On Wed, Aug 04, 2004 at 11:04:15AM -0700, "Hal Finney" wrote: [...] > The system will consume 10^25 * 60 nanowatts or about 6 * 10^17 watts. > Now, that's a lot. It's four times what the earth receives from the sun. > So we have to build a disk four times the area (not volume) of the earth, > collect that power and funnel it to our computers. Probably we would > scatter the computers throughout the disk, which would be mostly composed > of solar collectors. (Keeping the disk gravitationally stable is left > as an exercise for the student, as is the tradeoff involved in making > it smaller but moving it closer to the sun.)
If I did my unit conversions right, such a disk would be over 30,000 miles in diameter. So we'll probably get some advance notice - "Hey, what's that big-ass thing orbiting around the Moon?" -Jack