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