It also depends on which aspects of the future one is trying to predict… I’ll go out on a limb here, and say that I think the angular momentum of the Earth will be within 1% of its current value 20 years out.
Even that is by no means certain if there are superintelligences around in 20 years, which is by no means impossible. The unFriendly ones especially might want to use Earth’s atoms in some configuration other than a big sphere floating in space unconnected to anything else.
Good point—I’d thought that physical constraints would make disassembling the Earth take a large fraction of that time, but solar output is sufficient to do the job in roughly a million seconds, so yes, an unFriendly superintelligence could do it within the 20 year time frame.
It also depends on which aspects of the future one is trying to predict… I’ll go out on a limb here, and say that I think the angular momentum of the Earth will be within 1% of its current value 20 years out.
Even that is by no means certain if there are superintelligences around in 20 years, which is by no means impossible. The unFriendly ones especially might want to use Earth’s atoms in some configuration other than a big sphere floating in space unconnected to anything else.
Good point—I’d thought that physical constraints would make disassembling the Earth take a large fraction of that time, but solar output is sufficient to do the job in roughly a million seconds, so yes, an unFriendly superintelligence could do it within the 20 year time frame.