[ExI] They're Made out of Meat

[John Clark]

On Sun, May 24, 2026 at 9:20 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

*>> They're Made out of Meat*
>> <https://web.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html>
>>
>
> *> I've always enjoyed this story as a means of loosening one's carbon
> chauvinism, but I heard an argument against its likelihood that I find
> rather compelling. It goes like this: if you consider all the vastly
> improbable fine-tuning coincidences necessary to support the self-emergence
> of water soluable carbon-based life, it would be vastly more improbable
> that we would exist in a universe whose laws were simultaneously optimized
> to support other classes of self-emerging life based on entirely different
> mechanisms.*
>

*The laws of physics had to be such that large stars would be produced
because otherwise carbon would not exist. A 25 solar mass star spends 7
million years burning hydrogen to helium, and half a million years burning
helium to carbon, and 600 years burning carbon to neon, and 1 year burning
neon to oxygen, and 6 months burning oxygen to silicon. Silicon burning
lasts for just one day and produces iron, and then BOOM. The interesting
thing about life is that it can produce a structure that can process data
intelligently, and silicon and carbon are semiconductors so both can do
that; although I admit I don't quite see how you could get to the age of
semiconductor data processing without Evolution going through the stage of
carbon chemistry data processing. *

*If a way could be found to make thin high quality single crystal diamonds
cheaply then you'd actually be able to make AI semiconductor chips that
would work MUCH better than anything made of silicon. Heat is a huge
problem for chip designers and diamond conducts heat away from hotspots 5
times better than copper and 15 times better than silicon. And silicon has
a narrow band gap of only 1.1 electron volts so when the chip gets hot
electrons can accidentally jump over this small gap, but diamond has a much
higher gap of 5.5 electron volts so it can operate reliably at temperatures
of 500C, and in places of extremely high radiation levels too.*

*And with silicon even an electric field of modest strength can cause it to
lose its insulating properties and produce a sudden huge surge in
electrical current destroying the chip, so great care is needed to make
sure electrical components are not packed too closely together on the chip.
But the strength of the field required for this to happen is 60 larger in
diamond than it is in silicon. *

*But even if you had a dirt cheap way to make diamond wafers there remains
one huge problem to all this, doping. Although it's easy to make p-type
diamonds using boron, for decades nobody could figure out how to make
n-type diamonds, and CMOS logic gates need both types. But then just one
month ago a Chinese company found a way to make n-type diamonds using what
they call a "tri-element co-doping strategy" using boron, hydrogen and
phosphorus.*

*The boron-hydrogen-phosphorus tri-elements co-doped stable N-type single
crystalline Diamond*
<https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22163#:~:text=Here%20we%20demonstrate%20stable%20n,as%200.249%20this%20http%20URL.>


* John K Clark  *
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