Suns considered harmful (was: Pluto)

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat May 24 2003 - 13:11:19 MDT

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    Spike wrote:
    >
    > There is no need to assume we will do otherwise or colonize the
    > galaxy in any other form besides an enormous flock of interdependent
    > orbitting nodes. The more one thinks about it, the more inevitable
    > the Bradburyesque MBrain structure becomes. spike

    Let it be noted for the record that, when at Spike's house for the
    post-Gathering Gathering, I criticized Bradbury's MBrain plans on the
    grounds that they "allowed the sun to stay on". This, of course, is
    unacceptable because the only excuse for a physical process generating a
    bit of entropy is performing an irreversible computation (for example,
    writing the result of a reversible computation to permanent memory
    whenever that just can't be avoided). And by that I mean a *useful*
    irreversible computation - any physical process that generates a bit of
    entropy can be considered as performing an irreversible operation, just
    not a very useful one. Even if you catch 100% of the Sun's power output,
    the Sun itself is generating many bits of entropy that are not being used
    to write reversible computation outputs to memory, since the Sun is not a
    computing device. Consider that the "Sun" in Bradbury's MBrain system
    could as easily be a computer running so hot that it would maintain the
    Sun's present luminosity, and the orbiting MBrains would be able to
    perform just as many computations. We must thus conclude that a sun plus
    an MBrain is massively inefficient as a computer, since the total physical
    process generates many more bits of entropy than it performs useful
    irreversible computations.

    Happy birthday, posthumanity; now blow out the Sun... Well, the Sun's
    been burning for billions of years, and there are plenty more stars in the
    galaxy; leaving this one on for a few thousand years longer probably
    wouldn't hurt much. But when you consider the total number of
    irreversible operations performed to generate the aesthetic experience of
    gazing up at the night sky, it is the most wasteful way in the entire
    universe of computing a sense of wonder.

    -- 
    Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
    Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
    


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