[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.
>

The first communications satellite was a giant inflatable mylar balloon (
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/echo-nasas-first-communications-satellite/
). If you consider how much energy it takes to get something like that into
orbit, vs. how much additional energy it could collect from the sun (having
no atmosphere in the way, having 24/7 sunlight, and being able to radiate
directly into 2.7K cold space, and how much more than the surface of the
earth they could cover, how much time would it take to pay off the energy
cost of getting into a high-earth orbit or escaping the Earth's pull
altogether. I think when there are billions of years to pay off the cost,
the getting into orbit part is negligible.

And the black earth assumption is predicated on solar energy being the best
form of energy production (no fusion, no black hole engines, etc.). I think
there are probably better technologies and techniques available. Earth only
collects 4.5 x 10^-10 of the sun's rays, the rest goes off wasted. Further,
only 0.7% of the sun's mass will convert to energy, and it will take 5
billion years to get it. If we instead dropped the sun's mass (or any mass
for that matter) into a black hole, we could turn ~100% of that mass into
radiation. For example, Hawking wrote
<https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35421439> "A mountain-sized
black hole would give off X-rays and gamma rays, at a rate of about 10
million megawatts, enough to power the world's electricity supply."

These are just some of the ideas humans with their tiny brains have been
able to come up with. I have little doubt that a superintelligence could
devise still better ideas.

Jason
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