Russell: a hundred concerned neighbors point Nicoll-Dyson lasers at him and make him an offer he can't refuse. It's a simple enough solution for a reasonably bright five year old to figure out in 10 seconds; the fact that I didn't figure it out for months, makes it clear exactly how much to trust my thinking here.

Recently, Steve Omohundro and I were having a conversation about superintelligent attack and defense.

Omohundro was talking about using non-invertible problems (P vs. NP) to ensure that each of your parts know where your other parts are, while an attacker doesn't know where to aim without expending lots of energy to track you. (It goes without saying that an attacker has to attack in an unpredictable way, otherwise you can pull a Maxwell's Demon / Szilard Engine on the incoming attack to extract energy from it.)

And I was replying that if each local piece of yourself had to know where its local neighbors were, that implied a degree of regularity that wasn't usual in strong cryptography; and also that this kind of separation between pieces of yourself would make it difficult to do large quantum computations.

Some innocent unsophisticated bystander said, "I don't understand - why not just shoot lasers?"

"Lasers?" I said. "You'd use anything except lasers."

"Yes," Steve Omohundro said, "it's coherent light, each photon the same as every other photon - if you see one photon, you know what all of them look like - so basically, it's just a gift of free energy."

More to the point, how do you know what Hannibal Lector is doing in there? Tortured souls are not detectable from surface albedo.

Sorry, you're going to have to think about it for a few more months.