[ExI] mbrains and latency

[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Aug 6, 2023 at 9:01 PM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>.
> >
> >>... Keith does that clear it up at all?
>
> >...No.  I can't make head nor tail of your model...
>
> Long story short: the MSociety model is not analogous to the human brain.  We can imagine nodes which only communicate with about a trillion other nodes right there in its own neighborhood of perhaps a millisecond diameter.  Then there are other trillion-node objects nearby, perhaps a few milliseconds distant.  The entire star doesn't support a single MBrain but rather a huge number of smaller clusters of a trillion nodes.

At 300,000 km/s, a ms is 300 km across.  As a cube, 27,000,000 cubic
km, or 27 T cubic m.  There would be 1 node in 27 cubic meters, kind
of sparse

> >>... If MBrain nodes do some kind of calculation, they could still be very small and resemble dust.
>
> >...Ever seen a photo of a comet tail?  Dust gets blown away by light pressure...
>
> Sure, but comet tail dust is not station keeping.  If these nodes, on the 1 micron scale, reflect light and can orient themselves as needed, they can stay in formation, they can fly away from the host star or towards it.  To drop towards it, the node reflects light in the direction of travel in orbit.

Standard solar sail operation.

The area facing the sun is 90,000,000,000 square m.  A one-micron
square is 10^-12 square meters.  A trillion is 10^12 so the whole
trillion nodes would intercept one square meter of light or one part
in 90 billion.  (Ignoring the crazy diffraction.)  At 1 au, a square
meter is around a kW.  I would have to look it up, but I don't think a
kW worth of even ideal computing is much.

> >...Can't be dust and station-keeping makes no sense.,,
>
> Dust-sized nodes can do station keeping, if they orient themselves with differential reflection.

I am not sure they can do anything useful.  An atom is around a
nanometer, there are 1000 nm in a micron, so there could be a billion
atoms in the cube.  I don't have Drexler's work in front of me, but
that does not seem like enough to build a rod logic microprocessor
much less a PV power system, transmitter/receiver, sail reflectors,
etc.  A gigabyte of memory would burn the whole atom count.

Nanotech is not magic.

I don't know about the thermal problems either.  Might be ok, but I
don't know how tiny objects radiate.

Other than it being an idea from long ago, what advantage does this
have over a solid structure?

Keith

> >...So a medium sized asteroid would provide enough material.
>
> >...Please check math.
>
> Keith
> >
> >
> > spike
>
> Keith your numbers look like they are in agreement with calcs I have done in the past.  I might dig out the old notebooks and look at my previous work once again.
>
> spike
>