Sometime people talk about advanced AIs “boiling the oceans”. My impression is that there’s some specific model for why that is plausible outcome (something about energy and heat dispensation?), and it’s not just a random “big change.”
What is that model? Is there existing citations for the idea, including LessWrong posts?
Where j is dissipating power per area and sigma is Stephan-Boltzmann constant.
We can estimate j as
Gsc×πR2Earth4πR2Earth×(1−albedo)
Where GSC is a solar constant 1361 W/m^2. We take all incoming power and divide it by Earth surface area. Earth albedo is 0.31.
After substitution of variables, we get Earth temperature 254K (-19C), because we ignore greenhouse effect here.
How much humanity power consumption contributes to direct warming? In 2023 Earth energy consumption was 620 exajoules (source: first link in Google), which is 19TW. Modified rough estimation of Earth temperature is:
jsolar+JhumanSEarthσ1/4
Human power production per square meter is, like, 0.04W/m^2, which gives us approximately zero effect of direct Earth heating on Earth temperature. But what happens if we, say, increase power by factor x1000? We are going to get increase of Earth temperature to 264K, by 10K, again, we are ignoring greenhouse effect. But qualitatively, increasing power consumption x1000 is likely to screw the biosphere really hard, if we count increasing amount of water vapor, CO2 from water and methane from melting permafrost.
How is it realistic to get x1000 increase in power consumption? Well, @Daniel Kokotajlo at least thought that we are likely to get it somewhere in 2030s.
The power density of nanotech is extremely high (10 kW/kg), so it only takes 16 kilograms of active nanotech per person * 10 billion people to generate enough waste heat to melt the polar ice caps. Literally boiling the oceans should only be a couple more orders of magnitude, so it’s well within possible energy demand if the AIs can generate enough energy. But I think it’s unlikely they would want to.
My understanding is that here is enough energy generable via fusion that if you did as much fusion as possible on earth, the oceans would boil. Or more minimally, earth would be uninhabitable by humans living as they currently do. I think this holds even if you just fuse lighter elements which are relatively easy to fuse. (As in, just fusing hydrogen.)
Of course, it would be possible to avoid doing this on earth and instead go straight to a dyson swarm or similar. And, it might be possible to dissipate all the heat away from earth though this seems hard and not what would happen in the most efficient approach from my understanding.
I think if you want to advance energy/compute production as fast as possible, boiling the oceans makes sense for a technologically mature civilization. However, I expect that boiling the oceans advances progress by no more than several years and possibly much, much less than that (e.g. days or hours) depending on how quickly you can build a dyson sphere and an industrial base in space. My current median guess would be that it saves virtually no time (several days), but a few months seems plausible.
Overall, I currently expect the oceans to not be boiled because:
It saves only a tiny amount of time (less than several years, probably much less). So, this is only very important if you are in an conflict or you are very ambitious in resource usage and not patient.
Probably humans will care some about not having the oceans boiled and I expect human preferences to get some weight even conditional on AI takeover.
I expect that you’ll have world peace (no conflict) by the time you have ocean boiling technology due to improved coordination/negotiation/commitment technology.
Sometime people talk about advanced AIs “boiling the oceans”. My impression is that there’s some specific model for why that is plausible outcome (something about energy and heat dispensation?), and it’s not just a random “big change.”
What is that model? Is there existing citations for the idea, including LessWrong posts?
Roughly, Earth average temperature:
jσ1/4
Where j is dissipating power per area and sigma is Stephan-Boltzmann constant.
We can estimate j as
Gsc×πR2Earth4πR2Earth×(1−albedo)
Where GSC is a solar constant 1361 W/m^2. We take all incoming power and divide it by Earth surface area. Earth albedo is 0.31.
After substitution of variables, we get Earth temperature 254K (-19C), because we ignore greenhouse effect here.
How much humanity power consumption contributes to direct warming? In 2023 Earth energy consumption was 620 exajoules (source: first link in Google), which is 19TW. Modified rough estimation of Earth temperature is:
jsolar+JhumanSEarthσ1/4
Human power production per square meter is, like, 0.04W/m^2, which gives us approximately zero effect of direct Earth heating on Earth temperature. But what happens if we, say, increase power by factor x1000? We are going to get increase of Earth temperature to 264K, by 10K, again, we are ignoring greenhouse effect. But qualitatively, increasing power consumption x1000 is likely to screw the biosphere really hard, if we count increasing amount of water vapor, CO2 from water and methane from melting permafrost.
How is it realistic to get x1000 increase in power consumption? Well, @Daniel Kokotajlo at least thought that we are likely to get it somewhere in 2030s.
The power density of nanotech is extremely high (10 kW/kg), so it only takes 16 kilograms of active nanotech per person * 10 billion people to generate enough waste heat to melt the polar ice caps. Literally boiling the oceans should only be a couple more orders of magnitude, so it’s well within possible energy demand if the AIs can generate enough energy. But I think it’s unlikely they would want to.
Source: http://www.imm.org/Reports/rep054.pdf
I don’t know of an existing citation.
My understanding is that here is enough energy generable via fusion that if you did as much fusion as possible on earth, the oceans would boil. Or more minimally, earth would be uninhabitable by humans living as they currently do. I think this holds even if you just fuse lighter elements which are relatively easy to fuse. (As in, just fusing hydrogen.)
Of course, it would be possible to avoid doing this on earth and instead go straight to a dyson swarm or similar. And, it might be possible to dissipate all the heat away from earth though this seems hard and not what would happen in the most efficient approach from my understanding.
I think if you want to advance energy/compute production as fast as possible, boiling the oceans makes sense for a technologically mature civilization. However, I expect that boiling the oceans advances progress by no more than several years and possibly much, much less than that (e.g. days or hours) depending on how quickly you can build a dyson sphere and an industrial base in space. My current median guess would be that it saves virtually no time (several days), but a few months seems plausible.
Overall, I currently expect the oceans to not be boiled because:
It saves only a tiny amount of time (less than several years, probably much less). So, this is only very important if you are in an conflict or you are very ambitious in resource usage and not patient.
Probably humans will care some about not having the oceans boiled and I expect human preferences to get some weight even conditional on AI takeover.
I expect that you’ll have world peace (no conflict) by the time you have ocean boiling technology due to improved coordination/negotiation/commitment technology.
Build enough nuclear power plants and we could boil the oceans with current tech, yeah? They’re a significant fraction of fusion output iiuc?
Not quite, there is a finite quantity of fissiles. IIRC it’s only an order of magnitude of energy more than fossil fuel reserves.