3 ms·

Slightly tangent, but in talking about the risks and unintended consequences if such a project, lots of potential issues have been mentioned (which is my bigger

Slightly tangent, but in talking about the risks and unintended consequences if such a project, lots of potential issues have been mentioned (which is my bigger overall concern), but given the specs, a new one occurred to me: this design starts to look a lot like what might be required for true singularity type AI. +/- 16 trillion self-powered, locally communicating "cellular" elements, each with some minimal sensory and processing capability. Add to that the mobility presumed by the author, and the fact that it is literally designed to block the sun, and you've got everything you need for a matrix rewrite...

strainer 7y ago
Thanks for the info on the paper - I haven't read it, just seen a number of reports of different approaches to space shielding, that seem to establish its a physical/industrialy modest possibility (for a global project). It would be very early stages for the details of any project, I expect a well funded competition for competing designs and to be surprised and educated by actual designs. It just seems the prelimary designs already discussed establish its physically not unrealistic if launch capability can be sorted. 20 years ago ideas of huge wind turbines planted at sea and even floating were considered by most to be impractical or unproven, but the basic facts supported their possibility as major power sources - the density of air, the intensity of wind, the existence of resilient ocean hardware like oil rigs, the existence of very large aircraft wings. There was no end of unresolved details that could be counted to dissuade, but the broad limits were already visible and attractive. Rather than a Manhattan project to race to those limits, industry has grown slowly to approach them with not that much special funding to help. The control coordination of trillions of L1 satelites doesnt strike me as a huge challenge to people already working in similar fields. I do some work on simulations and read about related technics. Control units just get individual and group call codes that they can respond to, in timed windows if helpful. A number of manager satellites beam signals to sectors and listen to responses. They could likely often pinpoint individual transmissions themselves with modern radar style tech, although trillion is a large number, sheilds will rarely eclipse one and other because they would be very dispersed and relatively small. They dont have to relay all messages individually through neighbours but perhaps could. The options for implementation are extensive but I believe familiar to network designers. They don't really have AI processing to do, its just a matter of maybe reporting their neighbors numbers so position can be determined and relayed so they know where to 'light-sail' and can receive schedules for when to let light past - if that becomes necessary or is deemed advantageous. Im just rambling but there are loads of possibilities for how to organize them. As a multi-node processor it would be rather slow because of the average latency between nodes being many kilometers, rather than millimeters to meters in a supercomputing cluster.

strainer 7y ago

Thanks for the info on the paper - I haven't read it, just seen a number of reports of different approaches to space shielding, that seem to establish its a physical/industrialy modest possibility (for a global project). It would be very early stages for the details of any project, I expect a well funded competition for competing designs and to be surprised and educated by actual designs. It just seems the prelimary designs already discussed establish its physically not unrealistic if launch capability can be sorted. 20 years ago ideas of huge wind turbines planted at sea and even floating were considered by most to be impractical or unproven, but the basic facts supported their possibility as major power sources - the density of air, the intensity of wind, the existence of resilient ocean hardware like oil rigs, the existence of very large aircraft wings. There was no end of unresolved details that could be counted to dissuade, but the broad limits were already visible and attractive. Rather than a Manhattan project to race to those limits, industry has grown slowly to approach them with not that much special funding to help. The control coordination of trillions of L1 satelites doesnt strike me as a huge challenge to people already working in similar fields. I do some work on simulations and read about related technics. Control units just get individual and group call codes that they can respond to, in timed windows if helpful. A number of manager satellites beam signals to sectors and listen to responses. They could likely often pinpoint individual transmissions themselves with modern radar style tech, although trillion is a large number, sheilds will rarely eclipse one and other because they would be very dispersed and relatively small. They dont have to relay all messages individually through neighbours but perhaps could. The options for implementation are extensive but I believe familiar to network designers. They don't really have AI processing to do, its just a matter of maybe reporting their neighbors numbers so position can be determined and relayed so they know where to 'light-sail' and can receive schedules for when to let light past - if that becomes necessary or is deemed advantageous. Im just rambling but there are loads of possibilities for how to organize them. As a multi-node processor it would be rather slow because of the average latency between nodes being many kilometers, rather than millimeters to meters in a supercomputing cluster.