Solar Energy Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Michael Anissimov at Accelerating Future highlights the simple observation behind the transhumanist vision,

Part of the rationale for being a “transhumanist”, or, more broadly, having grandiose dreams for humanity’s future, is the extremely simple and mundane observation that the available matter and free energy in our general vicinity is far larger than what we have utilized of it thus far. The incoming solar energy is about a million times greater than global energy consumption, and the available hydrothermal energy to be extracted from the energy gradient between the mantle and the upper crust is many times that. These energy sources far exceed that available from all fossil fuels, uranium, and thorium combined. In the long run (less than a century?), solar and hydrothermal will become our primary energy sources, simply because nothing else will be able to meet our exponentially growing demand.

Sometimes its difficult to imagine the sheer amount of energy in our small part of the universe, but this spiral energy scale diagram does a nice job of capturing it (note I did not fact-check the claims so you be the judge on the accuracy).  Note the two data points that address the point made by Anissimov:

All electricity since Tesla – approximately 10^21 joules

Daily receipt by Earth of total solar energy – approximately 10^22 joules

Anissimov — not surprisingly for a transhumanist — thinks we should be focused on finding ways of increasing the percentage of that energy and other abundant resources,

Some, like environmentalist Bill McKibben — have said “Enough”, enough technology, enough life, enough progress. Unsurprisingly, I disagree. Looking back from the perspective of a world more than 20 times lusher and Nature-filled than today, with more than 20 times more people distributed evenly across huge tracts of land now practically empty, it will be hard to say, “we should have stopped when we were just at 5% of this potential”. There have been other times in history with just 5% of the biomass and life of today — immediately after major mass extinctions. If today’s world is “enough”, then why stop there? Why not revert back to a world with even less biodiversity and biomass? It would be a surprising coincidence if the current biomass is just right, rather than too little or too much. Those arguing otherwise are just products of their environment — the glacier, desert, and steppe-covered poverty of the Late Cenozoic.

Hell yeah.

Michael Anissimov on ‘The Challenge of Self-Replication’

Michael Anissimov has an interesting post on how exactly humanity is going to be able to develop desktop-level self-replicating machines (which are no longer science fiction but an emerging reality) while at the sametime avoiding a doomsday scenario where someone decides to, say, use a self-replicating machine to pump out swarms of nanobots carrying weaponized small pox or something similar.

What is remarkable are those that seem to argue, like Ray Kurzweil, the Foresight Institute, and the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, that humanity is inherently capable of managing universal self-replicating constructors without a near-certain likelihood of disaster. Currently Mumbai is under attack by unidentified terrorists — they are sacrificing their lives to kill, what, 125 people? I can envision a scenario in 2020 or 2025 that is far more destructive and results in the deaths of not hundreds, but millions or even billions of people. There are toxins with an LD50 of one nanogram per kilogram of body weight. A casualty count exceeding World War II could theoretically be achieved with just a single kilogram of toxin and several tonnes of delivery mechanisms. We know that complex robotics can exist on the microscopic scale — microwhip scorpions, parasitic wasps, fairyflies and the like — merely copying these designs without any intelligent thought will become possible when we can scan and construct on the atomic level. Enclosing every human being in an active membrane may be the only imaginable solution to this challenge. Offense will be easier than defense, as offense needs only to succeed once, even after a million failures.

. . .

Instead of just saying, “we’re screwed”, the clear course of action seems to be to contribute to the construction of a benevolent singleton. Given current resources, this should be possible in a few decades or less. Those who think that things will fall into place with the current political and economic order are simply fooling themselves, and putting their lives at risk.

Ah yes, when  terrorism meets script kiddies.

On the other hand, I’m not so sure his criticism of Kurzweil, etc. is warranted. It could just be me, but it seems likely that we’ll develop a matter replicator able to produce a nightmare doomsday scenario long before we achieve the ability to create the sort of singleton AI that Anissimov prescribes as a solution.

Regardless, both Anissimov’s post on the matter and the discussion in the comments is worth reading and pondering.