An amusing if implausible story, Eliezer, but I have to ask, since you claimed to be writing some of these posts with the admirable goal of giving people hope in a transhumanist future:

Do you not understand that the message actually conveyed by these posts, if one were to take them seriously, is "transhumanism offers nothing of value; shun it and embrace ignorance and death, and hope that God exists, for He is our only hope"?

If existential angst comes from having at least one deep problem in your life that you aren't thinking about explicitly, so that the pain which comes from it seems like a natural permanent feature - then the very first question I'd ask, to identify a possible source of that problem, would be, "Do you expect your life to improve in the near or mid-term future?"

Saved in quotes file.

The way stories work is not as simple as Orson Scott Card's view. I can't do justice to it in a blog comment, but read 'The Seven Basic Plots' by Christopher Booker for the first accurate, comprehensive theory of the subject.

"I'd like to see a study confirming that. The Internet is more addictive than television and I highly suspect it drains more life-force."

If you think that, why haven't you canceled your Internet access yet? :P I think anyone who finds it drains more than it gives back, is using it wrong. (Admittedly spending eight hours a day playing World of Warcraft does count as using it wrong.)

"But the media relentlessly bombards you with stories about the interesting people who are much richer than you or much more attractive, as if they actually constituted a large fraction of the world."

This seems to be at least part of the explanation why television is the most important lifestyle factor. Studies of factors influencing both happiness and evolutionary fitness have found television is the one thing that really stands out above the noise -- the less of it you watch, the better off you are in every way.

The Internet is a much better way to interact with the world, both because it lets you choose a community of reasonable size to be involved with, and because it's active rather than passive -- you can do something to improve your status on a mailing list, whereas you can't do anything to improve your status relative to Angelina Jolie (the learned helplessness affect again).

"The increase in accidents for 2002 sure looks like a blip to me"

Looks like a sustained, significant increase to me. Let's add up the numbers. From the linked page, total fatalities 1997 to 2000 were 167176. Total fatalities 2002 to 2005 were 172168. The difference (by the end of 2005, already nearly 3 years ago) is about 5000, more than the total deaths in the 9/11 attacks.

Eliezer,

I was thinking in terms of Dyson spheres -- fusion reactor complete with fuel supply and confinement system already provided, just build collectors. But if you propose dismantling stars and building electromagnetically confined fusion reactors instead, it doesn't matter; if you want stellar power output, you need square AUs of heat radiators, which will collectively be just as luminous in infrared as the original star was in visible.

Eliezer,

It turns out that there are ways to smear a laser beam across the frequency spectrum while maintaining high intensity and collimation, though I am curious as to how you propose to "pull a Maxwell's Demon" in the face of beam intensity such that all condensed matter instantly vaporizes. (No, mirrors don't work. Neither do lenses.)

As for scattering your parts unpredictably so that most of the attack misses -- then so does most of the sunlight you were supposedly using for your energy supply.

Finally, "trust but verify" is not a new idea; a healthy society can produce verifiable accounting of roughly what its resources are being used for. Though you casually pile implausibility on top of implausibility; now we are supposed to imagine that Hannibal Lecter created his fully populated torture chamber solar system all by himself, with no subcontractors or anything else that might leave a trace.

Carl,

If "singleton" is to be defined that broadly, then we are already in a singleton, and I don't think anyone will object to keeping that feature of today's world.

Note that altruistic punishment of the type I describe may actually be beneficial, when done as part of a social consensus (the punishers get to seize at least some of the miscreant's resources).

Also note that there may be no such thing as evolved hardscrabble replicators; the number of generations to full colonization of our future light cone may be too small for much evolution to take place. (The log to base 2 of the number of stars in our Hubble volume is quite small, after all.)

I have tended to focus on meta level issues in this sort of context, because I know from experience how untrustworthy our object level thoughts are.

For example, there's a really obvious non-singleton solution to the "serial killer somehow creates his own fully populated solar system torture chamber" problem: 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.

The reason for this untrustworthiness is itself not too hard to figure out: our Cro-Magnon brains are hardwired to think about interpersonal interactions in ways that were appropriate for our ancestral environment at the cost of performing worse than random chance in sufficiently different environments.

But fear is not harmless. Where was the largest group of Americans killed by the 9/11 attacks? In the Twin Towers? No: on the roads, in the excess road accident toll caused by people driving for fear of airline terrorism.

If the smartest thinkers in the world can't get together without descending into a spiral of paranoid fantasy, is there hope for the future of intelligent life in the universe? If we can avoid that descent, then it is time to begin doing so.