[ExI] Chips The Size Of[interplanetary] Dust [and matrioshka brains]

[Russell Wallace]

On 9/2/07, spike <spike66 at comcast.net> wrote:
> I once spent a lot of mental energy trying to figure out how to do
> station-keeping with M-brain nodes approximately the size of a dime (but
> much thinner).

What would you see as the advantage of making them that small? Seems
to me things are easier and more efficient if you agglomerate a decent
amount of machinery together in a single mass, for a Dyson sphere
maybe km-size nodes. We break things up into small units like cell
phones because we have a particular need to make them that small, but
when we just want total computing or other throughput we use smaller
numbers of larger units.