[ExI] Tabby's star

[Keith Henson]

spike wrote:

> OK assume away all engineering problems: assume fantasy engineering but reality physics.
> What does our M-Brain look like now?  Mine all look like big diffuse clouds of tiny particles,
> where we accept latency in exchange for maximal efficiency in scare matter resources.

This is the dominate paradigm from the early 90s, enshrined in
Stross's Accelerando.

My analysis came to the conclusion that waste heat and latency are
such huge problems that people never go off planet, but move into into
the deep ocean for cooling.

There are all sorts of problems with tiny particles out in space.  You
can see what happens to them from light pressure in a comet tail.  But
if you want to muster more matter than a planet, then a solid surface
which keeps your computing elements stable with respect to each other
seems easier  to control and cope with waste heat than a tiny
particle.

Can we put numbers on this?

The structures around Tabby's star are the other end of the scale from tine.


Keith