[ExI] The Black Earth

[Darin Sunley]

Playing with black holes at the bottom of the gravity well of your only
biosphere is probably not a great plan.

"Use only in a well-ventilated area - like the Kuiper Belt."

On Tue, Jul 8, 2025, 7:36 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
> 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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