Yes, good point that I hadn’t thought of, thanks. It’s very easy to imagine far-future technology in one respect and forget about it entirely in another.
To rescue my scenario a little, there’ll be an energy cost in transporting the iron together; the cheapest way is to move it very slowly. So maybe there’ll be paperclips left for a period of time between the first pass of the harvesters and the matter ending up at the local black hole harvester.
And of course you can throw black holes into black holes as well, and extract even more energy. The end game is when you have just one big black hole, and nothing left to throw in it. At that point you then have to change strategy and wait for the black hole to give off Hawking radiation until it completely evaporates.
But all these things can happen later—there’s no reason for not going through a paperclip maximization step first, if you’re that way inclined...
Yes, good point that I hadn’t thought of, thanks. It’s very easy to imagine far-future technology in one respect and forget about it entirely in another.
To rescue my scenario a little, there’ll be an energy cost in transporting the iron together; the cheapest way is to move it very slowly. So maybe there’ll be paperclips left for a period of time between the first pass of the harvesters and the matter ending up at the local black hole harvester.
And of course you can throw black holes into black holes as well, and extract even more energy. The end game is when you have just one big black hole, and nothing left to throw in it. At that point you then have to change strategy and wait for the black hole to give off Hawking radiation until it completely evaporates.
But all these things can happen later—there’s no reason for not going through a paperclip maximization step first, if you’re that way inclined...
Except if you’re really a paperclip maximizer.