Space is romantic; most people are overly obsessed with space in their view of the future. Even so, these remain valid questions: When will off-Earth economy be larger than the on-Earth? Where in the solar system will that off-Earth economy be then?
Not really. The hard part of disagreement is just understanding what people mean. The vast majority of the time, I can't tell if there is a disagreement at all. (Really, I don't think most utterances denote anything.)
I believe my opinions because I believe my arguments. It's really important to distinguish people who disagree with me because they have fewer arguments from people who disagree because they have more. It's not generally useful to project them onto a 1-dimensional metric that claims that they agree with each other.
I think giving an argument and then doing a poll of whether people believe the argument (maybe true/unsound/invalid/other) would be more valuable than doing the poll just about the conclusion. I do think that the polls in your more recent futurism post were more useful, but I find it pretty hard to articulate why. Maybe because this one should be dominated by a single argument. If you can identify an argument, that should trump the poll.
I believe that by the time we (our robotic decendents) are moving a large percentage of manufacturing off-earth, we will be capable of mega-engineering, and this scales very rapidly, so on the timescale of decades, there is no reason not to move all available solid mass into a tight orbit. "all solid mass" includes all Mars, Venus, Mercury, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and the asteroids. Earth and the Moon might be preserved as a park, or not, depending on the nature of our descendants. The "huge energy cost" is handled in any of several ways. For example, use fusion to drop the masses toward the sun and atmospheric braking in the corona to circularize the orbits.
really? hmm, different intuitions i guess. But why? if you aren't limited by resources you can just make solar panels way way bigger in earth orbit to compensate for not being even closer to the sun and you maximize productivity by keeping it all nearby.
I didn't mean to suggest you would expand outwards at all only that there seems to be no benefit to moving inwards to sun.
I mean consider limiting case where raw materials are free. All you need to not want to move closer to the son is that either moving panels sunward or the efficiency loses from making them away from concentration of economic activity is greater than the gains from more photon collection. Moving sunward costs tons of energy and the benefits to economic concentration are large.
indeed, i though you basically gave this argument in you OP hence why i didn't repeat it.
That changes if mercury is particularly easy to harvest materials from though.
The word 'suspect' should have made it clear that I’m stating a guess. Obviously, I could be wrong but just like the original post I’m making a suggestion about how various trade offs might interact.
But perhaps it's the use of the word serious that is bothering you. Would you have been happy if I said: i suspect if you plug in real figures you'll find... It wasn't meant to cast aspersions on the original post. Indeed, I’m doing exactly the same thing it did...raising a potential trade off that plausibly affects what one should expect to be most efficiencent.
yes, but the question is whether it makes more sense to spend the energy moving the materials for power generation closer to the sun (and away from the existing industrial bases) or just use that energy to build bigger solar cells to compensate.
I’m arguing that you would be better off just building twice as many PV panels in near earth orbit than spending the energy to send panels close enough to sun to double electric output. As long as you aren't material constrained efficiencies from production scale and avoiding spending the energy cost to move closer seems likely the winner.
Now if it turns out mercury has really easy to mind critical materials maybe that's different but otherwise you need to move the materials from out here closer to sun at huge energy cost.
Why do a poll on this question?It makes sense to poll for moral intuition, but for factual questions don't you want arguments, not popularity? Maybe some factual questions in the present day are thick with detail, but not questions like this.
Our best existing technologies work better with higher energy density. That's why they use mirrors to concentrate the incoming sunlight. Our current PV panels compete because they work well with the solar flux we get at the earth's surface, so the don't need the concentration and they don't benefit from it. At sufficiently high insolation, even steam turbines will outperform PV. Cooling will become an issue of course: you trade big mirror concentrators for big radiators shielded by big mirrors, but by shielding the radiators behind concentrating mirrors you arrive at an optimal system (useful energy per mass) for the solar flux at your location.
On the time scale of centuries, our robotic descendents will optimize the work they can extract given the mass and energy they have to work with. In your scenario, the sun supplies the energy. I think the planets will supply the solid mass, to the mass budget for solids is all of the solids on all of the solid object in teh system. The optimal location will be some particular set of distances from the sun, with each type of technology at its own optimal distance. I suspect you are correct: these orbits will be closer to the sun than 1 AU, and probably much closer, like inside the orbit of Mercury, in order to minimize communications delays. On your timescale, the time and energy required to move all the solids in the solar system to the proper places is inconsequential. Note that it is straightforward to establish a low-temperature environment near the sun simply by placing it behind a mirror, so until you get down into the corona, you can pick whatever temperature you choose. Given the amount of mass we have to work with, I suspect we will pick a set of orbits of nearly the same diameter and populate each orbit with environments that maintain a fixed relationship within the orbit. This is a lot simpler than expending energy to maintain a Dyson sphere.
Nevertheless I voted Sun. Energy hungry ems or AI should go near the sun, it can be easily aranged that none of the planets is shaded with enormous amount of energy being exploited using only a fraction of the suns energy for whatever post bios ends up doing for a long time, all that sunlight is just streaming out into space after all.
Yes the current ecosystem is very complex, also exponential growth ended a long time ago here on our planet when it comes to biomass it has been in a steady state ever since. We are apart of the ecosystem, humans is "weird" that we have invented machines and have this even weirder thing called "ambition". Post biological life may go through the same exponential growth spurt and then go into the same steady state. You may have the equivalent of artificial "plants" with more complex "animals" on top of them and so on. Evolution is realy only change, adaption and "survival into the future or through time", exponential growth may be a short lived strategy in it over very long terms.
Ur gay !
Ur gay
The (complete) web serial Ra features Ems who colonised their Sun at one point.
Not really. The hard part of disagreement is just understanding what people mean. The vast majority of the time, I can't tell if there is a disagreement at all. (Really, I don't think most utterances denote anything.)
I believe my opinions because I believe my arguments. It's really important to distinguish people who disagree with me because they have fewer arguments from people who disagree because they have more. It's not generally useful to project them onto a 1-dimensional metric that claims that they agree with each other.
I think giving an argument and then doing a poll of whether people believe the argument (maybe true/unsound/invalid/other) would be more valuable than doing the poll just about the conclusion. I do think that the polls in your more recent futurism post were more useful, but I find it pretty hard to articulate why. Maybe because this one should be dominated by a single argument. If you can identify an argument, that should trump the poll.
If you think that your opinions are correlated with truth, you should think others' opinions are as well.
I believe that by the time we (our robotic decendents) are moving a large percentage of manufacturing off-earth, we will be capable of mega-engineering, and this scales very rapidly, so on the timescale of decades, there is no reason not to move all available solid mass into a tight orbit. "all solid mass" includes all Mars, Venus, Mercury, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and the asteroids. Earth and the Moon might be preserved as a park, or not, depending on the nature of our descendants. The "huge energy cost" is handled in any of several ways. For example, use fusion to drop the masses toward the sun and atmospheric braking in the corona to circularize the orbits.
really? hmm, different intuitions i guess. But why? if you aren't limited by resources you can just make solar panels way way bigger in earth orbit to compensate for not being even closer to the sun and you maximize productivity by keeping it all nearby.
I didn't mean to suggest you would expand outwards at all only that there seems to be no benefit to moving inwards to sun.
I mean consider limiting case where raw materials are free. All you need to not want to move closer to the son is that either moving panels sunward or the efficiency loses from making them away from concentration of economic activity is greater than the gains from more photon collection. Moving sunward costs tons of energy and the benefits to economic concentration are large.
indeed, i though you basically gave this argument in you OP hence why i didn't repeat it.
That changes if mercury is particularly easy to harvest materials from though.
The word 'suspect' should have made it clear that I’m stating a guess. Obviously, I could be wrong but just like the original post I’m making a suggestion about how various trade offs might interact.
But perhaps it's the use of the word serious that is bothering you. Would you have been happy if I said: i suspect if you plug in real figures you'll find... It wasn't meant to cast aspersions on the original post. Indeed, I’m doing exactly the same thing it did...raising a potential trade off that plausibly affects what one should expect to be most efficiencent.
yes, but the question is whether it makes more sense to spend the energy moving the materials for power generation closer to the sun (and away from the existing industrial bases) or just use that energy to build bigger solar cells to compensate.
I’m arguing that you would be better off just building twice as many PV panels in near earth orbit than spending the energy to send panels close enough to sun to double electric output. As long as you aren't material constrained efficiencies from production scale and avoiding spending the energy cost to move closer seems likely the winner.
Now if it turns out mercury has really easy to mind critical materials maybe that's different but otherwise you need to move the materials from out here closer to sun at huge energy cost.
Why do a poll on this question?It makes sense to poll for moral intuition, but for factual questions don't you want arguments, not popularity? Maybe some factual questions in the present day are thick with detail, but not questions like this.
Our best existing technologies work better with higher energy density. That's why they use mirrors to concentrate the incoming sunlight. Our current PV panels compete because they work well with the solar flux we get at the earth's surface, so the don't need the concentration and they don't benefit from it. At sufficiently high insolation, even steam turbines will outperform PV. Cooling will become an issue of course: you trade big mirror concentrators for big radiators shielded by big mirrors, but by shielding the radiators behind concentrating mirrors you arrive at an optimal system (useful energy per mass) for the solar flux at your location.
On the time scale of centuries, our robotic descendents will optimize the work they can extract given the mass and energy they have to work with. In your scenario, the sun supplies the energy. I think the planets will supply the solid mass, to the mass budget for solids is all of the solids on all of the solid object in teh system. The optimal location will be some particular set of distances from the sun, with each type of technology at its own optimal distance. I suspect you are correct: these orbits will be closer to the sun than 1 AU, and probably much closer, like inside the orbit of Mercury, in order to minimize communications delays. On your timescale, the time and energy required to move all the solids in the solar system to the proper places is inconsequential. Note that it is straightforward to establish a low-temperature environment near the sun simply by placing it behind a mirror, so until you get down into the corona, you can pick whatever temperature you choose. Given the amount of mass we have to work with, I suspect we will pick a set of orbits of nearly the same diameter and populate each orbit with environments that maintain a fixed relationship within the orbit. This is a lot simpler than expending energy to maintain a Dyson sphere.
Presumably you know this because you have done a "serious" analysis? Can we see it?
Nevertheless I voted Sun. Energy hungry ems or AI should go near the sun, it can be easily aranged that none of the planets is shaded with enormous amount of energy being exploited using only a fraction of the suns energy for whatever post bios ends up doing for a long time, all that sunlight is just streaming out into space after all.
Yes the current ecosystem is very complex, also exponential growth ended a long time ago here on our planet when it comes to biomass it has been in a steady state ever since. We are apart of the ecosystem, humans is "weird" that we have invented machines and have this even weirder thing called "ambition". Post biological life may go through the same exponential growth spurt and then go into the same steady state. You may have the equivalent of artificial "plants" with more complex "animals" on top of them and so on. Evolution is realy only change, adaption and "survival into the future or through time", exponential growth may be a short lived strategy in it over very long terms.
That seems crazy wrong to me.