Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury
Comments
andyjohnson0
uticus
> The shell is not merely a strength structure; it is a fixed logistics skeleton. Its purpose is to provide: dense distributed launch/capture corridors large-scale routing geometry attachment points for high-temperature radiator fields buffering volume for material and coolant traffic alignment and vibration-control structure for the mature transport system...
Roger that
rmijic
Author here: just noting that this is a first-draft and still evolving.
Also, it is LLM output and I have updated the readme to show that. But I didn't just ask an LLM to one-shot this. It was a process of iteratively throwing ideas at it, doing calculations, and getting other LLMs to critique. Probably ~100-200 calls to top of the line consumer reasoning models went into this so far.
rafterydj
This reads like an LLM plagiarizing this video from Kurzgesagt:
ethmarks
Kurzgesagt didn't invent the concept of disassembling Mercury to build a Dyson swarm. Stuart Armstrong proposed it in a lecture in 2012[0].
0xf00ff00f
Pretty sure the idea predates that lecture, it appears in Charles Stross' novel Accelerando from 2005 (which is based on short stories that were published years earlier).
rmijic
That video is describing the generic concept of building a Dyson sphere from Mercury but lacks a proper account of waste heat removal and energy. It also lacks a specific timeline.
andrewflnr
> The mirror fleet does not increase the total power available to the project; Mercury still intercepts only a fixed amount of sunlight.
I think I must be missing something important, because this doesn't make sense to me. If you put your mirrors in orbits where they don't block the dayside surface (sun-synchronous?), then they increase the total surface area receiving solar radiation.
Stefan-H
Yeah, orbital mirrors essentially expand the radius of Mercury, increasing the sunlight available. Terrestrial mirrors would ensure that light makes it from the sunward side to the dark side of the planet.
restalis
Also, the kind of satellites that aren't much more than mirrors, even with today's knowledge, they can be designed to change their profile/surface and thus reduce the absorption of the incident radiation, if they'd had to cross the space between the sun and the sunlight collector areas.
functional_dev
Isn't the point of mirrors to concentrate heat for mining, not to get more total power?
throwaway270925
From the Readme:
> Note: the written report is currently "vibe coded" physical and engineering analysis using various LLM-based AIs, with the author acting as a guide and sanity check and putting pieces together. The intention moving forward is to move calculations to code and simply report the results.
nacozarina
this seems to ignore the fact that Mercury is way too deep in Sol’s gravity well to be useful, all it’s looking at is Mercury mass.
Stefan-H
Why does being so deep in the gravity well pose an issue? If you are assuming the Dyson swarm is intended to go back up the well then sure, but that isn't necessary.
ethmarks
Could you elaborate? Why would being deep in the gravity well be a non-starter? I thought Mercury's proximity to Sol was a huge advantage because of the ample solar power which would make planet-side manufacturing easier.
choilive
Bootstrapping an electronics supply chain on another planet seems harder than building the dyson swarm itself.
asdff
Just let Claude figure it out
thot_experiment
If someone can't be bothered to write it I can't be bothered to read it.
ossicones
Stuff like this is why I read HN
baddash
1-6 years can't be realistic can it? does someone have a better estimate of how long this would take?
lorenzohess
50-100 years default, 25-50 with Plan Mode, and down to ~10 if you use Opus 4.6 Max
rmijic
The whole reason for this project is to show that a few years is in fact realistic.
pndy
What about orbital mechanics? Wouldn't that create issues with/for objects in the solar system?
mrlonglong
"Shellworlds". With just two shells. As described in his books by Iain M. Banks.
trebligdivad
Does Mercury not have any useful radioactive material to provide more power?
andrewflnr
I guess it might. I wouldn't plan on it without a very detailed survey though, to say the least. Whereas solar is definitely right there. (And you still have to worry about cooling either way.)
NoMoreNicksLeft
Are there reactor designs that could work up there? There's not much water for coolant.
ethmarks
There are other substances that can be used for reactor coolant. Molten salt reactors are actually substantially more efficient than water-cooled reactors because they have a higher operating temperature. You can also use liquid metal as coolant, such as lead or bismuth.
jmount
I encourage Dyson sphere enthusiasts to listen to the interesting argument that Dyson spheres they may be deliberately designed as an "sounds neat but is impossible" filter joke, ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLzEX1TPBFM .
Smaug123
(Thanks to the maintainers of yt-dlp and of whisper-cpp, and to OpenAI for training Whisper. It makes this kind of task actually bearable.)
There are no actual claims about Dyson spheres in the video? It's literally just "Dyson published a paper, I claim without evidence that Dyson intended it as a joke, people who believe it are gullible fools, therefore it's impossible, also I found someone else's blog post who doesn't know what they're talking about, also desiring the expansion of humanity is evil and eugenics"? Can you summarise an actual argument from the video?
MarkusQ
Sped through that, couldn't stomach the whole thing. Is there more to it than "argument by sneering dismissal"? (Basically, so far as I can tell, her point seems to be "this was intended as a joke to see if you're stupid, so if you believe it, you are, neener-neener!")
dist-epoch
Somehow I new before clicking that it was going to be Angela.
Two years ago: AI does not exist but it will ruin everything anyway
alhazrod
Please someone, send grey goo to Mercury.
LoganDark
I am such a sucker for technical Aspie writing. I've seen it mistaken for LLM output many times but this is not that.
rmijic
Actually, it is LLM output and I have updated the readme to show that. But I didn't just ask an LLM to one-shot this. It was a process of iteratively throwing ideas at it, doing calculations, and getting other LLMs to critique. Probably ~100-200 calls to top of the line consumer reasoning models went into this so far.
Smaug123
Nah, it's totally Claude. No human writes the bulleted list in https://github.com/RokoMijic/MercurialDyson/blob/4f6cb3c0b5b..., or "The thermal management problem that naively prohibits rapid disassembly is resolved by three key insights…". The whole thing reeks of Claude, but chapters 12 and 13 are probably the clearest slam-dunks.
If you want to compare styles, https://github.com/Smaug123/gospel/blob/764996d20e11674f9221... is similarly written almost entirely by Opus (4.5 rather than 4.6) with some strong LessWrong-o-sphere background prompting and the instruction to be terse. The styles are practically identical.
LoganDark
> DI containers mean the call site doesn't tell you what's called. Instead: pass values in, get values out.
That one is obviously LLM.
Before I left the comment, I reviewed some of this user's commit history to about a decade back, and they genuinely write like this. Though I think this is the first long-form content I've seen from them.
rmijic
I have plenty of long-form content on my blog at transhumanaxiology Less Wrong profile roko and X/rokomijic
grahamnorton39
For what it’s worth, gptzero.me rates it as entirely AI generated, with 100% confidence. It’s not perfect, but it’s a pretty strong signal.
Certain aspects of how it’s structured and written do also seem AI-generated—for instance, the simultaneously persuasive but explanatorily equivocal tone is pretty typical of current LLMs. Also, there are just some text formatting features that are pretty rare for humans to use—for instance, using the nice-looking Unicode 1/2 fraction glyph, which isn’t really in keeping with the otherwise unpolished maths formatting.
It’s a bit sad that AI writing is now so good as to seem almost authentic, if not for the giveaway of a few subtle stylistic quirks.
throwaway270925
It is though, even says so in the readme:
> Note: the written report is currently "vibe coded" physical and engineering analysis using various LLM-based AIs, with the author acting as a guide and sanity check and putting pieces together. The intention moving forward is to move calculations to code and simply report the results.
LoganDark
Ah, I do see that was added to the readme about 12 hours after my original comment. It does seem more heavily curated than any one-shot output would be.
agency
You sure about that? It really comes off as LLM output to me, in its general structure and formatting, attention-grabbing opening sentences of paragraphs ("This ratio has a profound consequence:", "This distinction matters."x2), and the classic "it's not X, it's Y" stuff ("The collector is a hybrid optical-power megastructure, not a single dense slab of ordinary powersats.", "The shell does not interact with a small number of giant launchers. It interacts with a dense distributed network.")
vinceguidry
I got about a fifth of the way in before the writing got too incoherent to stay interesting.
r-w
> The shell is not merely a strength structure; it is a fixed logistics skeleton.
Ancalagon
its not? how can you tell?
rmijic
it is
Reading the "endgame" section, and I feel that some serious thought ahould be given to what the replicator colony will do after it has finished dismantling Mercury.