[ExI] Slow thinking

[BillK]

On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 5:50 PM, Keith Henson  wrote:
> Human clock rate is perhaps 200 Hz.  I don't know where computers will
> limit, but we are already GHz rates, if we get up to 200 GHz, latency
> becomes a big problem with maximum dimensions for a brain being in the
> mm range and the subjective time to get a message back from the far
> side of an MBrain is 40,000 years.  All of a sudden, galactic
> communication problems have come to the solar system.
>
> Power, cooling and speed of light delays all conspire against brains
> or even civilizations being physically large if they are running at
> high clock rates.  Round trip to the moon is about 2.5 seconds.  At an
> easy million to one subjective speed up, it would take about 29 days
> to get a message back.  Even the 60 ms low latency optical fibers from
> New York to London would seem like 16 hours.
>
> It occurred to me just now that this is an alternative answer to the
> Fermi question.  Once intelligent life forms start moving into faster
> hardware, it may be that they can't leave their home planet without
> getting hopelessly out of touch with whatever is going on.
>
>


Yup.  We discussed this in April this year.
(You as well!).  :)

<http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2011-April/065635.html>


BillK