[ExI] mbrains and latency

Mon Aug 7 18:46:52 UTC 2023

On Mon, Aug 7, 2023 at 6:35 AM spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>
> ...
> >
> >> 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...
>
> Ja, but we are not locked into the micron scale nodes, even if we want to use that to explain Abby's star light dipping.  Even going to just ten microns, still dust, and that gives us a trillion atoms.  But we are not locked into a gigabyte of memory either.  Keith you and I remember the days when our HP programmable calculators gave us 969 programming steps with some of that having to be partitioned into variable storage.  I did a lot of cool programming with that little thing.
>
> >...I don't know about the thermal problems either.  Might be ok, but I don't know how tiny objects radiate...
>
> In very general, smaller is better.  As an object scales down, the surface area to volume ratio increases.
>
> I wrote earlier about a trillion nodes communicating with others within a millisecond but I meant microsecond,

A microsecond would reduce the cube from 300 m to 3 meters on a side,
the volume to 27 cubic meters and the sunlight interception to 9
square meters.  The nodes are now so tightly packed that the front
ones shade the ones in the back.  I suspect that the station keeping
could be replaced by a frame at less mass cost.

> with the entire teragroup communicating higher-level signals with another teragroup a millisecond away.  So a typical spacing between nodes would be a millimeter or so.  But they don't just send single bits to each other, they send small-ish data packets.

The cube root of 10^12 is 10^4 so 3 meters would have 10,000 in a row,
about 0.3 mm spacing to the nearest neighbor.  If they are
station-keeping then the communication between them has to be
electromagnetic because the distance varies.  If they are in a frame,
wires will do.
>
> Another way to look at it: the human brain consists of a few billion neurons which have a number of inputs but don't individually calculate anything.  They just fire or not fire, depending on the input and the chemical environment.  A current computer network consists of a few million nodes, with each node performing a large number of very sophisticated calculations and sending each other very complex data packages.
>
> The MSocieties then are somewhere between those two in a sense: the nodes are not nearly as sophisticated as a cell phone, but more sophisticated than a neuron.  A member of an MSociety, call it an JBrain (reaching back to terminology from 20 years ago coined by I think Anders)

No, I found the original post on a floppy disk and it was by Perry
Metzger.  I bitched about the speed of light delay in the next post
which may be why I was tagged as the originator of the silly idea.
Human brains are asynchronous but we can impute a clock rate of about
200 Hz.  A brain spread out over a distance of more than 5 ms of light
speed would think slower than a human.  What's the point of that?  If
you want to think fast, the hardware has to be small.  I took this to
the limit here:
https://hplusmagazine.com/2012/04/12/transhumanism-and-the-human-expansion-into-space-a-conflict-with-physics/

"I have long had misgivings about large aggregations of computing
nodes forming a mind because of speed-of-light delays. That will
reduce “thinking speed,” since a mind cannot “be of one mind” if much
it is not aware of the current situation due to speed-of-light delays"
...
"Due to this line of thinking, I no longer think it’s practical to
surround a star with computronium. Instead, I suspect population
centers will shrink to sizes in the few hundred-meter range and sunk
in the deep oceans for cooling."

If what we are seeing at Tabby's Star is a Dyon Dot devoted to
computation, they took a different approach.  Ran out of planets with
cold oceans perhaps.  Or feeding the computers with that much power
heated the oceans too much. Or they grew the uploaded population far
beyond planets. Even at 7 au, the available power is huge.  I suspect
the shape is a deep wedge to provide them with radiation at right
angles to the sunlight.  From our direction, the temperature is about
65 K, which allows very efficient computation.

It is possible that they are not thinking much faster than we do now.
Otherwise, the edge-to-edge communication delay of 2.5 seconds would
be intolerable.  This makes many assumptions based on them occupying
15-star systems (or more) and having a biological origin.

> consists of a trillion nodes within a microsecond of each other doing a small amount of calculation and sending other nodes in that JBrain data packets of a few hundred or a few thousand bits.
>
> >...Other than it being an idea from long ago, what advantage does this have over a solid structure?
>
> Keith
>
> It doesn't need structural strength,

You don't need much in any orbit.

> it isn't damaged by orbiting debris and meteoroids.

Self repair.  I wonder how fast cosmic rays will take out the nodes?

> It can even be constructed from orbiting debris left over from an earlier pre-nanotech society suffering a Kessler event.

There is only around 6,000 tons of junk.  Plus most of it is the wrong elements.

> If so, it would be the only example I know of a way to recover space access after a Kessler catastrophe: nanoparticles disassemble the debris and construct dusi-sized nodes which go on about their business anywhere they want in orbit.

Big laser will also clean up the junk.

> If a meteor from outside comes tearing inward, it would punch right thru a cloud of nanodes, and take out those of course, but the others which escape the collision would go about their business as usual with nothing analogous to a memorial service for their suddenly missing teammates.  Nanodes don't get emotional or have friends.

it depends, it could take out an uploaded  person.  Hopefully they
have a backup, but if not it time for a wake.

Keith

> spike
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> > >...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
> >
>
>
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