[ExI] MBrain heat rejection

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

A few questions then:

Why are the thinkplates so small? (BTW, I swiped the term from The
Rapture of the Nerds, it's a reasonably entertaining book despite its
crappy monkey politics intrusions) Shouldn't you rather make devices
capable of supporting a much larger computational load?

Bluetooth is non-directional, meaning most of the energy used for
transmission is lost. Why not use lasers for communications with
neighboring nodes?

What about the gravitational interactions between the plates? It would
definitely be an issue.

I agree that keeping the relative velocities of neighboring plates low
is a good idea since this diminishes the likelihood of a cascade of
collisions between streams of plates - but if you go with larger
plates and correspondingly larger distances between them, that would
be less of an issue. The plates should have a means of sweeping the
space free of natural and construction-related debris, perhaps by
using optical devices to capture and process it into substrate.

I just occurred to me that turning the plates edgewise towards the sun
would allow cooling and would open more distant plates for direct
insolation - so having a system of concentric non-contiguous devices
with scheduled cycling of attitude towards the sun would allow a very
substantial equalization of temperatures between layers of plates. By
adjusting the relative duration of sun-facing vs. edgewise attitude
phases you could have essentially identical total insolation between
plates at widely varying orbits. The inner shells would spend most of
their time facing away from the sun, the outer shells would mostly
face it. And there would be a lot of space to radiate heat away
between other plates.

And you could have plates in non-equilibrium orbits partially
supported by light pressure. Wouldn't that be cool?

Rafal