Overheating: A problem everywhere. The logistics of a post-scarcity society may have eliminated most material-supply problems; advanced ergtech may have made energy not a meaningful practical constraint; computer power may be an absolute bargain everywhere; but even with every fancy high-tech possibility up to and including neutrino-catalyzed cooling in play, the requirement for heat dissipation still enforces speed constraints on nanotechnology, density limits on computronium, causes problems for guns firing on full-auto, prevents stealth in space, and requires most heavy industry to be kept at least in orbit even if its customers are downwell. Damn you, thermodynamics!
2 thoughts on “Trope-a-Day: Overheating”
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So, if I was a graduate student in ontotechnology, instead of focusing on coherency oriented tricks (warp drives, FTL radio, magic pockets, translocation, free energy, etc) I’d focus instead on non-local IN-coherency oriented tricks.
e.g., I’d look for ways to dump waste heat and/or unwanted entropy somewhere ELSE, either in the understructure of spacetime, or some distance away in semi-local spacetime. And if universe SIGSEGs and dumps that waste heat out as randomized exotic particles, as long as it’s someplace else, I still win.
Even if I have to pay a significant energy tax for it, it would be well worth it, for all the applications you just listed.
Plus, I’m sure I could write enough grants from enough foundations and starcorps for that research to fund myself and my research for a couple of decades (12-year-ads?)…
Ah, yes, non-local entropy sinks. The most promising angle so far is a tangle channel variant that still requires you to provide an entangled sink mass to dump your entropy into, but even that will be a revolution in entropy management technology. If they can make the dratted thing work.
(Which is to say… yep, it’s being worked on.)