"Close by" is not actually nearly as close as the [rocket]booster boosters would have you believe. Space is really, really big. Why go through the hassle when you have a phenomenal planet right here?
I like your theory on psychosis though!
"Close by" is not actually nearly as close as the [rocket]booster boosters would have you believe. Space is really, really big. Why go through the hassle when you have a phenomenal planet right here?
I like your theory on psychosis though!
I mean, what seems more efficient: creating massive city sized domes that are self contained and controlling the entire environment to sustain human life, "magically" dispelling our atmosphere and boiling off our oceans, mastering physics to move entire planets. Or launching a rocket to Mars with sufficient supplies? Keep in mind that we already have SpaceX and we'll probably have Starship operational long before 2200 where some of this is meant to go down. And if some AI got to the point of the mastery of physics needed to move a planet out of solar orbit, your objection is that getting to Mars would be hard?
That's like asking whether it's more efficient to transmit Internet over telephone lines versus fiber optic ones. There's a path dependency to all things. Sure if the SSE knew upfront its ultimate end state was as such, but it wouldn't.
It'd know it needs data centers, ahh and probably a large security perimeter around those. And look at that, the proliferation of data centers has effectively turned the non-data-center land into the enclaves, etc. etc.
But still, are you aware that getting a single Starship just to Moon will require 10-20 Starships to refuel it?
Even the optimistic case of Starship hardly makes any dent whatsoever in this equation.
But the AI will have read this essay right? And this very discussion. And it will have over a 100 years to plan.
I think any vision of AI that is smart enough to move planets but dumb enough to display the lack of foresight you describe is unbelievable. But we all choose a different level to suspend our disbelief I guess.
But you're still assuming it's the same AI in both cases instead of one that's gradually becoming more capable.
We will create AI capable of "helping humans to protect their cities from an increasingly hostile atmosphere" long before we build one capable of doing anything meaningful in outer space.
(To be clear I don't really defend/endorse this vision of the future, I'm just playing devil's advocate here)