Im skeptical about the timeline here. Unless we allow for the laws of physics,chemistry and biology to be completely suspended, this plan will take centuries to get accomplished, even if we assume the shoggokudzu had absolute “peak” possible growth rate for a biological organism. Biology is hard capped in its ability to metabolize captured matter, and for a good reason: if it could be done faster, the life would simply cook itself with the energy spillover.
Shoggokudzu could conceivably make the AI victory inevitable in a long enough timeline, but not particularly fast, when a determined human with a chainsaw and a lighter can destroy years of its growth in 10 seconds. Human civilization is almost perfectly designed to be the ultimate “pest” against vast biological systems. Destroying biomass and destabilizing complex ecosystems is basically our core trait.
A corn seed weighs 0.25 grams. A corn cob weighs 0.25kg. It takes 60-100 days to grow. Assuming 1 cob per plant and 80 days that’s 80/log(1000,2)=8 days doubling time not counting the leaves and roots. I’d guess it’s closer to 7 days including stalk leaves and roots.
Kudzu can grow one foot per day.
Suppose a doubling time of one week which is pretty conservative. This means a daily growth rate of 2^(1/7) --> 10% so whatever area it’s covering, It grows 10% of that. For a square patch measuring 100m*100m that means each side grows 0.25 meters per day. This is in line with kudzu initially.
initial : (100m)² 0.25m/day linear
month1 : (450m)² 1.2m/day linear
month2 : (2km)² 5m/day linear
month3 : (2km)² 22m/day linear
month4 : (9km)² 100m/day linear
month5 : (40km)² 440m/day linear
month6 : (180km)² 2km/day linear
month7 : (800km)² 9km/day linear
month8 : (16000km)² 40km/day linear (half of earth surface area covered)
8m1w : all done
1 week doubling times are enough to get you biosphere assimilation in under a year. If going full Tyranid and eating the plants/trees/houses can speed things up then things go faster. Much better efficiencies are achievable by eating the plants and reusing most of the cellular machinery. Doubling time of two days takes the 8 month global coverage time down to 10 weeks. Remember e-coli is doubling in 20 minutes so if we can literally re-use the whole tree (jack into the sap being produced) while eating the structural wood, doubling times could get pretty absurd.
The reason for specifying modular construction is to enable faster linear growth rates which are necessary for fast spread. Starting from multiple points is also important. Much better to have 10000 small 1m*1m patches spread out globally than a single 100m*100m patch. Same timeline but 100x lower required linear expansion rate.
So at month8 the edge grows 0.46 m/s. That doesn’t sound very plausible to me. In this timeline the area doubles about every week, so all the growth must happen in two dimensions (opposed to the corns weight gain), it couldn’t get thicker. It means it’s bandwidth for nutrient transport would not change, thus it couldn’t support the exponential growth on the edges. (although as between month2 and month3 it took a break of growth, some restructuring might have happened)
First, more patches growing from different starting locations is better. That cuts required linear expansion rate proportional to ratio of (half earth circumference,max(dist b/w patches))
Note that 0.46 m/s is walking speed. two layer fractal growth is practical (IE:specialised spikes grow outwards at 0.46m/s initiating slower growth fronts that cover the area between them more slowly.)
Material transport might become the binding constraint but transport gets more efficient as you increase density. Larger tubes have higher flow velocities with the same pressure gradient. (less benefits once turbulence sets in). Air bearings (think very long air hockey table) are likely close to optimal and easy enough to construct.
As for biomass/area. Corn grows to 10Mg/ha = 1kg/m²
for a kilometer long front that implies half a tonne per second. Trains cars mass in the 10s to hundreds of tonnes. assuming 10 tonnes and 65′ that’s half a tonne per meter of train. So move a train equivalent at (1m/s+0.5m/s) --> 1.5m/s (running speed) and that supplies a kilometer of frontage.
There’s obviously room to scale this.
I’m also ignoring oceans. Oceans make this easier since anything floating can move like a boat for which 0.5m/s is not significant speed.
Added notes:
I would assume the assimilation front has higher biomass/area than inner enclosed areas since there’s more going on there and potentially conflict with wildlife. This makes things trickier and assembly/reassembly could be a pain so maybe put it on legs or something?
that is only plausible from a “perfect conditions” engineering perspective where the Earth is a perfect sphere with no geography or obstacles, resources are optimally spread, and there is no opposition. Neither kudzu, or even microbes can spread optimally.
And this assumes that the only issues the shoggokudzu faces is soil/water issues, mountains, rivers, pests, natural blights and diseases, mold,bad weather, its own mutations etc. One man with a BIC lighter can destroy weeks of work. Wildfires spread faster than plants. Planes with herbicides, or combine harvesters with a chipper, move much faster than plants grow. As bad as engineered Green Goo is, the Long Ape is equally formidable at destruction.
This is not to say Kudzuapocalypse would not be absolutely awful. It might, over long enough timeline, beat the natural Earth ecosystem, and decades/centuries after, humanity itself. But this would not be an instantaneous process.
Forest fires are a tragedy of the commons situation. If you are a tree in a forest, even if you are not contributing to a fire you still get roasted by it. Fireproofing has costs so trees make the individually rational decision to be fire contributing. An engineered organism does not need to do this.
Photosynthetic top layer should be flat with active pumping of air. Air intakes/exausts seal in fire conditions. This gives much less surface area for ignition than existing plants.
Easiest option is to keep some water in reserve to fight fires directly. possibly add some silicates and heat activated foaming agents to form an intumescent layer. secrete from the top layer on demand.
That is only plausible from a “perfect conditions” engineering perspective where the Earth is a perfect sphere with no geography or obstacles, resources are optimally spread, and there is no opposition. Neither kudzu, or even microbes can spread optimally.
I’ll clarify that a very important core competency is transport of (water/nutrients). Plants don’t currently form desalination plants (seagulls do this to some extent) and continent spanning water pumping networks. The fact that rivers are dumping enormous amounts of fresh water into the oceans shows that nature isn’t effective at capturing precipitation. Some plats have reservoirs where they store precipitation. This organism should capture all precipitation and store it. Storage tanks get cheaper with scale.
Plant growth currently depends on pulling inorganic nutrients and water out of the soil, C, O and N can be extracted from the atmosphere.
An ideal organism roots itself into the ground, extracts as much as possible from that ground then writes it off once other newly covered ground is more profitably mined. Capturing precipitation directly means no need to go into the soil for that although it might be worthwhile to drain the water table when reachable or ever drill wells like humans do. No need for nutrient gathering roots after that. If it covers an area of phosphate rich rock it starts excavating and ships it far and wide as humans currently do.
As for geographic obstacles 2/3rds of the earth is ocean. With a design for a floating breakwater that can handle ocean waves, the wavy area can be enclosed and eventually eliminated. Covered area behind the breakwater can prevent formation of waves by preventing ripple formation (IE:act as a distributed breakwater).
If it’s hard to cover mountains, then the AI can spend a bit of time solving the problem during the first few months, or accept a small loss in total coverage until it does get around to the problem.
One man with a BIC lighter can destroy weeks of work. Wildfires spread faster than plants. Planes with herbicides, or combine harvesters with a chipper, move much faster than plants grow. As bad as engineered Green Goo is, the Long Ape is equally formidable at destruction.
I even bolded the parts about killing all the humans first. Yes humans can do a lot to stop the spread of something like this. I suspect humans might even find a use for it (EG:turn sap into ethanol fuel) and they’re likely clever enough to tap it too.
I’m not going to expand on “kill humans with pathogens” for Reasons. We can agree to disagree there.
I completely agree we should not be talking pathogen use strategies online, for...obvious reasons, even if we put aside the threat of malicious AI. Humans taking ideas from that would be bad enough. I simply don’t see the pathogen route to be as dangerous as many people say, due to inherent limitations of organic systems (and microscopic systems in general). But further explaining how, why, etc is a bad idea, so lets agree to disagree.
I think you glossed over the section where the malevolent AI simultaneously releases super-pathogens to ensure that there aren’t any pesky humans left to meddle with its kudzugoth.
I did not, I just do not think any kind of scientifically plausible pathogen can wipe out humanity, or even seriously diminish our numbers. There is a trade-off between lethality and virality of any pathogen; if it kills too fast or too surely, it cannot spread. If it spreads quickly, it cannot be too deadly. Dead men do not travel or cough.
Probably the worst outcome would be something like Super-Covid, a disease that spreads easily, usually does not kill, but causes long term detriment to human health. Anything more deadly than that would sound all of the post-Covid alarms, and lead to quarantine, rampant disinfectant use, and masks/gloves/protection being commonplace. No biological pathogen can reliably beat those, unless it is straight up dry nanotech that can spread via onboard propulsion, survive caustic chemicals, and burrow through latex: in other words, science fiction/magic.
I don’t think getting into much detail here is a good idea, but a pathogen could have a long incubation period after which it’s disastrous. HIV is a classic example, and something engineered could be far worse.
This suggests an engineered pathogen could have all sorts of interesting coordinated behavior.
natural viruses are evolved for simplicity
selection pressure in natural viruses leads to a tragedy of the commons (burn fast, burn hot)
A common reasoning problem I see is:
“here is a graph of points in the design space we have observed”
EG:pathogens graphed by lethality vs speed of spread
There’s an obvious trendline/curve!
therefore the trendline must represent some fundamental restriction on the design space.
Designs falling outside the existing distribution are impossible.
This is the distribution explored by nature. Nature has other concerns that lead to the distribution you observe. That pathogens have a “lethality vs spread” relationship tells you about the selection pressures selecting for pathogens, not the space of possible designs.
Im skeptical about the timeline here. Unless we allow for the laws of physics,chemistry and biology to be completely suspended, this plan will take centuries to get accomplished, even if we assume the shoggokudzu had absolute “peak” possible growth rate for a biological organism. Biology is hard capped in its ability to metabolize captured matter, and for a good reason: if it could be done faster, the life would simply cook itself with the energy spillover.
Shoggokudzu could conceivably make the AI victory inevitable in a long enough timeline, but not particularly fast, when a determined human with a chainsaw and a lighter can destroy years of its growth in 10 seconds. Human civilization is almost perfectly designed to be the ultimate “pest” against vast biological systems. Destroying biomass and destabilizing complex ecosystems is basically our core trait.
Let’s talk growth rates.
A corn seed weighs 0.25 grams. A corn cob weighs 0.25kg. It takes 60-100 days to grow. Assuming 1 cob per plant and 80 days that’s 80/log(1000,2)=8 days doubling time not counting the leaves and roots. I’d guess it’s closer to 7 days including stalk leaves and roots.
Kudzu can grow one foot per day.
Suppose a doubling time of one week which is pretty conservative. This means a daily growth rate of 2^(1/7) --> 10% so whatever area it’s covering, It grows 10% of that. For a square patch measuring 100m*100m that means each side grows 0.25 meters per day. This is in line with kudzu initially.
initial : (100m)² 0.25m/day linear
month1 : (450m)² 1.2m/day linear
month2 : (2km)² 5m/day linear
month3 : (2km)² 22m/day linear
month4 : (9km)² 100m/day linear
month5 : (40km)² 440m/day linear
month6 : (180km)² 2km/day linear
month7 : (800km)² 9km/day linear
month8 : (16000km)² 40km/day linear (half of earth surface area covered)
8m1w : all done
1 week doubling times are enough to get you biosphere assimilation in under a year. If going full Tyranid and eating the plants/trees/houses can speed things up then things go faster. Much better efficiencies are achievable by eating the plants and reusing most of the cellular machinery. Doubling time of two days takes the 8 month global coverage time down to 10 weeks. Remember e-coli is doubling in 20 minutes so if we can literally re-use the whole tree (jack into the sap being produced) while eating the structural wood, doubling times could get pretty absurd.
The reason for specifying modular construction is to enable faster linear growth rates which are necessary for fast spread. Starting from multiple points is also important. Much better to have 10000 small 1m*1m patches spread out globally than a single 100m*100m patch. Same timeline but 100x lower required linear expansion rate.
So at month8 the edge grows 0.46 m/s. That doesn’t sound very plausible to me.
In this timeline the area doubles about every week, so all the growth must happen in two dimensions (opposed to the corns weight gain), it couldn’t get thicker. It means it’s bandwidth for nutrient transport would not change, thus it couldn’t support the exponential growth on the edges.
(although as between month2 and month3 it took a break of growth, some restructuring might have happened)
First, more patches growing from different starting locations is better. That cuts required linear expansion rate proportional to ratio of (half earth circumference,max(dist b/w patches))
Note that 0.46 m/s is walking speed. two layer fractal growth is practical (IE:specialised spikes grow outwards at 0.46m/s initiating slower growth fronts that cover the area between them more slowly.)
Material transport might become the binding constraint but transport gets more efficient as you increase density. Larger tubes have higher flow velocities with the same pressure gradient. (less benefits once turbulence sets in). Air bearings (think very long air hockey table) are likely close to optimal and easy enough to construct.
As for biomass/area. Corn grows to 10Mg/ha = 1kg/m²
for a kilometer long front that implies half a tonne per second. Trains cars mass in the 10s to hundreds of tonnes. assuming 10 tonnes and 65′ that’s half a tonne per meter of train. So move a train equivalent at (1m/s+0.5m/s) --> 1.5m/s (running speed) and that supplies a kilometer of frontage.
There’s obviously room to scale this.
I’m also ignoring oceans. Oceans make this easier since anything floating can move like a boat for which 0.5m/s is not significant speed.
Added notes:
I would assume the assimilation front has higher biomass/area than inner enclosed areas since there’s more going on there and potentially conflict with wildlife. This makes things trickier and assembly/reassembly could be a pain so maybe put it on legs or something?
that is only plausible from a “perfect conditions” engineering perspective where the Earth is a perfect sphere with no geography or obstacles, resources are optimally spread, and there is no opposition. Neither kudzu, or even microbes can spread optimally.
And this assumes that the only issues the shoggokudzu faces is soil/water issues, mountains, rivers, pests, natural blights and diseases, mold,bad weather, its own mutations etc. One man with a BIC lighter can destroy weeks of work. Wildfires spread faster than plants. Planes with herbicides, or combine harvesters with a chipper, move much faster than plants grow. As bad as engineered Green Goo is, the Long Ape is equally formidable at destruction.
This is not to say Kudzuapocalypse would not be absolutely awful. It might, over long enough timeline, beat the natural Earth ecosystem, and decades/centuries after, humanity itself. But this would not be an instantaneous process.
Forest fires are a tragedy of the commons situation. If you are a tree in a forest, even if you are not contributing to a fire you still get roasted by it. Fireproofing has costs so trees make the individually rational decision to be fire contributing. An engineered organism does not need to do this.
Photosynthetic top layer should be flat with active pumping of air. Air intakes/exausts seal in fire conditions. This gives much less surface area for ignition than existing plants.
Easiest option is to keep some water in reserve to fight fires directly. possibly add some silicates and heat activated foaming agents to form an intumescent layer. secrete from the top layer on demand.
I’ll clarify that a very important core competency is transport of (water/nutrients). Plants don’t currently form desalination plants (seagulls do this to some extent) and continent spanning water pumping networks. The fact that rivers are dumping enormous amounts of fresh water into the oceans shows that nature isn’t effective at capturing precipitation. Some plats have reservoirs where they store precipitation. This organism should capture all precipitation and store it. Storage tanks get cheaper with scale.
Plant growth currently depends on pulling inorganic nutrients and water out of the soil, C, O and N can be extracted from the atmosphere.
An ideal organism roots itself into the ground, extracts as much as possible from that ground then writes it off once other newly covered ground is more profitably mined. Capturing precipitation directly means no need to go into the soil for that although it might be worthwhile to drain the water table when reachable or ever drill wells like humans do. No need for nutrient gathering roots after that. If it covers an area of phosphate rich rock it starts excavating and ships it far and wide as humans currently do.
As for geographic obstacles 2/3rds of the earth is ocean. With a design for a floating breakwater that can handle ocean waves, the wavy area can be enclosed and eventually eliminated. Covered area behind the breakwater can prevent formation of waves by preventing ripple formation (IE:act as a distributed breakwater).
If it’s hard to cover mountains, then the AI can spend a bit of time solving the problem during the first few months, or accept a small loss in total coverage until it does get around to the problem.
I even bolded the parts about killing all the humans first. Yes humans can do a lot to stop the spread of something like this. I suspect humans might even find a use for it (EG:turn sap into ethanol fuel) and they’re likely clever enough to tap it too.
I’m not going to expand on “kill humans with pathogens” for Reasons. We can agree to disagree there.
I completely agree we should not be talking pathogen use strategies online, for...obvious reasons, even if we put aside the threat of malicious AI. Humans taking ideas from that would be bad enough. I simply don’t see the pathogen route to be as dangerous as many people say, due to inherent limitations of organic systems (and microscopic systems in general). But further explaining how, why, etc is a bad idea, so lets agree to disagree.
I think you glossed over the section where the malevolent AI simultaneously releases super-pathogens to ensure that there aren’t any pesky humans left to meddle with its kudzugoth.
I did not, I just do not think any kind of scientifically plausible pathogen can wipe out humanity, or even seriously diminish our numbers. There is a trade-off between lethality and virality of any pathogen; if it kills too fast or too surely, it cannot spread. If it spreads quickly, it cannot be too deadly. Dead men do not travel or cough.
Probably the worst outcome would be something like Super-Covid, a disease that spreads easily, usually does not kill, but causes long term detriment to human health. Anything more deadly than that would sound all of the post-Covid alarms, and lead to quarantine, rampant disinfectant use, and masks/gloves/protection being commonplace. No biological pathogen can reliably beat those, unless it is straight up dry nanotech that can spread via onboard propulsion, survive caustic chemicals, and burrow through latex: in other words, science fiction/magic.
I don’t think getting into much detail here is a good idea, but a pathogen could have a long incubation period after which it’s disastrous. HIV is a classic example, and something engineered could be far worse.
raises finger
realizes I’m about to give advice on creating superpathogens
I’m not going to go into details besides stating two facts:
nature has figured out how to make cellular biology do complicated things
including coordinating behavior across instances of the same base genetic programming
This suggests an engineered pathogen could have all sorts of interesting coordinated behavior.
natural viruses are evolved for simplicity
selection pressure in natural viruses leads to a tragedy of the commons (burn fast, burn hot)
A common reasoning problem I see is:
“here is a graph of points in the design space we have observed”
EG:pathogens graphed by lethality vs speed of spread
There’s an obvious trendline/curve!
therefore the trendline must represent some fundamental restriction on the design space.
Designs falling outside the existing distribution are impossible.
This is the distribution explored by nature. Nature has other concerns that lead to the distribution you observe. That pathogens have a “lethality vs spread” relationship tells you about the selection pressures selecting for pathogens, not the space of possible designs.