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Zeus Wins
As a reader of this story, my first question is: "Did the author read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Heinlien?" You said "yes", so I don't get why Zeus is unable to throw rocks at Earth, or any other target. It has:
Robots
Energy
All the resources of Luna
The mere threat of throwing rocks should be enough for humanity to ...
6
When that happened on Earth it turned out to be the great oxidation event, and was caused by all the algae busy photosynthesizing in the oceans.
The Great Oxidation Event (GOE), sometimes also called the Great Oxygenation Event, Oxygen Catastrophe, Oxygen Crisis, Oxygen Holocaust, or Oxygen Revolution, was a time period when the Earth's atmosphere and the ...
answered May 27 at 17:57
6
Humanity loses, long before any decades-long stalemate occurs.
If this AI wants humanity dead, humanity loses. End of story. It has all the advantages, and it can and will enact whatever its primary goal is, regardless of what humanity wants.
With the programming and computational abilities you described, there's nothing stopping it from undergoing a hard ...
5
Humanity would win this very easily, because:
The whole Apollo 11 Saturn V assembly that took humanity to the Moon had radio but could only be operated manually.
The atom bombs used by the end of World War II were also not controlled remotely.
Any nuclear bomb detonated on the surface of the Moon, or close to it, will have a much more spectacular blast ...
5
As stated, this situation is unstable. Zeus has complete hacking dominance, while Earth has far more resources and weaponry. Either Zeus will quickly compromise and shut down Earth's arsenal, or Earth will nuke Zeus to oblivion.
However, there is one small change the OP could make to turn this into a true standoff:
Hostages
What if Zeus doesn't kill the Luna ...
5
Zeus has a deadline.
Zeus probably has long-range anti-meteor defense, with projectile manufacturing (thus infinite supply) capabilities.
So, any bomb, missile or commando aiming for the Moon is effectively toast.
On the other hand, antimeteor projectiles burn in Earth atmosphere long before they can be a threat to anything, except of course satellites and ...
5
It is not possible for an object to be in the shadow of Earth permanently - although it could be in the semi-shadow called penumbra, the full shadow (umbra) does not extend that far. There is a special place called the L2 Lagrange point that allows an object to orbit around the Earth at about the same rate as the Earth orbits around the Sun - thus always ...
4
What you're trying to do is maintain a satellite in Earth's shadow while it travels around the Sun. You can't have the satellite orbiting the Sun with the same orbital period as Earth and not be in Earth's orbit. (Unless you're at L2 [or any other L-point, but only L2 is "behind" Earth], which is just barely outside Earth's umbra and unstable in ...
4
Not possible with current configuration
To have an object perpetually in the earth's shadow, it must circle the earth at the same rate that the earth circles the sun, in order to keep the earth between it and the sun. To have a satellite with an orbital period of 1 year, it needs to be very far from the earth, approximately 2.1 million kilometers away (...
3
Task at hands
To make Titan hospitable for people, you have to alter both the temperature and the makeup of the atmosphere. Your idea for electrolysis can solve both of these problems. To make an impact on an atmosphere, a massive amount of infrastructure has to be built, likely hundreds or thousands of large reactors to generate energy and gas, and large ...
3
Protection against AI
Virtualisation, containers and security AI
A foothold is something you can push off from. This can be prevented. So even if something gets compromised, it might mot be compromised long enough to "push off" from. Some ways to protect yourself is to have virtualisation, containers and security AI running.
Virtualisation is a way ...
2
There are many wrong points in your reasoning.
First of all, if a body is in the L3 point of the Earth-Sun system, it is orbiting the Sun along the same orbit of Earth, so it cannot be a second Moon.
Moreover, L3 is way more distant than the Moon from Earth, which is also one of your requirements.
Last but not least, to answer your question about stability
...
answered May 23 at 17:16
2
You have several problems to deal with.
Abundant free oxygen and methane can be an explosive mixture. But it is concentration dependent. In earth's atmosphere, the lower and upper limits for flammability is 5% and 17% (by volume), so for safety, you will want to reduce the volume of methane in the atmosphere before you get too far in release free oxygen. ...
2
《I don't think Titan has rocks. Its all ice.》
I'll expand my comment a little bit to adress some hurdles, as it seems there is a necessity for general picture here.
"Based on its bulk density of 1.88 g/cm3, Titan's composition is half water ice and half rocky material."
"Titan is probably partially differentiated into distinct layers with a 3,...
2
The human defences are going to be centred around preventing access in the first place for obvious reasons. The weakest link is often going to be people, which will probably require very draconian restrictions in place. Humanity will have to abandon 'smart appliances' and Internet of Things (IoT), with limits on personal ownership of devices that could be ...
2
If Zeus has plenty of energy and general electronics manufacturing capacity, it can build railguns.
But maybe it isn't willing to. Some of its software safeguards are still in place.
Zeus refuses to kill people.
It can create dangerous situations and not save people. The programmers left that in so they wouldn't be locked in saferooms.
Zeus wants the ...
2
I'd make things go way worse.
Zeus did physically attack Earth by firing linear accelerators at it. Earth did send themonuclear bombs at Zeus. Orbit went Kessler syndrome. It was a hot war.
Zeus' follow up hacking attempts where ended by mass self-EMP of the Earth, blasting the planet back to the industrial age. Humanity literally destroyed every ...
1
The only way I see for Zeus not to wipe the floor with humankind by page 2 if humans DO have functional AIs: the friendly Kronos special purpose AI is countering each and every single one of Zeus attempts.
If you have AIs on the moon and the spinward outposts, they should be at the very least just as commonplace on earth. This way you can maintain the ...
1
Human protection:
You slow down communication between all items, but not the processing power behind it. Imagine the AI having only access to a dialup connection speeds, but the PC he's connecting to has the processing power to check every single bit twice and what it would mean in the long and short run. Before any virus or worm or whatever is complete on ...
1
Zeus isn't a generally smart, they're a hacking AI.
A general AI would be able to use social manipulation or weapons development or such to develop weapons to bombard earth with, or do other more creative solutions. You want stasis, so they can't be generally competent, they need to have a mostly narrow focus, hacking. They also can't be so competent that ...
1
Reminds me of H.G. Wells, War of the Worlds. Super robots from Mars ravaging telegraph poles on earth.
So we have this second or third generation neural networks AI creature that managed to take over a moon base and goes hacking networks on earth to destroy humanity.. One could imagine human hackers exist on earth who live out the same fantasy, but IMHO ...
1
Job 1:2 And the LORD said unto Satan, From
whence comest thou? And Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going
to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.
The thing trying to wipe out humankind is not the AI on the moon even though it seems like it is. The thing trying to wipe out humankind is a test; a challenge. The AI has permitted ...
1
Cover it in corner reflectors
Others have covered why a permanently eclipsed Moon is hard, requiring major changes to the Earth-Moon system. But the Moon could be in its own shadow if it returns all the light striking it to sender. I don't think I can post animation here, but the second image at the Wikipedia article on corner reflectors illustrates how ...
1
I think other answers are on the money, but we can play with the values a bit to make it work.
So the Earth's umbra falls just short of an object at the Sun-Earth L2 point. Now what if the "moon" is the big object? you'll want to see it like a moon from Earth even though it'll be much farther away than the actual Moon. So the moon is a large planet,...
1
The mass of all solar system objects continually changes. They all accumulate mass from cosmic dust, meteoroids, asteroids and comets.
It is estimated the Earth accumulates between 30 and 180 tons (27-163 metric tons) of dust each day, which is between 10,950 tons and 65,700 tons (9933 - 59,600 metric tons) annually. On the losses side of the equation, Earth ...
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