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Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development

nickbostrom.com · 2,682 words · saved by 2 readers

Translations: Bosnian, French by Neil Warren, German, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish Formats: HTML, PDF, Audio As I write these words, suns are illuminating and heating empty rooms, unused energy is being flushed down black holes, and our great common endowment of negentropy is being irreversibly degraded into entropy on a cosmic scale. These are resources that an advanced civilization could have used to create value-structures, such as sentient beings living worthwhile lives. The rate of this loss boggles the mind. One recent paper speculates, using loose theoretical considerations based on the rate of increase of entropy, that the loss of potential human lives in our own galactic supercluster is at least ~1046 per century of delayed colonization.1 This estimate assumes that all the lost entropy could have been used for productive purposes, although no currently known technological mechanisms are even remotely capable of doing that. Since the estimate is meant to be a lower bound, this

Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development ☾ I. The Rate of Loss of Potential Lives As I write these words, suns are illuminating and heating empty rooms, unused energy is being flushed down black holes, and our great common endowment of negentropy is being irreversibly degraded into entropy on a cosmic scale. These are resources that an advanced civilization could have used to create value-structures, such as sentient beings living worthwhile lives. The rate of this loss boggles the mind. One recent paper speculates, using loose theoretical considerations ba

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