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.
simulacra_procession@lemmy.today 5 months ago
Dyson Spheres Are a Joke
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 5 months 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.
simulacra_procession@lemmy.today 5 months 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.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 5 months 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.