[senectus1]

long term is doing a lot of heavy lifting here...

in the very broad shoulders of long term, he's probably right.. its why the concept of a dysonsphere is around. you can get uninterrupted 24/7 free energy.

but yeah, the tech is a long way away.

*Edit: lol My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.

i think 2-3 years is a very unlikely outcome.

[tsimionescu]

Dyson spheres (or the more plausible sounding Dyson swarms) are not an actual physically possible thing, they're just a nice sounding sci-fi trope, like teleporters or replicators.

Freeman Dyson invented the concept as a joke against SETI, especially designing it to sound quasi-plausible.

In reality, there is no way to create a stable structure of this size, it would be like trying to balance a building on the top of a pinhead - except the pinhead is a chaotic, unpredictable star. And the amount of energy required to displace multiple planets worth of mass, manufacture some amount of it into complex satellites, and then displace this amount again to a "stable" Solar orbit simply doesn't exist in the Solar system, on any plausible time scale (it would take many thousands if not millions of years worth of solar power to do so).

[Melatonic]

I agree - long term I can see highly distributed compute ( like tons of small satellites ) becoming a cool space thing. And eventually a ringworld like thing or dysonsphere

But 2 to 3 years?! Seems crazy

[laughing_man]

His timelines always assume absolutely everything goes right, and there are no legal or regulatory problems.