I think that it’s likely to take longer than 10000 years, simply because of the logistics (not the technology development, which the AI could do fast).
The gravitational binding energy of the sun is something on the order of 20 million years worth of its energy output. OK, half of the needed energy is already present as thermal energy, and you don’t need to move every atom to infinity, but you still need a substantial fraction of that. And while you could perhaps generate many times more energy than the solar output by various means, I’d guess you’d have to deal with inefficiencies and lots of waste heat if you try to do it really fast. Maybe if you’re smart enough you can make going fast work well enough to be worth it though?
I’m not sure what the details would look like, but I’m pretty sure ASI would have enough new technologies to figure something out within 10,000 years. And expending a bunch of waste heat could easily be worth it, if having more computers allows sending out Von Neumann probes faster / more efficiently to other stars. Since the cost of expending the Sun’s energy has to be compared with the ongoing cost of other stars burning.
I’m not sure what the details would look like, but I’m pretty sure ASI would have enough new technologies to figure something out within 10,000 years.
I feel like this is the main load-bearing claim underlying the post, but it’s barely argued for.
In some sense the sun is already “eating itself” by doing a fusion reaction, which will last for billions more years. So you’re claiming that AI could eat the sun (at least) six orders of magnitude faster, which is not obvious to me.
I don’t think my priors on that are very different from yours but the thing that would have made this post valuable for me is some object-level reason to upgrade my confidence in that.
Doesn’t have to expend the energy. It’s about reshaping the matter to machines. Computers take lots of mass-energy to constitute them, not to power them.
Things can go 6 orders of magnitude faster due to intelligence/agency, it’s not highly unlikely in general.
I agree that in theory the arguments here could be better. It might require knowing more physics than I do, and has the “how does Kasparov beat you at chess” problem.
If you can use 1kg of hydrogen to lift x>1kg of hydrogen using proton-proton fusion, you are getting exponential bulidup, limited only by “how many proton-proton reactors you can build in Solar system” and “how willing you are to actually build them”, and you can use exponential buildup to create all necessary infrastructure.
I think if you want to go fast, and you can eat the rest of the solar system, you can probably make a huge swarm of fusion reactors to help blow matter off the sun. Let’s say you can build 10^11-watt reactors that work in space. Then you need about 10^15 of them to match the sun. If each is 10^6 kg, this is about 10^-4 of Mercury’s mass.
I think that it’s likely to take longer than 10000 years, simply because of the logistics (not the technology development, which the AI could do fast).
The gravitational binding energy of the sun is something on the order of 20 million years worth of its energy output. OK, half of the needed energy is already present as thermal energy, and you don’t need to move every atom to infinity, but you still need a substantial fraction of that. And while you could perhaps generate many times more energy than the solar output by various means, I’d guess you’d have to deal with inefficiencies and lots of waste heat if you try to do it really fast. Maybe if you’re smart enough you can make going fast work well enough to be worth it though?
I’m not sure what the details would look like, but I’m pretty sure ASI would have enough new technologies to figure something out within 10,000 years. And expending a bunch of waste heat could easily be worth it, if having more computers allows sending out Von Neumann probes faster / more efficiently to other stars. Since the cost of expending the Sun’s energy has to be compared with the ongoing cost of other stars burning.
I feel like this is the main load-bearing claim underlying the post, but it’s barely argued for.
In some sense the sun is already “eating itself” by doing a fusion reaction, which will last for billions more years. So you’re claiming that AI could eat the sun (at least) six orders of magnitude faster, which is not obvious to me.
I don’t think my priors on that are very different from yours but the thing that would have made this post valuable for me is some object-level reason to upgrade my confidence in that.
Doesn’t have to expend the energy. It’s about reshaping the matter to machines. Computers take lots of mass-energy to constitute them, not to power them.
Things can go 6 orders of magnitude faster due to intelligence/agency, it’s not highly unlikely in general.
I agree that in theory the arguments here could be better. It might require knowing more physics than I do, and has the “how does Kasparov beat you at chess” problem.
If you can use 1kg of hydrogen to lift x>1kg of hydrogen using proton-proton fusion, you are getting exponential bulidup, limited only by “how many proton-proton reactors you can build in Solar system” and “how willing you are to actually build them”, and you can use exponential buildup to create all necessary infrastructure.
I think if you want to go fast, and you can eat the rest of the solar system, you can probably make a huge swarm of fusion reactors to help blow matter off the sun. Let’s say you can build 10^11-watt reactors that work in space. Then you need about 10^15 of them to match the sun. If each is 10^6 kg, this is about 10^-4 of Mercury’s mass.