[ExI] so just buy it

[Keith Henson]

"singularity is about a dozen to fifteen years out,"

The Clinic Seed story was set in the mid-2040s, in line with what
Kurzweil thought at the time.  But the progress is autocatalytic and
difficult to say when the takeoff becomes obvious.

It is strange to have tools to plan projects, such as making syngas
from electric power and trash, and having the horizon shrink to where
conventional planning and construction take longer than we think we
have.  In a dozen years, will we still be making trash?  Or will it
all go into the home recycler?

Keith

On Fri, Jan 23, 2026 at 3:57 PM spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>
> ...> On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat
> Subject: Re: [ExI] so just buy it
>
> On Fri, Jan 23, 2026 at 5:58 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> >>... Amid all this Greenland conflict, it occurred to me we aughta just see if Musk or Ellison will buy it.  Musk could offer every Greenlander one miiiiilllllion dollars, if they agree to make like Billy Joe and Bobby Sue, take the money and run, get the US to agree to take them.
>
>
> >...They have said no, to any price.
>
> Their loss and ours.  In the meantime, we still have Alaska, with all that Arctic sea shoreline up there.  We could run nukes, use fresh cooling water, send it thru a huge heat exchanger with the heat being dumped into sea water and right back out.  Maybe it could all be done without having to mess with towers.  Submarines do it that way.
>
> >...2) ... given Musk's demonstrated values, it can be concluded that Greenland would not be worth that much money to him...
>
> Ja, Musk might be out of the picture.  I heard (but have not confirmed) that Musk believes the singularity is upon us, so close that any effort to build new powerplants starting from scratch is too late.  He might be right about that.  He's an S-alpha-1.  Apparently he believes that superintelligence can occur with current computing resources and power capacity.
>
> I don't want to disagree with Musk, but I do.  I have a feeling that there will be flat spots on the runup to superintelligence, just as humanity had technological stasis repeatedly in the time since we have had our current mental capacity.  I am staying with my own prediction that the singularity is about a dozen to fifteen years out, and that it does require building up the electric power distribution infrastructure.
>
> spike
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