Which occurs first: a Dyson Sphere, or Real GDP increase by 5x?
From 1929 to 2024, US Real GDP grew from 1.2 trillion to 23.5 trillion chained 2012 dollars, giving an average annual growth rate of 3.2%. At the historical 3.2% growth rate, global RGDP will have increased 5x within ~51 years (around 2076).
We’ll operationalize a Dyson Sphere as follows: the total power consumption of humanity exceeds 17 exawatts, which is roughly 100x the total solar power reaching Earth, and 1,000,000x the current total power consumption of humanity.
Personally, I think people overestimate the difficulty of the Dyson Sphere compared to 5x in RGDP. I recently made a bet with Prof. Gabe Weil, who bet on 5x RGDP before Dyson Sphere.
I would have thought that all the activities involved in making a Dyson sphere themselves would imply an economic expansion far beyond 5x.
Can we make an economic model of “Earth + Dyson sphere construction”? In other words, suppose that the economy on Earth grows in some banal way that’s already been modelled, and also suppose that all human activities in space revolve around the construction of a Dyson sphere ASAP. What kind of solar system economy does that imply?
This requires adopting some model of Dyson sphere construction. I think for some time the cognoscenti of megascale engineering have favored the construction of “Dyson shells” or “Dyson swarms” in which the sun’s radiation is harvested by a large number of separately orbiting platforms that collectively surround the sun, rather than the construction of a single rigid body.
Charles Stross’s novel Accelerando contains a vivid scenario, in which the first layer of a Dyson shell in this solar system, is created by mining robots that dismantle the planet Mercury. So I think I’d make that the heart of such an economic model.
Which occurs first: a Dyson Sphere, or Real GDP increase by 5x?
From 1929 to 2024, US Real GDP grew from 1.2 trillion to 23.5 trillion chained 2012 dollars, giving an average annual growth rate of 3.2%. At the historical 3.2% growth rate, global RGDP will have increased 5x within ~51 years (around 2076).
We’ll operationalize a Dyson Sphere as follows: the total power consumption of humanity exceeds 17 exawatts, which is roughly 100x the total solar power reaching Earth, and 1,000,000x the current total power consumption of humanity.
Personally, I think people overestimate the difficulty of the Dyson Sphere compared to 5x in RGDP. I recently made a bet with Prof. Gabe Weil, who bet on 5x RGDP before Dyson Sphere.
I would have thought that all the activities involved in making a Dyson sphere themselves would imply an economic expansion far beyond 5x.
Can we make an economic model of “Earth + Dyson sphere construction”? In other words, suppose that the economy on Earth grows in some banal way that’s already been modelled, and also suppose that all human activities in space revolve around the construction of a Dyson sphere ASAP. What kind of solar system economy does that imply?
This requires adopting some model of Dyson sphere construction. I think for some time the cognoscenti of megascale engineering have favored the construction of “Dyson shells” or “Dyson swarms” in which the sun’s radiation is harvested by a large number of separately orbiting platforms that collectively surround the sun, rather than the construction of a single rigid body.
Charles Stross’s novel Accelerando contains a vivid scenario, in which the first layer of a Dyson shell in this solar system, is created by mining robots that dismantle the planet Mercury. So I think I’d make that the heart of such an economic model.