[ExI] Peevish legacy of dour Puritanism

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sat, Jan 12, 2013 at 10:52:02AM -0800, Adrian Tymes wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 8:33 PM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
> > But speaking of waste, have you ever considered how much of the Sun's
> > energy is wasted?  Virtually all of it sails by the planets becoming
> > uselessly dilute.
> 
> The Sun "... blasts unimaginable quantities of energy into space each

Total solar output: 4 MT/s (that is megatons/second, in the
E=mc^2 sense, not the TNT equivalent sense).
Earth intercepts 2 kg/s, or 2 Hz of Tsar bombas (about 100 MT/s,
in terms of TNT equivalent).

> instant, and virtually every joule of it is wasted entirely.  Incomprehensible
> riches can be ours if we can but stretch our arms wide enough to dip from
> this eternal river of wealth."

Much more prosaically, failure to do so will result in hunter-gatherer
level of technology and population density, on the long run.

It's not as if we've got a choice.
 
> > This question recasts the discussion from "religious like" to
> > engineering and economics; how do we do it and how do we pay for it?
> 
> I am thinking, more and more these days, that the only feasible way to
> get something like this involves not paying for it - at least, not directly
> paying for the vast majority of it.
> 
> E.g., get an automated solar factory on the Moon.  It need not be all that

Yes indeed. An idea more than 30 years old
http://www.molecularassembler.com/KSRM.htm

> efficient, but it does need to be able to expand itself in reasonable time
> until it can churn out solar panels at a reasonable rate.  One may pay

The first step is extending the Internet to include the entire Moon, with at
least 1 GBit/s throughput.

> for the seed factory, for ground crew time "operating" the factory (which

Teleoperation is cheap enough, and by rotating the crew across the
time zones you'll get 24/7/365 operation. Initially this will be limited
to "peak of eternal sunlight" zones, but by adding PV/HVDC infrastructure
annulus by annulus you'll creep steadily equatorwards, without having
to cater to lunar day/night.

> may be just monitoring, but having a human involved to satisfy outside
> parties who care more about the politics than the details), and a few
> other things - but this is a far cry from buying each and every solar
> panel.

The ecosystem operates itself, with us profiting from it. Postbiology
will be the same.