All Our Energy Problems will be Solved!

[Roboramma]

Well, of course I am, and so are you. How could it be otherwise? The whole concept of K-whatever civilizations inevitably "progressing" to K-whatever+I civilizations by expanding even farther and exploiting vastly greater energy sources on vastly greater scales than the previous stage is based on a narrative of perpetual progress that's one of the core features of our present day civilization.

As arguably it should be, because so far we've failed to provide everyone with even basic needs, opting to increase the population instead while preserving scarcity. (Oh, but of course, a civ with a K in it certainly wouldn't do that; somewhere along the line, human nature will change or the AIs will take over or the aliens will teach us or the Crystal Convergence will finally kick in or whatever, and our descendants will do so much better.)

But I'm not even talking about that. Let's assume a stable post-scarcity state is reached at some future point. I still see an issue with diminishing returns. Take megalomania out of the picture (which seems to me to be pretty much a requirement for reaching that post-scarcity state) and how much can any one person actually derive benefit from? Double the size of the room I'm in now, and double the linear size of my windows and electronic screens to compensate for the increased distance, and what have I gained? Okay, if there wasn't a pandemic, that would allow me to throw a bigger party. Good enough. But how many doublings does that work for? If my living room were the size of a convention center, I could throw a meatspace party for 50,000 people, but if everyone's were that size, on the average the most frequently I could possibly need the full capacity of mine would be for one party in every 50,000. Barring vastly extended life spans, it's never going to be used.

Why is increased population size not a good thing? I think my life has value. Those new people will think their lives have value too. If I want to add to the total value in the universe, increasing the number of people is one way to do it.

To the extent that those new people make life worse for the ones already here, you might get a net loss by adding new people, but if we also add new resources so that they're not taking away from the old people, then the total value goes up. Particularly if the old people have already reached the maximum use for resources that they can get and those new resources won't increase the value they find in life. Giving them to new people will be good.

More people will need more resources to enjoy life. But there are plenty of resources up there, and one reason to go and get them is for the sake of those future people.

 

[Roboramma]

I'd be more interested in channeling all that energy into antimatter production and storage, and channeling the antimatter into engine rooms.

There might be some uses for antimatter, but in general I think it's just far too inefficient to try to produce it as a fuel source.

(I mean the production process of anti-matter will be extremely inefficient in terms of energy in to anti-matter out. Once you've got the stuff it's probably the most efficient possible fuel source).

One technology that can get relatively high payloads up to a significant fraction of c, that we basically have worked out already, is nuclear pulse propulsion.

 

[Roboramma]

I seem to recall someone has attempted to look for that and not found it.

I saw this blog post by Scott Aaronson yesterday, and as it is related to the discussion going on in this thread I thought I'd share it.

It includes an explanation for why we might not see that happening yet, even though the process is going on.

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5253

On the view described, there’s only a tiny cosmic window in which a SETI program could be expected to succeed: namely, when the thin surface of the first of these expanding bubbles has just hit us, and when that surface hasn’t yet passed us by. So, given our “selection bias”—meaning, the fact that we apparently haven’t yet been swallowed up by one of the bubbles—it’s no surprise if we don’t right now happen to find ourselves in the tiny detection window!

He's actually discussing some ideas of Robin Hanson, but while I find Hanson's ideas powerful, he's often not the best at communicating them.

This bit gets at something I've often thought about:

For starters, there’s the fact that life on earth has been evolving for at least ~3.5 billion years—for most of the time the earth has existed—but life has a mere billion more years to go, until the expanding sun boils away the oceans and makes the earth barely habitable. In other words, at least on this planet, we’re already relatively close to the end. Why should that be?

It’s an excellent fit, Robin says, to a model wherein there are a few incredibly difficult, improbable steps along the way to a technological civilization like ours—steps that might include the origin of life, of multicellular life, of consciousness, of language, of something else—and wherein, having achieved some step, evolution basically just does a random search until it either stumbles onto the next step or else runs out of time.

Of course, given that we’re here to talk about it, we necessarily find ourselves on a planet where all the steps necessary for blog-capable life happen to have succeeded. There might be vastly more planets where evolution got stuck on some earlier step.

But here’s the interesting part: conditioned on all the steps having succeeded, we should find ourselves near the end of the useful lifetime of our planet’s star—simply because the more time is available on a given planet, the better the odds there. I.e., look around the universe and you should find that, on most of the planets where evolution achieves all the steps, it nearly runs out the planet’s clock in doing so. Also, as we look back, we should find the hard steps roughly evenly spaced out, with each one having taken a good fraction of the whole available time. All this is an excellent match for what we see.

 

[Roboramma]

A paper related to my last post:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.01522

According to a hard-steps model of advanced life timing, humans seem puzzlingly early. We offer an explanation: an early deadline is set by 'grabby' civilizations (GC), who expand rapidly, never die alone, change the appearance of the volumes they control, and who are not born within other GC volumes. If we might soon become grabby, then today is near a sample origin date of such a GC. A selection effect explains why we don't see them even though they probably control over a third of the universe now. Each parameter in our three parameter model can be estimated to within roughly a factor of four, allowing principled predictions of GC origins, spacing, appearance, and durations till we see or meet them.