Ah gotcha I somehow missed that part

If Roko’s Basilisk is ever created, the resulting Ai would look at humanity and say “wtf you people are all so incredibly stupid” and then yeet itself into the sun

That’s…what?

Yep

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/us/nestle-water-california.html

No.

Point 1: if it did exist, it wouldn’t be this novel thing, it already happens with humans

Point 2: …but it won’t exist.

Helios is another one of the Sun’s names. It’s the more poetic version. But Sol is a proper name, exclusive to our sun.

Yeah but that’s not a Roko’s Basilisk scenario. That’s the singularity.

Sure, but if you’re taking that tack it could feel anything. We could build an AI for love and forgiveness and it decides it’s more fun to be a psychopath. The scenario has to be constrained to a sane, logical AI.

Sure, but that particular AI? The “eternal torment” AI? Why the fuck would we make that. Just don’t make it.

The cost is that you deplete the aquifer. Generally speaking, water pumped out of the ground doesn’t replenish (except on geologic time scales). That’s what I meant by the fossil fuel comparison. It’s not like taking water from a stream or a lake replenished by snowmelt. Once that aquifer is dry, it’s dry, and the land becomes dead.

Maybe, but I don’t trust generations to consistently maintain it. I’d rather a self-correcting natural process.

Come live in San Francisco!

“Oh no, California is wracked by drought! I mean except San Francisco…”

“Oh no, giant heat wave is pummeling the West Coast, except San Francisco which is still 65 degrees…”

“Oh no, giant wildfires are threatening everywhere except San Francisco which is surrounded by water on 3 sides…”

“Oh no, housing is becoming unaffordable everywhere, except San Francisco! …because it was already unaffordable in SF…oops…”

I did the math for Socal the last major drought, and normal people using water was like 2-5% of the water usage. And that includes lawns and stuff. Farming was the vast majority of water usage.

Yeah that’s like saying the gas in your car comes from a hole in the ground.

Resource extraction is never free.

Removed by mod

Fair point, but doesn’t change the overall calculus.

If such an AI is ever invented, it will probably be used by humans to torture other humans in this manner.

In this hypothetical future we’ve learned how to live with an equilibrium. Also we’ve fired all the terminally pessimistic doomers into the Sun. Not for any scientific reason, just because it was the right thing to do.

I don’t like the idea of a tenuous bunch of satellites keeping an atmosphere in play. Relying on technology to keep atmosphere on a planet sounds super risky. Like if we wanted to live in such a place, we’d live on a space station. Planets are supposed to be safe and solid.

The current theory is if we grab a few asteroids and hit mars just right, we can speed up its rotation enough to restart the dynamo. Sounds way cheaper than a permanent planetwide shield.

Possible. It’s looking like the planets may not have an atmosphere, which means there could be ocean life but vast surface-covering life like Earth is unlikely.

I think tidally locked planets are fascinating. If they have water, they could be eyeball planets. There’s a habitable ring in the twilight zone, and depending on how hot the day side is parts of that might be habitable too.

But we’ll likely run into the same issue re the atmosphere as we have with Mars: no magnetosphere to prevent any atmosphere from getting stripped away. It’s starting to look like a self-protecting atmosphere like Earth has is quite rare in rocky planets.

If I could summon a genie and learn any one bit of knowledge, it’d be how to restart Mars’s dynamo. Once we have that, terraforming is a solved problem. Not easy, but doable.