[ExI] The Black Earth

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Tue, Jul 8, 2025 at 9:34 PM Jason Resch <jasonresch at gmail.com> wrote:

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

### Yes, absolutely - in the long term the AI might perhaps disassemble all
planets to create a Dyson swarm or invent some other source of negentropy
that would provide a better return per unit mass than any achievable with
solar cells, which would make harvesting solar energy a losing proposition.

But in the short term, a few hundred years, the Black Earth could happen...
and as you may guess, my post was a bit of a setup to be able to finish
with an epic, foreboding image - the Red Eyes of Earth staring into the
abyss :)

Rafal
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