-burning forest. The heated exhaust will be a searing-hot
> windstorm always blowing away from the poles to the equator, to be sucked
> in after it cools off and be recirculated forever.
>
> So there you are - Earth will become a smooth, carbon black globe with
> glowing red irises at either pole, staring, Janus-faced, into the night sky.
>

I have written a bit about what computronium might look like here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LJuOQooUaVN0eHvPcL0zuKUT9Z0CLKic/view?usp=sharing

One interesting insight: both our universe as a whole, and black holes, can
be seen as examples of computronium.

Jason
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