Alex Wissner-Gross

So instead of having a rigid sphere encasing our sun, we instead, say, take apart Jupiter, or maybe our moon, maybe, maybe Mercury.

People are much more sensitive to that.

The moon's had it coming.

We take apart some parts of our solar system, and instead of trying to build a rigid sphere encasing our sun, instead we build a loose aggregate of orbiting data centers that only loosely encase our sun.

And the moves that we've seen out of SpaceX in the past few months are, I would argue, a preview of the so-called Dyson Swarm.

The Dyson Swarm that SpaceX has already soft-launched

is earth centered rather than sun centered and is focused on sun synchronous orbit or sso so this is a special class of orbits around the earth that are always in view of the sun that never go into earth's shadow so fully realized one could imagine

few decades from now.

It's a polar orbit.

So if you go around the equator, you're going to end up in the shadow part of the time.

So it's a polar orbit.

Sun's here, Earth's here.

It's orbiting around the poles in a special class of orbits.

If this were fully realized and very reflective, you would literally be able to look up during the day or not in the sky and see a ring around the Earth, sort of a Saturn ring.

Maybe that's what a mature planetary civilization looks like.

A fully developed Dyson's form wouldn't be earth centered.

It would be sun centered.

We'd probably take apart some of the planets and we'd convert the mass of the planets to a set, a loose aggregate of AI data centers, all orbiting the sun, all computing.

So Eliezer Yudkowsky, who's popularized the notion of paperclipping as sort of a nightmare scenario for AI, what if the AI decides it wants to convert everything to paperclips?

This is, I would say, a much more economically productive use of the mass of our solar system.