George Dvorsky
Canadian bioethicist, transhumanist, and futurist
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George P. Dvorsky (born May 11, 1970) is a Canadian bioethicist, transhumanist and futurist. He is a contributing editor at io9[1] and producer of the Sentient Developments blog and podcast. He was chair of the board for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET)[2][3] and is the founder and chair of the IEET's Rights of Non-Human Persons Program,[4] a group that is working to secure human-equivalent rights and protections for highly sapient animals. He also serves on the Advisory Council of METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence).
George Dvorsky | |
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| Born | May 11, 1970 |
| Website | www |
Dvorsky is a secular Buddhist,[5][6] progressive environmentalist,[7] ancestral health advocate,[8] and animal rights activist.[9][non-primary source needed] He writes and speaks on a wide range of topics, including technoscience, ethics, existential risks, artificial intelligence, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and futurology, from a democratic transhumanist perspective.[2][3]
Nonhuman rights and ethics
Dvorsky presented an argument for non-human animal biological uplift at the IEET Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights conference at Stanford University in May 2006.[10][11]
Space development
Dvorsky gained some notoriety in 2012 after writing about Dyson spheres, hypothetical structures intended to collect the entire energetic output of a star with solar power collectors. While Dvorsky presented it as a solution to humanity's resource needs including power and living space,[12] Forbes blogger Alex Knapp and astronomer Phil Plait, among others, have criticized Dvorsky's article.
Dismantling Mercury, just to start, will take 2 × 1030 joules, or an amount of energy 100 billion times the US annual energy consumption ... [Dvorsky] kinda glosses over that point. And how long until his solar collectors gather that much energy back, and we’re in the black?
At one AU – which is the distance of the orbit of the Earth, the Sun emits 1.4 × 103 J/sec per square meter.[note 1] That’s 1.4 × 109 J/sec per square kilometer. At one-third efficiency, that’s 4.67 × 108 J/sec for the entire Dyson sphere. That sounds like a lot, right? But here’s the thing – if you work it out, it will take 4.28 × 1028 seconds for the solar collectors to obtain the energy needed to dismantle Mercury. That’s about 120 trillion years.
— Alex Knapp[13]
Other publications including Popular Science, Vice, and skeptical blog Weird Things followed up on this exchange.[14][15][16] None of them note the above numerical inaccuracies, although Weird Things does point out Plait's misunderstanding regarding bootstrapping, which Knapp agreed with in an update to his post.[13][16] James Nicoll noted in his blog that Knapp seriously underestimated the area of a sphere.[17]