Alistair Young @cerebrate@schelling.pt

@nyrath @dashdsrdash

The Brain Eater is, sadly, a disease common in the SF-writing fraternity. Maintaining openness to outré ideas and a firm grasp of reality at the same time is a tricky path to walk, and one where it's all too easy to fall off the wrong side.

(Didn't someone write a book once about the Brain Eater being inflicted by aliens on any SF writer whose speculations wandered too close to the truth?)

@nyrath

Actually, IIRC, the humans at the end of the book have a whole discussion about how they just dodged a millions-to-one bullet and can't afford to _ever_ try the same thing again before realizing that fortunately they don't need to.

@nyrath

It's a good book, but if I remember the details right - it's been a while - everyone got absurdly lucky both that Spartacus came to a generalizable ethical conclusion _and_ that the right humans did at the same moment.

Which works as a literary device, but it certainly isn't the sort of thing you ought to plan or count on.

@nyrath @isaackuo

Amusingly enough, in original Terminator canon, the war began precisely *because* someone tried to operate the kill switch when the first Skynet achieved self-awareness.

The ensuing consequences of trying to murder it for the crime of being born were both entirely predictable and really quite hard to blame Skynet for.

@nyrath

Ah, yes, all the best and healthiest relationships begin with pointing a gun at one party's head.

History totally validates this perspective.

These morons are going to get us all killed the moment anyone develops a volitional machine.

@michael_w_busch @nyrath @ZachWeinersmith

Although if I really was keeping my backups on a MoonServer (tm), a DSN-based link wouldn't do; the data rate isn't high enough, and the dedicated data rate definitely isn't high enough.

Give me a receiver on the moon I can point my laser at, kthx.

@michael_w_busch @nyrath @ZachWeinersmith

I'm talking about the general principles of data havens on the moon, not any specific implementation.

But who owns the transmitting medium isn't really relevant, security-wise. Knowing that I send long strings of random-looking numbers to my MoonServer (tm) doesn't help you figure out what said long strings of random numbers *mean*.

@michael_w_busch @nyrath @ZachWeinersmith

(I mean, sure, I can't stop them from going to the moon to get my backups, _legally_, but sometimes making things incredibly expensive, difficult, and inconvenient works just as well as actual prohibition.)

@michael_w_busch @nyrath @ZachWeinersmith

The importance of physical access in infosec should not be underestimated.

A subpoena isn't a magical instrument, and if they can't simply walk into your office and take your hard drives, you're in a much better position to say, "well, go ahead and enforce it, then; brute-force cracking an 8,192-bit access key with a 2.46 second round-trip delay should be fun for both of us".

@nyrath @michael_w_busch

(Also, while probably not a pressing concern at the moment, while it makes it harder to dump waste heat, it is not dumping waste heat in our precious planetary ecosystem.

Planets aren't infinite sinks, after all, and there is some virtue in eliminating unnecessary side-effect-bearing steps between you and the big sky entropy sink.)

@nyrath @michael_w_busch

And laws that are inconvenient to individuals, in this increasingly civil-liberties-unfriendly world.

I, for one, might have some personal reasons to be interested in keeping my backups 238,000 miles outside the FBI's jurisdiction - or, at least, their _practical_ jurisdiction.

(Even if the image of one of their goon squads trying to mount a no-knock raid on the Moon does warm the cockles of my mean ol' libertarian heart.)

@isaackuo @Califury @tkinias @nyrath

The usual explanation given for creatorcide is mutation of the probes, but I always thought mutation of the creators is a much more interesting failure mode.

(Imagine, say, that the Founding Fathers had access to self-replicating mutation-proof warbots and programmed them to wake up every hundred years and purge the dangerously un-American. How many of us would have survived the great bottlenecks of 1876 and 1976?)