davidad does the math: a billion mining robots would need ~7 centuries to dismantle Mercury
davidad · x · 2026-10-02
AI researcher davidad pushed back on a "no further AI progress" counterfactual about dismantling Mercury: the largest mining robot humans can build and operate — under far more favorable conditions than Mercury's — harvests 8.5e6 ft³/day. Even with a billion units, each crewed by 3-5 remote operators on Earth, disassembling Mercury's volume would take roughly 6.9 centuries. He argues the counterfactual is odd anyway, since purely human-operated space build-out plus dismantling would take several centuries on its own.
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