Indeed.
Here's one for you: There's a 10–15% chance, even barring radical life extension tech, that I'll live long enough to see the moon completely disassembled by von Neumann replicators.
Here's one for you: There's a 10–15% chance, even barring radical life extension tech, that I'll live long enough to see the moon completely disassembled by von Neumann replicators.
There's several things that it depends on which are TRL 1-3, but are known to be at least theoretically possible. Based on how long it takes to get other things from TRL 1 to working device, I think it's most likely to take longer than my current remaining life expectancy even to be even odds, but not by such a large margin as to be infinitesimal odds.
> we can't even build self assembling macroscopic machines
TRL-1 tends to imply such statements :)
… although, is that actually true? For macroscopic, I mean? Given factories exist and robot arms are part of them, are you sure nobody has used a robot arm to assemble an identical robot arm from a pile of robot arm parts? I've not heard of anyone actually doing so, but are you sure that's never been done?
This can only be done if the VN machines are able to form a useful cloud away from the moon immediately after they've disassembled the surface layer. If they aren't allowed to do that, it would take 415 millennia: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1.244e29+J+%2F+%281kW%2...
But you can make it twice as fast by getting the first layer to lift the second layer to cislunar orbit, then combine the power of both layers; then four times as fast etc. etc.
I don't know the upper limit before the main constraint is cooling.
We could game this out and figure out exactly what a rational bet is, but you get my point. It seems very hard to believe you think there is a 10-15% chance. Those are probabilities at which you would be making major moves to hedge.
I said "10-15%" of the moon being disassembled in my (current natural) lifetime, as in the break-even point for a bet is me spending $20 today for a chance you pay me $133-$200 on my deathbed. (I don't expect you to want to do that just because your odds for this are even lower, so you'd only want to take the other side of a 1:10 payout ratio if you thought it was 90% likely to be disassembled, the point is the breakeven point for positive expected returns is return ≥ cost * probability even before time discounted value of money and why would I want more money when I die).
As for hedging, isn't that normally done for negative outcomes? If so, what's the downside here?
A VN replicator on the moon is unambiguously harder than one on Earth (existence proof: life only found on one of them), so if the D6-to-D10 dice roll says "success!" for the moon, the mere existence of the tech will also radically transform what money even means down here on earth.
Surely the hedge to make against it is what to expect if we don't maintain the current rate of tech development that makes such an outcome even this likely? And the hedge for that looks somewhere between "prepper" and "political economist"?
Not by itself. I basically agree with your broader point, of course, but on this particular detail, if someone's goal is to turn the moon into something like a Culture Orbital with the Earth at the centre*, the overall momentum of the system doesn't need to change.
* Or the old barycentre at the centre. This is also a terrible idea, please don't do this. Apart from anything else, mistakes are inevitable and large chunks of moon/O will rain down on us.