Anders Sandberg

heh https://www.aleph.se/Nada/dysonFAQ.html#ENOUGH made me think of the recent Universal Paperclips thread, to which I will not hyperlink in order to spare the audience from the productivity virus :-) But, in the spirit of fun productivity degradation, I love, love, love this game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Program/ Also relevant, from Kurzgesagt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A

Tangential to this, but one of the authors, Anders Sandberg, has a great page on transhumanism that I loved reading a long time ago. If anyone is interested: http://www.aleph.se/Trans/

The "Cyberiad" is an incredibly great introduction too. For example, it contains an electric bard which produces a long poem about tensor algebra, starting with: > Come, let us hasten to a higher plane > Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, > Their indices bedecked from one to n > Commingled in an endless Markov chain! The whole thing is here: http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Cultural/Art/tensor.html Needless to say, Michael Kandel's translation is also hugely impressive.

I could be wrong (my physics background isn't that strong either) but I think Dyson's "time without end" paper http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Omega/dyson.txt shows that eventually the universe will cool down enough to make all keys brute-force-attackable despite Bremermann's limit. Given a finite amount of attacker computation you're willing to defend against, you can get a real advantage from key stretching (though not from mere salting). If you want a password strength of 256 bits, you can memorize a password of 226 bits and require work equivalent to 2³⁰ key-hashing operations to derive the actual encryption key or crypted password. This is normally called a KDF; reasonable ones are scrypt, bcrypt, and Argon2, in ascending order of goodness. If you make the work factor unreasonably large, you won't be able to use the password in practice, because you have to do that work every time you use it. For example, if you try to memorize 170 bits of password and use a 2¹⁷⁰ work factor in your KDF to reach the 340-bit security level, recommended here, you have to do 2¹⁷⁰ work on your laptop every time you log in. Assuming a trillion operations per second (a safe upper bound for current laptops) each login will take about 47 nonillion years, about a sextillion times longer than the history of the universe so far and about 50 times longer than the expected lifetime of the last galaxies (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future). It may be inconvenient to…

The inner planets contain enough mass to create a shell of 1 AU radius with mass of 42 kg/m^2. That sounds like a plausible thickness and density for a sandwich of photovoltaics - GPUs - heat sinks. You don't build a rigid shell of course, you build a swarm of free-floating satellites in a range of orbits. See https://www.aleph.se/Nada/dysonFAQ.html#ENOUGH for numbers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aestivation_hypothesis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9sh9NpL4i8 https://mindmatters.ai/2020/10/researchers-the-aliens-exist-but-they-a… https://aleph.se/andart2/space/the-aestivation-hypothesis-popular-outl…

Yes and no. It's possible, but it's not a stable configuration, so it's unlikely to form naturally. https://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2014/02/torusearth.html

Anders Sandberg, the author, was heavily involved with the orionsarm.com project (hard science-fiction worldbuilding). It was a big, big influence on my youth in the early 2000's, at the age of 17, while I went through a deep exploration of futurism and what could be possible in my lifetime. This is where I learned of things like Dyson Spheres, which, sure enough, referenced one "Dyson Sphere FAQ" written by Sandberg himself. https://orionsarm.com/eg-article/4845fbe091a18 http://www.aleph.se/Nada/dysonFAQ.html

One Dyson sphere of radius 1 AU (Sun-Earth distance) having mass 600 kg/m^2 (8-20 cm thick) will require[1] 10^26 kg of material. The Milky Way's dark mater halo is considered[2] to have mass 10^12 M_Sun = 10^42 kg. So you will need a total of 10^16 (10 quadrillion) spheres. [1]: https://www.aleph.se/Nada/dysonFAQ.html#ENOUGH [2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.4013

I also appreciate the role-playing game settings of the author of this article. http://www.aleph.se/Nada/Game/BigIdeas/index.html

I knew I recognized the author somewhere. I recall him from his fun article about a torus Earth. http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2014/02/torusearth.html

More likely we really are alone: http://aleph.se/andart2/space/seti/dissolving-the-fermi-paradox/

That does sound like an interesting video, and I'd like to see it if you find it (or I might search for it later). As for the Star Trek (TNG) interpretation of AGI, I suspect something like this in the real world would give rise to a kind of "oracle" situation, which creates its own dangerous problems. A system which functions as described only by observing and giving input where asked still has the potential to affect the outcome of events simply by being a reliable predictor. A paper explaining this concept far better than I would be able to in a HN comment is available here: http://www.aleph.se/papers/oracleAI.pdf

http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2009/04/monumental_egos.html "I suggest we call the unit of ego the Wolfram"

see also http://aleph.se/andart2/megascale/just-how-efficient-can-a-jupiter-bra… and https://www.gwern.net/docs/1999-bradbury-matrioshkabrains.pdf http://aleph.se/andart2/megascale/energy-requirements-of-the-singulari…

Interested in mathematics and geology, so you say? Behold, I am the polypontian, and spin links 'twixt diverse nodes not my own: http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2014/02/torusearth.html Perhaps this Anders would be interested to discuss the particular brand of paint you enjoy watching dry [0]. [0] Which if one has any fascination at all with viscous fluids or amorphous solids, one really must try sometime.

Heat, actually. All the energy the star produces has to escape into space somehow. The way it does this is by heating up the sphere until it radiates out into space at the same rate at which the star irradiates the sphere. The bigger the sphere, the cooler it is, because it has more surface area to radiate away heat. So if your sphere is too small, it may end up glowing at red heat, which might make it difficult to live on. Calculating the temperature is straightforward: http://www.aleph.se/Nada/dysonFAQ.html

"During the dinner discussion leading up to this definition the foreword to one of the Mathematica books was mentioned, where Stephen Wolfram (in third person) wrote "Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica and is widely regarded as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today." In honour of this self-assessment I suggest we call the unit of ego the Wolfram." - "Monumental egos" blog post by Anders Sandberg http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2009/04/monumental_egos.html

For a real example see Pluto and its largest moon Charon. And as you probably already know, our moon IS tidally locked to us ;) Then, there's the question "What if the earth was a torus?": http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2014/02/torusearth.html

He's talking about the ideas from Dyson's "Time Without End" lectures: http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Omega/dyson.txt

aka the nanoreplacement procedure. A few more ideas are listed here: http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Uploading/#METHODS

An AI in a box that wants to affect the outside world minimally, but can answer questions posed to it. See the paper: http://www.aleph.se/papers/oracleAI.pdf

This reminds me of these designs: http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/10/warning_signs_for_tomorrow… Nanoparticle Hazard, Nonstandard Spacetime, Macroscale Quantum System...

This might work as a way for adjusting wake-up time: http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2007/11/the_early_bird_gets_the_ca…

There is another blog entry about Wolfram's ego, where the guy goes even further and proposes that the unit of "ego" be called Wolfram: http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2009/04/monumental_egos.html

Edit: A big brain fart, ignore the retracted part below. Colonizing the universe is of course impossible in 100My, barring FTL. What the paper I referred to [1] says is that colonizing the Milky Way may take less than that, and if you can do that, spreading to the rest of the observable universe is fairly easy, very relatively speaking. <retracted> According to some calculations, it should in principle be possible to colonize the entire observable universe in less than a hundred million years. It's much too fast for the expansion to affect except marginally.</retracted> The relative jump in difficulty from interstellar to intergalactic is much smaller than from interplanetary to interstellar. Anyway, as others said, mere intragalactic (and intra-Local Group) travel is not affected by expansion in any way whatsoever. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S009457651300114… PDF at https://www.aleph.se/papers/Spamming%20the%20universe.pdf

> a Matrioshka Brain would put out such a small amount of radiation, it'd be invisible for all sensor technology A huge object emitting infrared radiation would be quite detectable. At the level of energy output from our Sun, a Dyson sphere with a diameter of the Earth's orbit, would actually have a surface temperature of 395K or 122C. It would put out lots of infrared radiation, and would be very detectable against the cosmic background which has a radiation temperature of 2.7K. Some SETI programs have looked for these, and already in 1984 we had the technology to observe, and as it turns out, to rule out any of these (Dyson spheres around stars with energy output comparable to our Sun) existing within the nearest 300 light years. https://www.aleph.se/Nada/dysonFAQ.html#HEAT https://www.aleph.se/Nada/dysonFAQ.html#OBS http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/weirdastronomy.php#id--Ob…

I wouldn't put it that way. The problem is that a ton of the stuff impinging on us is not knowledge. It's propaganda, fluff, stupid memes, click bait, and systems with interfaces designed to be addictive and to act like Skinner boxes. What I really see happening is a "part 2" repeat of the spam apocalypse that hit e-mail, Usenet, and other federated systems on the early Internet. In the late 1990s spam destroyed most of these systems. E-mail was so valuable it had to be saved, but saving it has mostly involved delegating it to a small oligopoly of vertically integrated e-mail providers with the resources to fight spam. Usenet and other less well known federated systems were destroyed. I think we are now seeing a similar kind of spam assault against the open web, social media, and the news. The latter with the whole "fake news" phenomenon really resembles a Sybil attack. In recent years I've seen an avalanche of totally fake news sites that look like legitimate newspapers popped up (apparently from templates) and used to spam social media with a whole slew of unfounded allegations and other assorted bullshit. The role they've had in the election has gained a lot of press but it's in no way limited to that or even to politics. A lot of it seems to be shilling for quack medical products and other traditional mainstays of... spam! I've started calling this whole phenomenon "spam 2.0." I'd define spam 2.0 as the semi-automated bulk creation of fake news outlets, fake social…

> This is just silly Given an HN reader took the trouble to email me their thanks for my comment, I respectfully disagree. To do this, they had find my email address by following some of my other comments, linking to a website, following through to github... The email they wrote was articulate. They put in real effort to say "thanks". > "he" is a gender neutral pronoun when referring to a person of unspecified gender (as in other languages). In some dictionaries, yes. A possible counter-argument to this is that the tradition of that usage comes from cultures with significant inbuilt misogyny. > "They" is plural. Sometimes. - https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/they - http://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/singular-nonbinary-they > "Ve" is not a word. I can read it, write it, say it and find other like usages in numerous places. To me, that reflects most of the necessary facets of "a word". - https://genderneutralpronoun.wordpress.com - http://vevemvir.tumblr.com - http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Cultural/Art/eganrev.html - http://www.dictionary.com/browse/etymology - http://www.wikihow.com/Create-a-Made-Up-Word > "S/he" is awkward and unnecessary Agreed. I dislike this form. A similar option is to alternate use of "he" and "she". This form is common, and probably the simplest. I wish I'd suggested it. > we can argue that it is misandrous because you're capitalizing the "S" and prioritizing "She" over "he" That was you, not me.

Reminds me of the Space Odyssey series: http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Cultural/Art/2001.html "In these, they roamed among the stars. They no longer built spaceships, they were spaceships. But the age of Machine-entities swiftly passed. In their ceaseless experimenting, they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light. They could become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny of matter. Into pure energy, therefore, they presently tranformed themselves; and on a thousand worlds, the empty shells they had discarded twitched for a while in a mindless dance of death, then crumbled into rust. Now they were lords of the galaxy, and beyond the reach of time. They could rove at will among the stars, and sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space. But despite their godlike powers, they had not wholly forgotten their origin, in the warm slime of a vanished sea."