Comment on Bezos plan for solar powered datacenters is out of this world… literally

brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• very_well_lost@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I’d recommend diving into this for a more scientifically ‘thought out’ and optimistic extrapolation: www.orionsarm.com

  Man… if the Technopocolpyse is what you consider optimistic, I’d hate to find out what you consider pessimism!

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  • Cybersteel@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    AI will turn all of us into paperclips before long unless the AI jihad succeeds.

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  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Humanity survived though. Even ‘humans’ dying out but some form of life expanding out would be not terrible.

    My biggest fear is Earth ‘fizzling’ and never expanding, and the odds of that happening are pretty high.

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    • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Well, I’m not sure you’ve considered the time-frames involved in that concern. We have a whole lot of time before the sun goes out on us. It took Earth about 2 billion years to develop multicellular life. It then took another 2.5 b before we got vertebrates. That was the hard part though and it’s done, I don’t think there’s any undoing it. There aren’t many things that could wipe out all forms of vertebrates on earth, so I’m confident that would be as far back as the planet could reasonably be set back by any disaster.

      Just 60 million years ago, mammals were not at all a dominant form of life, yet that’s all it took for early rodent-like mammals to evolve into human beings (as well as all the other mammals we know today). So based on that timeline, if all human life on the planet were wiped out tomorrow, I’d estimate (pessimistically) it would take less than another 200 million years before another species gained a similar level of intelligence and began a new era of civilization (and perhaps as little as 10 m years, as some species are already quite intelligent). In fact, if the next species screws up, and gets themselves killed, I expect earth will get another go at it in another 10–200 million years, over and over again.

      On the other side of the equation, the sun will expand into a red giant and consume the earth in about 5 billion years. That gives us a whole lot of tries to get it right.

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      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I have, but I’m also concerned that humanity got “lucky” so far and that this won’t happen again. There are theories positing that there are several blocking “gates” to civilization, and humanity passed an exceptional number of them already.

        It’s reasonable to assert that’s a misleading, human centric perspective; but I’d also point out that the Fermi Paradox supports it. Either:

        • The conditions that gave birth to our civilization are not exceptional, and spread intelligent life is hiding from us (unlikely at this point, I think)

        • They are exceptional, and we just happened to have passed many unlikely hurdles so far (hence it is critical we don’t trip up at the end here).

        • They are not that exceptional, and there is some gate we are not aware of yet (which I have heard called the Great Filter).

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• vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Billionaire seem to have a… unscientific view of a sci fi future.

  That’s cause due to network effects people who are making such projects are equivalent to grocers in qualification. Just were in the right place at the right time. They are not engineers, not philosophers. But since they’ve read and seen in sci-fi that they have to show something engineer-philosopher-like, they are doing all this bullshit.

  Our world’s problem is in these monopolies which should be busted. After they are busted, we’ll see a lot of goodness through the usual normal competition.

  And also I don’t think the sequence of events that led to the current state of things should be treated as some proof of “capitalism not working” or “computer-driven futurism being a dead end” or even “space travel not ever happening” or anything as radical. Every time is different. It’s like living all your life alone after one bad relationship.

  We should dream, and we should make, and we should try, and we should tell those who think it’s their “vision” or none to go kick rocks.

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• Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It doesn’t look like a Cyberpunk movie.

  The real world looks surprisingly like a cyberpunk movie already.

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• simulacra_procession@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Dyson Spheres Are a Joke

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  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    With the caveat that I only read the transcripts, I don’t find that compelling at all.

    The initial sentiment is correct; folks like Sam Altman responding to existential problems like “oh we can just build a Dyson Sphere in 30 years” should be in freaking jail instead of power.

    But the only other justification I see is “well, this is stupidly impractical in the context of current humans.” Things like:

    • “What, we make all those nanobots and get all that energy with fusion and use it to disassemble Jupiter?”

    • “Why don’t we just use that energy to leave the solar system?”

    • “Say it’s a Dyson Swarm; what do we do living on all those solar satellites?”

    She’s fallen into the same trap of “existing sci fi” she accuses other of falling into.

    We’re not talking about a bunch of people in space looking to expand a habit. At this point, we’re talking about some AI that’s already converted an entire moons worth of mass into computronium, can upload folks to VR and simulate realities, that can reconfigure atomic nuclei into ultradense strings of matter or construct and control tiny black holes to generate energy and elements.

    It’s left the solar system loooong ago.

    Its capabilities, needs, and goals are completely umhuman, and at that point pondering how to efficiently capture the output of all this stellar mass sustainably is absolutely practical to plan. A Dyson Sphere (or more practically a swarm) isn’t the only way, but it’s not the worst idea for a “young” intelligence. And in OA, at a certain point, the Sephrotics seem to construct dyson spheres as habitats for aesthetic reasons, whereas their actual industrial/computational bases are different arrangements of masses.

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    • simulacra_procession@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Was this written with AI? The whole point of the video was simply that the original ‘paper’ about Dyson Spheres was very clearly a joke at the early SETI projects expense, even according to the man who wrote it. You can think whatever you want about the merits of them in a futurist context.

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      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        No, I just skimmed the transcript because it’s an hour long, heh.

        I did get that bit about SETI and the original paper, which is interesting, and also agree that astronomers looking for them over the paper is hilarious and stupid.

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