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I'm a big believer that humanity's future is in space in a Dyson Swarm. There are simply too many advantages. It's estimated that humanity currently uses ~10^11

by jmyeet 7mo ago

I'm a big believer that humanity's future is in space in a Dyson Swarm. There are simply too many advantages. It's estimated that humanity currently uses ~10^11 Watts of power. About 10^16 Watts of solar energy hits the Earth but the Earth's cross-section is less than a billionth of the Sun's total energy output. A Dyson Swarm would give us access to ~10^25 Watts of power. With our current population that would give every person on Earth living space about equivalent to Africa and access to more energy than our entire civilization currently uses by orders of magnitude. I bring this up to present an alternate view of the future that a lot of thought has gone into: the Matrioshka Brain. This is basically a Dyson Swarm but the entire thing operates as one giant computer. Some of the heat from inner layers is captured by outer layers for greater efficiency. That's the Matrioshka part. How much computing power would this be? It's hard to say but estimates range from 10^40 to 10^50 FLOPS (eg [1]). At 10^45 FLOPS that would give each person on Earth access to roughly 100 trillion zettaflops. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/1nzbhxj/matrioshka_brain_calculator/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/1nzbhxj/matrio...

voidUpdate 7mo ago
If we absorb all of the sun's energy using a dyson swarm, the earth is going to get very cold and dark
ninkendo 7mo ago
It makes me wonder about what it would take to actually create one. You’d need self-replicating machines to build it, naturally. You’d need some ability for them to mine from asteroids and process the materials right there on the spot. And they’d need to be able to build both the processor “swarmlets” (probably some stamped-out solar/engine/CPU package) and more builders, so that the growth can be exponential. Oh, and the ability to turn solar energy into thrust somehow using only fuel you can get from the mined asteroids. Maybe a prerequisite is finding a solar system that has a huge and extremely uranium-rich asteroid belt. You would need a CPU design that can be built using the kind of fidelity that a self-replicating machine in space under constant solar radiation can achieve. But if you can get the scale high enough, maybe you can just brute force it and make machines on the computational scale of a Pentium 3, but there’s 10^40 of them so who cares. Maybe there’s a novel way of designing a durable computing machine out of hydrocarbons we have yet to discover. The machines would have to self replicate, and you’d need to store the instructions somewhere hardened. And that can be built out of materials commonly found in asteroids. Maybe hydrocarbons. Hell, may as well use RNA. These things need to be as good as humans at building stuff, so really this is just creating artificial “life” that self has DNA and is made of cells that build proteins needed to create the machine. Maybe they reproduce by spreading as little DNA seeds that can attach to an asteroid with the right chemistry, and we just spew them into the cosmos at a candidate star and hope the process gets kickstarted. Hell, we could make it spew its own DNA at the next stars over as soon as it’s done. We’d have a whole galaxy computing for us, all we’d need is the right DNA instructions, the right capsule for them, and a way to launch them. Maybe another civilization has already done this…
userbinator 7mo ago
Dyson Swarm sounds like the name of an aggressive cleaning machine.
- danw1979 7mo ago
  It's 2071. James Dyson, now 124 and in better health than ever, thanks to the AI-fuelled nanorobotic revolution, has just lost control of the last of the company's Dyson Swarms. What started as a fleet of cleaning-nanites, a dirt and dust-eating squadron-for-hire, has gone rogue; all of Earth's organic matter is now on the menu. People still haven't forgiven him about Brexit.
  - extraduder_ire 7mo ago
    I do find it kind of funny that the Dyson company sold a vacuum cleaner called the "Dyson ball".
PxldLtd 7mo ago
I very much disagree, there's just too many engineering hurdles for us to surmount for this to be a reasonable solution. When you actually break down the physics, the scale works against you. You can't have "one giant computer" when the speed of light is a 16-minute ping time from one side of the swarm to the other. Also cooling. Space is a vacuum, you can't just use convection. The inner layers would melt before they could radiate it away. Even maintenance and power distribution, you're talking about trillions of nodes that need active course correction to avoid a chain-reaction of collisions. There's so many reasons this is not feasible and more of a whimsical thought experiment. I've barely even touched on most of the issues.
- sfn42 7mo ago
  Some people just choose to ignore reality..

by jmyeet 7mo ago

voidUpdate 7mo ago

If we absorb all of the sun's energy using a dyson swarm, the earth is going to get very cold and dark

ninkendo 7mo ago

It makes me wonder about what it would take to actually create one. You’d need self-replicating machines to build it, naturally. You’d need some ability for them to mine from asteroids and process the materials right there on the spot. And they’d need to be able to build both the processor “swarmlets” (probably some stamped-out solar/engine/CPU package) and more builders, so that the growth can be exponential. Oh, and the ability to turn solar energy into thrust somehow using only fuel you can get from the mined asteroids. Maybe a prerequisite is finding a solar system that has a huge and extremely uranium-rich asteroid belt. You would need a CPU design that can be built using the kind of fidelity that a self-replicating machine in space under constant solar radiation can achieve. But if you can get the scale high enough, maybe you can just brute force it and make machines on the computational scale of a Pentium 3, but there’s 10^40 of them so who cares. Maybe there’s a novel way of designing a durable computing machine out of hydrocarbons we have yet to discover. The machines would have to self replicate, and you’d need to store the instructions somewhere hardened. And that can be built out of materials commonly found in asteroids. Maybe hydrocarbons. Hell, may as well use RNA. These things need to be as good as humans at building stuff, so really this is just creating artificial “life” that self has DNA and is made of cells that build proteins needed to create the machine. Maybe they reproduce by spreading as little DNA seeds that can attach to an asteroid with the right chemistry, and we just spew them into the cosmos at a candidate star and hope the process gets kickstarted. Hell, we could make it spew its own DNA at the next stars over as soon as it’s done. We’d have a whole galaxy computing for us, all we’d need is the right DNA instructions, the right capsule for them, and a way to launch them. Maybe another civilization has already done this…

userbinator 7mo ago

Dyson Swarm sounds like the name of an aggressive cleaning machine.

danw1979 7mo ago
It's 2071. James Dyson, now 124 and in better health than ever, thanks to the AI-fuelled nanorobotic revolution, has just lost control of the last of the company's Dyson Swarms. What started as a fleet of cleaning-nanites, a dirt and dust-eating squadron-for-hire, has gone rogue; all of Earth's organic matter is now on the menu. People still haven't forgiven him about Brexit.
- extraduder_ire 7mo ago
  I do find it kind of funny that the Dyson company sold a vacuum cleaner called the "Dyson ball".

PxldLtd 7mo ago

I very much disagree, there's just too many engineering hurdles for us to surmount for this to be a reasonable solution. When you actually break down the physics, the scale works against you. You can't have "one giant computer" when the speed of light is a 16-minute ping time from one side of the swarm to the other. Also cooling. Space is a vacuum, you can't just use convection. The inner layers would melt before they could radiate it away. Even maintenance and power distribution, you're talking about trillions of nodes that need active course correction to avoid a chain-reaction of collisions. There's so many reasons this is not feasible and more of a whimsical thought experiment. I've barely even touched on most of the issues.

sfn42 7mo ago
Some people just choose to ignore reality..