MTH Fiction Series · III of V · Charles Stross — Accelerando

Economics 2.0

In Stross's Accelerando, the solar system is dismantled into computronium and the post-Singularity economy runs at millions of subjective years per calendar year. The key Fermi discovery: interstellar travel is ruinously expensive — not in joules, but in subjective time. For a mind running at silicon speeds, a forty-year crossing is a forty-million-year exile.

Post-Singularity Parameters
The Two Ledgers
Local throughput
Subjective yrs per calendar yr
One-way trip — objective
One-way trip — subjective
Ops forgone by 10⁹ kg seed ship
Set parameters to calculate.
Trip duration, objective vs subjective (log scale)
Objective (calendar)
Subjective (experienced)
Computronium & the Vile Offspring
In Accelerando, humanity's successors dismantle the inner planets into nested shells of computronium — matter optimized for computation. The "Vile Offspring" who inhabit it run Economics 2.0, a resource-allocation regime so fast and strange that baseline humans cannot participate. The novel suggests self-aware consciousness itself may persist only as a niche inefficiency. The engineering side of this structure is explored in the OCS Matrioshka Brain Layer Planner.
Why Nobody Leaves
The objective ledger says expansion pays: a colonized star eventually doubles your compute. But decisions are made by minds, and minds run fast. At a 10⁶× speedup, a 40-year crossing is experienced as 40 million years of exile from an economy evolving faster than biology ever did. Whatever arrives is a fossil. In the novel, only obsolete, slowed, or desperate minds travel — the fast economy stays home, by overwhelming revealed preference.
MTH Connection
The Macro Transcension Hypothesis predicts inward migration because compressed inner space offers more computation per joule and per second. Stross supplies the complementary repulsion: outward travel carries a subjective-time cost that grows in direct proportion to how advanced you are. The faster you think, the farther away the stars become. Both pressures select the same endpoint — dense, local, silent computation.
The ωCen Stress Test

Omega Centauri is the strongest available stress test for the bandwidth-and-latency family of Fermi solutions. In the cluster's dense core, neighboring stars are typically a few light-months to light-years apart — a hundred to a thousand times closer than stars in the solar neighborhood. Travel objections mostly evaporate there: crossings take years, not millennia, even at modest speeds. If expansion-minded civilizations existed in ωCen, the cluster should have been engineered end-to-end billions of years ago.

Yet the cluster shows no colonization signature. Under Stross's model this is still expected — note in the calculator that even an ωCen-core hop of 0.2 ly costs a fast mind thousands of subjective years, and the subjective penalty scales with speedup, not just distance. The silence of a system where travel is cheap is therefore evidence that the binding constraint is the mind's economics rather than the rocket's: precisely the regime where MTH's inward attractor dominates. What to look for instead is concentrated waste heat — the topic of the layer planner and the Dyson swarm detectability tool.

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