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How to destroy the Earth (2006)

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21–30 of 47 posts

Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)

#21
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still there, the signal-to-noise radio is much, much worse though.

Unfortunately, the increasing noise is rapidly pushing interesting information to below Shannon limit.

Hmmm.

I wonder how difficult it'd be to spider the web and index all the pages with a certain density of useful information.

There's ole entropy, but we also have a priori knowledge of certain bits of information that suggest that useful information in the content is nil. E.g., anything that is a listicle.

Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)

#22
I choose a "meticulously deconstructed" variant. I call it the "onion method".

First, invent a self-replicating robot. It does not need to be miniaturized. It would actually probably work better if they were all stadium-sized. Allow replication, using solar energy and near-surface resources, until the entire planet is covered by a uniform layer one robot deep.

The robots then securely connect to their nearest neighbors. You now have a uniform robot tensegrity shell around the planet. The linkages expand until the shell rises to a uniform altitude above the surface. This likely requires a material with tensile strength higher than any currently known, and a material with compression strength higher than any currently known. I haven't done the math. Reasonable strengths may require that the shell robots run on the surface a bit to start the whole thing spinning faster than the planet.

A circular section of the shell directly facing the sun de-links, falls back to the surface, and begins replicating as before. The remainder of the robot shell opens like a jellyfish mantle, to catch the solar wind and reflect additional solar energy to the dark side of the planet. The shell sails to a different orbit, so as to not re-collide with the planet.

Repeat until all shells have sailed away.

Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)

#23
Here's my way: An enormous particle accelerator.

Shoot electrons into space in vast quantities until the whole earth becomes so highly charged it blows itself to pieces.

Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)

#24

I choose a "meticulously deconstructed" variant. I call it the "onion method". First, invent a self-replicating robot. It does not need to be miniaturized. It would actually probably work better if they were all stadium-sized. Allow replication, using solar energy and near-surface resources, until the entire planet is covered by a uniform layer one robot deep. The robots then securely connect to their nearest neighbo…

Solar wind is not strong enough to put something in orbit.

Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)

#26
post #23

Here's my way: An enormous particle accelerator. Shoot electrons into space in vast quantities until the whole earth becomes so highly charged it blows itself to pieces.

Shooting electrons out gets harder and harder as you go since you're counteracting an ever increasing positive charge from the Earth.

Besides, on a uniformly conductive sphere (which admittedly the Earth is not at the crust but probably is near the mantle and core), excess charge distributes over the surface, so only the top layer of the Earth would get blown off (along with your accelerator).

Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)

#28
post #9
post #6

This reminds me of what the Web used to be: amusing entries by interesting people, devoid of advertising, marketing or JavaScript.

It's still there, the signal-to-noise radio is much, much worse though.

Your comment suggested a new tool/feature to me: what if we had something like Google, except it added the additional constraint where it only led you to sites/pages that were in that old retro lean static simple HTML style. The graph of text pages, perhaps with embedded images, version of the web.

Ideally it would be just an add-on feature to an existing web search engine like Google. But if you wanted to boot it up faster you could perhaps meta-spider/index on top of them, where your wrapper site added this constraint as a filter.

I'd love to be able to explore a curated web subset that was just text and images, no bandwidth bloat, no obvious SEO abusers, no pirated content farms, no ads, no spyware, no audio, no (automatically streaming/playing) video, etc.

Re: How to destroy the Earth (2006)

#30
post #6

This reminds me of what the Web used to be: amusing entries by interesting people, devoid of advertising, marketing or JavaScript.

In the same vein I've got to recommend

* Norman Yavin's Usenet archive of interesting technical and science related posts (http://yarchive.net/)

* Prof James Calvert's pages on about everything worth knowing (http://mysite.du.edu/~jcalvert/)

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