Thank you, that looks like a great book, and I'm impressed that they made it open access.
I'll try to find the time to go over it in more detail later, but from brief skimming now, I failed to find the "bottom line", saying how long we have until we run out of energy sources, and it seems to be advocating that by moving to renewable sources, we are good to go forever, at least unless population growth continues exponentially.
So with population growth declining across the world, and the gradually accelerating shift to renewables (and continuously improving tech), I don't quite see a big cause for concern. While of course it's true that there is some limit to how many GPUs we can run on Earth, I don't think we're anywhere close to that limit, and I don't see a particular argument against the option of seeding the rest of the universe with compute infrastructure too (other than that we should stop to think whether we should).
Same story with energy. Google gives us free stuff cause someone pays. And the moment the ad industry stops paying the bill the next data center becomes unaffordable. The story is never about how much energy is available in the universe. The story is about Ameobas over eating and blowing up.
I'll try to find the time to go over it in more detail later, but from brief skimming now, I failed to find the "bottom line", saying how long we have until we run out of energy sources, and it seems to be advocating that by moving to renewable sources, we are good to go forever, at least unless population growth continues exponentially.
So with population growth declining across the world, and the gradually accelerating shift to renewables (and continuously improving tech), I don't quite see a big cause for concern. While of course it's true that there is some limit to how many GPUs we can run on Earth, I don't think we're anywhere close to that limit, and I don't see a particular argument against the option of seeding the rest of the universe with compute infrastructure too (other than that we should stop to think whether we should).