PLANET-SIZED Computers - Technological Endpoints of Civilization

well Ari we've been tracking this thing for weeks and we still don't know what it is you want to strike up a conversation with that thing you'd be my guest what do you think it was yeah a number wait wait a number a computation Aria I have an idea what this may be I think it's a hyper-intelligent super object in outer space a Jupiter brain now entering the facility what is the perfect computer well of course that depends on your definition of the word perfect I happen to like mine sentient yeah Tiger King was crazy but one definition of perfect might be a machine that can compute the most the fastest science fiction has thought about this commutation of computation for a long time in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy you can find a supercomputer that can tell you basically anything and more recently in the video game destiny 2 you can find a computer so powerful it can simulate infinite realities but whatever these ultimate machines are ultimately supposed to be doing to realize them we would have to realize the limits of computation so let's say that we want to build the fastest most powerful computer what would we be worried about as outlined by a 1999 paper by computational neuroscientist ander Sandberg the ultimate computer is limited by four main factors the first is processing power and memory density simply put a computer can't compute without all of those individual units of processing and memory the physical chips and circuits and these components can only get so small limited by physics and this will dictate our computers ultimate size and shape the second hurdle is processing speed a computer can only run as fast as the electrical signals can make it through the system the third limit is communication if our ultimate computer is very large and spoiler alert whoo-hee only a big boy the speed of light is going to be a check on how well our system can talk to itself across vast distances lastly our computer will need some kind of energy supply and a way to handle all of the resulting waste heat so we have the beginnings of an uber computer it's as small as possible it's as efficient and processor dense as possible and it has an adequate power source so let's take the logical extremes of all of these limits to try to build this thing at least theoretically in the real world so where do we start what do we build it with how about something very strong and conductive like an analogue of diamond and make the processors and circuits out of that we also want it to be as dense and large as possible so let's make it the size of a planet so that it's just above gravitational collapse I know it sounds crazy but we're gonna keep going where do we put this thing well because it's so heavy let's put it in space to help with the self-weight problem and what do we power it with fusion reactors yeah now we have a mega scale structure built from nano scale components floating in space computing science only knows what what do we call it well perhaps we could call it a Jupiter brain a hyper-intelligent super object and out of space ah yeah sorry sorry in the September of 1991 members of a private science and science fiction mailing list were coming up with a weird idea an ultra-intelligent machine in space the size of Jupiter not Jupiter itself but rather the mass of Jupiter fully converted into a computer they called this concept and other concepts like it Jupiter brains and it was really fascinating but how would humans ever realize and construct something like this well the original thinkers supposed with the appropriate designs in hand that something like self-replicating nano machines could get the job done they could multiply and cover the surface of planets and/or moons that you wanted to disassemble they would take the pieces apart atom by atom molecule by molecule supplying the components and the raw materials necessary to construct something like a Jupiter brain these ideas were first given scientific weight by a paper in 1999 by our friend Anders Sandberg building a Jupiter brain is theoretically possible but I'm less concerned with the how as I am with the why because why someone might build a Jupiter brain could have implications for your very reality how do you get something the size of a planet from something that's not even microscopic like and nano machine well I want to tell you a story there's a legend in India about a local king who was something of a chess fanatic I couldn't get a board during lockdown so I had to make one out of electrical tape he had the habit of challenging all the wise visitors to his kingdom to a game of chess one day a sage was visiting the kingdom and so the king challenged this sage today the king was feeling a rather boastful and he said sage if you beat me I will give you anything you wish the sage naturally agreed but he gave him a interesting proposition if the sage won he said if I win I want you to pay me in grains of rice but I want you to do it in a specific way if I win I want you to give me one grain of rice in the first square and then double it for each successive square so the gift of grain would be one grain in the first square two grains of rice in the second square four grains of rice in the third square eight grains of rice in the fourth square and so on and so on all the way down the board as the legend goes the sage beat the King and as the king was doling out the sages payment he realized there would be no possible way to give him the rice that he won do the math on this doubling and it's no wonder why the king couldn't pay the sage by the time you get to the 64th square you have an amount of rice literally that could cover the end Tyrel tea of India in rice a metre deep if you laid out all these grains of rice end-to-end counted out the distance it would go for over nine light-years that's enough to bring you to health of Centauri and then back this is how something like a replicating nano machine could go from basically nothing into the mass of a planet if a nanomachine was replicating like a bacterium every 20 minutes it can go from basically no mass to the mass of Earth in under two days wise guy arya take us to the spaceport please destination the human brain might be the most complicated organic structure in the universe that you know and if we wanted to put this complexity in the terms of computational language we might take all the synapses in a human brain all the connections and multiply that raw number by the frequency with which they fire electrically speaking if we do that we get a number around 10 quadrillion or so operations per second again the language of a computer why build a jupiter brain a hyper intelligent super object or not well you can read the papers yourself but if you had a planet-sized computer with the perfect power source the perfect materials the perfect processing speeds it might make a million trillion septillion operations per second and that's why this is the true power of a jupiter brain hyper intelligent smell but there's still a little ways to go though so here's some math in the meantime remember the dimensional analysis we did for hoarding toilet paper well it's gonna come in handy for a comparison here like we said the human brain might perform 10 to the 16 operations per second now estimates tell us that about a hundred billion humans have ever lived and human lifespans have recently doubled and have a lot of variance but let's just put the average lifespan at 50 years if we put these numbers into our dimensional analysis multiply it all out we get 10 to the 36 total operations the total amount of neural activity for every human ever yeah here a perfectly optimized planet-sized computer like this would be intelligent beyond comprehension just think of this 10 to the 32nd number that we just came up with and compare it to that 10 to the 42nd operations per second that means a super object like this would be able to fully and trivially simulate the consciousness of every human that has ever lived ever think about that for a moment every single human experience fully simulated every memory every bit of happiness every bit of love of hate every peak of ecstasy depth of despair all of it simulated in less than two microseconds using less than one one thousandth of the available processing power right there stay with that fact for a moment the entirety of human experience in what would be a passing flicker of electricity for that thing a Jupiter brain is only at the small end of this larger idea there are other concepts that seek to build computers out of entire solar systems worth of material but in whatever form these mega minds would prove incredibly useful if not invaluable they could literally have enough bandwidth to scan an entire galaxy at once and they could help us avoid potential threats or cosmic catastrophes and mitigate them they could advise us on how to be a proper spacefaring civilization and advise future human civilizations as they accumulated knowledge over millions if not trillions of years the potential of a jupiter brain is so great that it's a fundamental component of the now very famous simulation argument thinking goes that if one of these brains did exist it's so easy to simulate so many human lives that your chances of being a flesh-and-blood human right now are actually pretty low one paper that I read even suggested that the power of a jupiter brain makes the whole concept the technological endpoint of a sufficiently advanced civilization the crowning achievement if humans ever really could build a hyper-intelligent super object in outer space I guess my ultimate question about the ultimate computer would be this are you thinking about a Jupiter brain right now or is a Jupiter brain thinking about you thinking about itself until next time thank you so much two very nerdy staff at the facility for their direct and substantial support in creating this video today especially I want to recognize research assistant Kyle Zhu bryggen cool name and visiting scholar Jesse Laine if you want to join us at the facility go on the staff join our patreon and our disk order right now literally hundreds of nerds are organizing their own lockdown D&D games or giving me episode ideas and they're putting questionable memes up you can go to the patreon link in the description below in this video and if you support the facility just enough you get your name on Aria here each week and as you can see there's more and more of each time so I don't know how to pass the Oh Jupiter brains will be so oh so potentially intelligent then trying to talk to them would be like trying to talk to something that doesn't know how to talk so if you took just the order of magnitude comparison how many more connections are operations per second the Jupiter brain can make in comparison to you it'd be the same as you compared to a nematode and have you ever tried to have a conversation with a worm it doesn't go well a lot about dirt [Music]

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 907,388

Rating: 4.9361305 out of 5

Keywords: science, technology, computers, learning, stem, education, biology, physics, space, kyle hill, math, in a nutshell, black holes, how to, because science, engineering, the facility, ai, artificial intelligence, elon musk, jupiter brain, simulation theory

Id: Rmb1tNEGwmo

Length: 12min 43sec (763 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Schyte96]

Only planet sized? pfff, you are thinking to small for SFIA.

[u/pineconez]

Planet-sized computers are supposed to be a technological endpoint?

That's cute. You must be new here.

[u/tigersharkwushen_]

Notwithsanding whether a planet size computer is a technological end point, I don't even think computer, regardless of size, is a technological end point at all. I think something like harvesting energy from black holes is closer to a technological end point.

[u/Doveen]

And... What do you even do with it? You can calculate a lot of stuff, you can upload your brain in to it and live in a virtual reality tailored to your own desire.

Sounds nice as a gimmik but personally I don't find that appealing. I got in to miniature painting because while I could possibly own 3D digital models of the stuff I like, even paint them digitally, It's just not the same.

I would probably make a "homebase" in a nice torpical island virtual reality, but spend most of the computing capacity alloted to me to do stuff in the real world.

[u/spooky_redditor]

damm If it can do all that imagine what a matrioshka brain can do!

[u/[deleted]]

What about converting an asteroid or a small moon into a computer? What could we do with that?

[u/[deleted]]

Could we talk about like below 1nm computing? Something so efficient that's perfect for SFIA?

[u/KellorySilverstar]

Does it come with a redundant RAID array? NAS storage? I would think you would want a double planet system going for redundancy. How long will it take TMSC to upgrade it's graphics cards?

To me, as an achievement, a planet sized computer feels more limiting than expansive because it should quickly become obsolete and upgrading it would likely be a task equal to building it. The reason to build one is that your civilization is such that building it is just like our building a Google Data Center. Expensive, but not particularly challenging or much of an issue. As such would not really seem like an endpoint as such.

[u/tomkalbfus]

I wonder, would the planet Venus be a good site for a planet-sized computer? I mean planet-sized in that its diameter is the size of a planet, it could be a hollow shell for instance and still be the size of a planet. What if we built a hollow shell planet-sized computer around Venus that is the size of Earth? Since Venus is smaller than the Earth, it could fit inside. The shell would be supported by a "ribcage" of orbital rings, its surface would intercept the sunlight that was heading for the planet, using some of that energy to power its processors, radiating the excess into space as waste heat. Hatches in the surface would allow the introduction of elements needed to terraform the planet below. An equatorial docking ring would spin at orbital velocity allowing ships to dock with it while in orbit, and in the meantime while terraforming the planet below, we can run a simulation of the planet already terraformed, we don't have to wait!