The Sun pours energy into space in all directions, and Earth is just a dot which intercepts far less than 1% of that. You can build giant solar panels in space and then beam the collected energy elsewhere in the solar system, or just store it in batteries and physically move the batteries to where they are needed. Also, a post-singularity civilization can surely build fusion reactors as a mobile self-contained power source. A “Bussard ramjet” model of interstellar craft can fuel its fusion reactor while in flight by magnetically collecting the interstellar atoms in its path, and then refuel at a planetary system e.g. by tapping the atmospheres of gas giants.
Earth civilization currently uses an extremely limited range of resources—the tiny fraction of solar output which happens to reach this dot in space, and the tiny fraction of the Earth’s mineral volume lying within a few kilometers of its surface. You can already multiply this by some large factor, just by building solar panels in space and by mining asteroids. If we talk about more radical schemes… one common idea is to dismantle whole planets and completely surround a star with solar collectors. Even a mildly expansive civilization could give rise to an ever-increasing number of settled solar systems, with some fraction of them completely encircling their central star in this way. Eventually I would expect experiments on individual stars—mining the stellar atmosphere by stimulating solar flare production, attempts to form metastable plasma structures that can survive within the star, who knows.
At the same time, there is no law of nature to keep human and nonhuman intelligence operating solely at human scales of space and time. There should be intelligent beings which are smaller and faster, and others which are bigger and slower. The “body” of an intelligent being could be a network of sensorimotor devices of arbitrarily large spatial extent. The speed of light doesn’t provide an upper limit on size, just an upper limit on the “mind-body clock speed” of such a being (e.g. the minimum time it takes a signal to come in from the outermost periphery and for a response to be sent back out: you stubbed your toe, withdraw it; your sensor-web near Venus is needed elsewhere, relocate it).
In principle it is possible for a post-singularity civilization to hang back from, and completely renounce, such expansions and transformations, in all possible forms. But is it likely?
You know, Dyson spheres and all that stuff, they are utterly unfeasible: require far too much material, more than there is in the entire Solar System, not to mention maintenance and transportation costs. Same, at a lower scale, with building solar panels in space. I put the viability of all those awesome dreams as anything other than wishful thinking in question, Show me numbers.
Now, that we develop complete and utter mastery of this planet. Within the limits of what power renewable energies can offer: even the constant, titanic calculations and information flows that would require would require an awful lot of power, nevermind actually doing stuff to things with it.
OK, how about the number “1”? It’s estimated that a shell of very-low-density “statites”, surrounding the sun at the distance of Earth’s orbit, would require as much mass as can be found in one large asteroid. Increase the mass per statite by two orders of magnitude, and you can still build a swarm with cross-section larger than the Earth.
We can quibble about materials and about long-term stability. It might be that, without constant care, intricate megastructures on an interplanetary scale will collapse or disperse after a few thousand or million years. But to say they are physically impossible is somewhat obtuse. Consider the natural asteroid belt. It is already a type of “structure”—a toroidal region of space populated with a million distinct objects, with total mass something like 5% of Earth’s moon. So tell me why a colony of mining robots, digging into the moon and shooting ore off to space factories, couldn’t produce a comparable archipelago of artificial space objects?
The specifics of various proposals may be infeasible—e.g. the idea of a solid, rigid Dyson sphere—but I don’t see the basic idea of massive engineering in space being shown to be comprehensively impossible.
Okay. Lack of imagination on my part: I was primed to imagine a Dyson Sphere built around the solar system, not a small, pre-mercurial, partial structure. After all, inconcievable doesn’t mean impossible.
Nevertheless, I want to portray a humanity that’s focused on conservation and optimization and recycling and re-using. At least as an intermediate step before attempting to tame the Solar System. Even when they move out, I want them to be sustainable in terms of resources in the scale of billions of years. Meaning that the regime that we’re keeping right now (humans have moved and processed so much rock, we’re a geological era all by ourselves) wouldn’t be the one we’d be using in The Future.
The Sun pours energy into space in all directions, and Earth is just a dot which intercepts far less than 1% of that. You can build giant solar panels in space and then beam the collected energy elsewhere in the solar system, or just store it in batteries and physically move the batteries to where they are needed. Also, a post-singularity civilization can surely build fusion reactors as a mobile self-contained power source. A “Bussard ramjet” model of interstellar craft can fuel its fusion reactor while in flight by magnetically collecting the interstellar atoms in its path, and then refuel at a planetary system e.g. by tapping the atmospheres of gas giants.
Earth civilization currently uses an extremely limited range of resources—the tiny fraction of solar output which happens to reach this dot in space, and the tiny fraction of the Earth’s mineral volume lying within a few kilometers of its surface. You can already multiply this by some large factor, just by building solar panels in space and by mining asteroids. If we talk about more radical schemes… one common idea is to dismantle whole planets and completely surround a star with solar collectors. Even a mildly expansive civilization could give rise to an ever-increasing number of settled solar systems, with some fraction of them completely encircling their central star in this way. Eventually I would expect experiments on individual stars—mining the stellar atmosphere by stimulating solar flare production, attempts to form metastable plasma structures that can survive within the star, who knows.
At the same time, there is no law of nature to keep human and nonhuman intelligence operating solely at human scales of space and time. There should be intelligent beings which are smaller and faster, and others which are bigger and slower. The “body” of an intelligent being could be a network of sensorimotor devices of arbitrarily large spatial extent. The speed of light doesn’t provide an upper limit on size, just an upper limit on the “mind-body clock speed” of such a being (e.g. the minimum time it takes a signal to come in from the outermost periphery and for a response to be sent back out: you stubbed your toe, withdraw it; your sensor-web near Venus is needed elsewhere, relocate it).
In principle it is possible for a post-singularity civilization to hang back from, and completely renounce, such expansions and transformations, in all possible forms. But is it likely?
You know, Dyson spheres and all that stuff, they are utterly unfeasible: require far too much material, more than there is in the entire Solar System, not to mention maintenance and transportation costs. Same, at a lower scale, with building solar panels in space. I put the viability of all those awesome dreams as anything other than wishful thinking in question, Show me numbers.
Now, that we develop complete and utter mastery of this planet. Within the limits of what power renewable energies can offer: even the constant, titanic calculations and information flows that would require would require an awful lot of power, nevermind actually doing stuff to things with it.
OK, how about the number “1”? It’s estimated that a shell of very-low-density “statites”, surrounding the sun at the distance of Earth’s orbit, would require as much mass as can be found in one large asteroid. Increase the mass per statite by two orders of magnitude, and you can still build a swarm with cross-section larger than the Earth.
We can quibble about materials and about long-term stability. It might be that, without constant care, intricate megastructures on an interplanetary scale will collapse or disperse after a few thousand or million years. But to say they are physically impossible is somewhat obtuse. Consider the natural asteroid belt. It is already a type of “structure”—a toroidal region of space populated with a million distinct objects, with total mass something like 5% of Earth’s moon. So tell me why a colony of mining robots, digging into the moon and shooting ore off to space factories, couldn’t produce a comparable archipelago of artificial space objects?
The specifics of various proposals may be infeasible—e.g. the idea of a solid, rigid Dyson sphere—but I don’t see the basic idea of massive engineering in space being shown to be comprehensively impossible.
Okay. Lack of imagination on my part: I was primed to imagine a Dyson Sphere built around the solar system, not a small, pre-mercurial, partial structure. After all, inconcievable doesn’t mean impossible.
Nevertheless, I want to portray a humanity that’s focused on conservation and optimization and recycling and re-using. At least as an intermediate step before attempting to tame the Solar System. Even when they move out, I want them to be sustainable in terms of resources in the scale of billions of years. Meaning that the regime that we’re keeping right now (humans have moved and processed so much rock, we’re a geological era all by ourselves) wouldn’t be the one we’d be using in The Future.