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It certainly would be much worse to burn a living planet, but even a hellhole like Venus is a uniquely beautiful and mysterious scientific wonderland.
by Jeff_Brown 5y ago
It certainly would be much worse to burn a living planet, but even a hellhole like Venus is a uniquely beautiful and mysterious scientific wonderland.
- jjk166 5y agoYou say that now when your entire civilization is limited to a single planet. But I would imagine the novelty wears off after you've explored billions of venus-like planets. For a galaxy spanning civilization, it would be equivalent to destroying an acre of the Sahara.
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoAn appropriately stiff integalactic tax on entropy, enforced only above some enormous threshold like burning a planet, could be optimal. Because you're right -- at some scale, for some payoff, burning a Venus is the right decision. But ceteris peribus, harvesting from the entropy already present is better than adding to the universe's entropy.