I think eating the Sun is our destiny, both in that I expect it to happen and that I would be pretty sad if we didn’t; I just hope it will be done ethically. This might seem like a strong statement but bear with me
Our civilization has undergone many shifts in values as higher tech levels have indicated that sheer impracticality of living a certain way, and I feel okay about most of these. You won’t see many people nowadays who avoid being photographed because photos steal a piece of their soul. The prohibition on women working outside the home, common in many cultures, is on its way out. Only a few groups like the Amish avoid using electricity for culture reasons. The entire world economy runs on usury stacked upon usury. People cared about all of these things strongly, but practicality won.
To believe that eating the Sun is potentially desirable, you don’t have to have linear utility in energy/mass/whatever and want to turn it into hedonium. It just seems like extending the same sort of tradeoffs societies make every day in 2025 leads to eating the sun, considering just how large a fraction of available resources it will represent to a future civilization. The Sun is 99.9% of the matter and more than 99.9% of the energy in the solar system, and I can’t think of any examples of a culture giving up even 99% of its resources for cultural reasons. No one bans eating 99.9% of available calories, farming 99.9% of available land, or working 99.9% of jobs. Today, traditionally minded and off-grid people generally strike a balance between commitment to their lifestyle and practicality, and many of them use phones and hospitals. Giving up 99.9% of resources would mean giving up metal and basically living in the Stone Age. [1]
When eating the Sun, as long as we spend 0.0001% of the Sun’s energy to set up an equivalent light source pointing at Earth, it doesn’t prevent people from continuing to live on Earth, spending their time farming potatoes and painting, nor does it destroy any habitats. There is really nothing of great intrinsic value lost here. We can’t do the same today when destroying the rainforests! If people block eating the Sun and this is making peoples’ lives worse it’s plausible we should think of them like NIMBYs who prevent dozens of poor people from getting housing because it would ruin their view.
The closest analogies I can think of in the present day are nuclear power bans and people banning vitamin-enriched GMO crops even as children were dying of malnutrition. With nuclear, energy is cheap enough that people can still heat their homes without, so maybe we’ll have an analogous situation where energy is much cheaper than non-hydrogen matter during the period when we would want to eat the Sun. (We would definitely disassemble most of the planets though, unless energy and matter are both cheap relative to some third thing but I don’t see what that would be.) With GMOs I feel pretty sad about the whole situation and wish that science communication were better. At least if we fail to eat the sun and distribute gains to society people probably wouldn’t die as a result.
[1] It might be that the 1000xing income is less valuable in the future than it was in the Neolithic, but probably a Neolithic person would also be skeptical that 1000xing resources is valuable until you explain what technology can do now. If we currently value talking to people across the world, why wouldn’t future people value running 10,000 copies of themselves to socialize with all their friends at once?
I think eating the Sun is our destiny, both in that I expect it to happen and that I would be pretty sad if we didn’t; I just hope it will be done ethically. This might seem like a strong statement but bear with me
Our civilization has undergone many shifts in values as higher tech levels have indicated that sheer impracticality of living a certain way, and I feel okay about most of these. You won’t see many people nowadays who avoid being photographed because photos steal a piece of their soul. The prohibition on women working outside the home, common in many cultures, is on its way out. Only a few groups like the Amish avoid using electricity for culture reasons. The entire world economy runs on usury stacked upon usury. People cared about all of these things strongly, but practicality won.
To believe that eating the Sun is potentially desirable, you don’t have to have linear utility in energy/mass/whatever and want to turn it into hedonium. It just seems like extending the same sort of tradeoffs societies make every day in 2025 leads to eating the sun, considering just how large a fraction of available resources it will represent to a future civilization. The Sun is 99.9% of the matter and more than 99.9% of the energy in the solar system, and I can’t think of any examples of a culture giving up even 99% of its resources for cultural reasons. No one bans eating 99.9% of available calories, farming 99.9% of available land, or working 99.9% of jobs. Today, traditionally minded and off-grid people generally strike a balance between commitment to their lifestyle and practicality, and many of them use phones and hospitals. Giving up 99.9% of resources would mean giving up metal and basically living in the Stone Age. [1]
When eating the Sun, as long as we spend 0.0001% of the Sun’s energy to set up an equivalent light source pointing at Earth, it doesn’t prevent people from continuing to live on Earth, spending their time farming potatoes and painting, nor does it destroy any habitats. There is really nothing of great intrinsic value lost here. We can’t do the same today when destroying the rainforests! If people block eating the Sun and this is making peoples’ lives worse it’s plausible we should think of them like NIMBYs who prevent dozens of poor people from getting housing because it would ruin their view.
The closest analogies I can think of in the present day are nuclear power bans and people banning vitamin-enriched GMO crops even as children were dying of malnutrition. With nuclear, energy is cheap enough that people can still heat their homes without, so maybe we’ll have an analogous situation where energy is much cheaper than non-hydrogen matter during the period when we would want to eat the Sun. (We would definitely disassemble most of the planets though, unless energy and matter are both cheap relative to some third thing but I don’t see what that would be.) With GMOs I feel pretty sad about the whole situation and wish that science communication were better. At least if we fail to eat the sun and distribute gains to society people probably wouldn’t die as a result.
[1] It might be that the 1000xing income is less valuable in the future than it was in the Neolithic, but probably a Neolithic person would also be skeptical that 1000xing resources is valuable until you explain what technology can do now. If we currently value talking to people across the world, why wouldn’t future people value running 10,000 copies of themselves to socialize with all their friends at once?
Elon seems to want to eat the Sun