# UAPs and UFOs: Anyone have any estimates for the computer power the aliens might have if they exist? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [March 11, 2022, 12:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uaps-and-ufos-anyone-have-any-estimates-for-the-computer-power-the-aliens-might-have-if-they-exist/960860 "2022-03-11T00:34:54Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![chappachula](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/d2c977/32.png) [@chappachula](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chappachula)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2023, 1:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uaps-and-ufos-anyone-have-any-estimates-for-the-computer-power-the-aliens-might-have-if-they-exist/960860/21 "2023-10-04T13:07:41Z")
> [@ready29003](#): > > Something is up A lot of hot air. And, since hot air rises, yeah, something is up. ---
**Author:** ![eburacum45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eburacum45/32/8690_2.png) [@eburacum45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eburacum45)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2023, 6:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uaps-and-ufos-anyone-have-any-estimates-for-the-computer-power-the-aliens-might-have-if-they-exist/960860/22 "2023-10-09T18:04:02Z")
> [@ready29003](#): > > David Grusch and some 30 whistleblowers have come forward to congress Grusch did not give many specific details we can check, so we don’t know what these ‘whistleblowers’ have actually disclosed. He is deeply involved with a somewhat dubious group of UFO believers who are promoting the fiction that the US has secret information about aliens, but they have never been able to produce any convincing evidence yet. I suspect, though I can’t prove (yet), that a significant fraction of these ‘30 whistleblowers’ are members of this dubious cabal. It is absolutely absurd that the US, with only 5% of the world’s surface area and population, has information about alien incursions when the rest of the world doesn’t (or, alternately, it is also absurd to think that all the countries in the world are in a conspiracy to cover this knowledge up, since many of these countries are at loggerheads with one another). ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2023, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uaps-and-ufos-anyone-have-any-estimates-for-the-computer-power-the-aliens-might-have-if-they-exist/960860/23 "2023-10-09T18:16:48Z")
\ > [@Darren\_Garrison](#): > > Except for possible quantum computing as others have mentioned (which has limited uses) I don’t expect aliens to have much more computing power than we do. I’d say that the difference between a 5 MHz 8088 and a [5 GHz modern chip](https://www.pcworld.com/article/563358/heres-why-the-5ghz-wars-are-back.html) would dwarf the difference between a 5 GHz modern chip and a Gleepnerg Inside® alien chip, for the same reason that the aliens aren’t going to have Mach 100 aircraft, ground cars that get 1,000 miles per gallon of gasoline, or terajoule laser pistols: material physics stretches only so far before becoming a mature technology that has reached its limit. And humans 300 years ago may have reasoned that the aliens would not travel more than a couple of hundred miles in a day because their horses would get tired. Yes, a particular technology has limits, but no, intelligent species are not forced to only advance a single technological solution in a linear way. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2023, 6:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uaps-and-ufos-anyone-have-any-estimates-for-the-computer-power-the-aliens-might-have-if-they-exist/960860/24 "2023-10-09T18:22:35Z")
> [@ready29003](#): > > Anyone have any estimates for the computer processing power an alien species might have on say a typical spacecraft. Assuming these aliens have advanced technologically at least 300 years beyond us? They have the computational power to simulate a universe. We are _inside the alien spacecraft_. > **["the call is from inside the house" When A Stranger Calls(1979).wmv](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkcGm-pWwsQ?=list)** > > "the call is from inside the house" clip from "When a Stranger Calls" (1979) ---
**Author:** ![eburacum45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eburacum45/32/8690_2.png) [@eburacum45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eburacum45)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2023, 6:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uaps-and-ufos-anyone-have-any-estimates-for-the-computer-power-the-aliens-might-have-if-they-exist/960860/25 "2023-10-09T18:52:32Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > Yes, a particular technology has limits, but no, intelligent species are not forced to only advance a single technological solution in a linear way. It may be the case that alien computing technology uses ideas we can barely imagine. Such as computation inside the 4th dimension (you could stack an almost infinite number of computer processors on top of each other in the 4th dimension, while retaining the same 3-dimensional footprint in this universe) - or you could use a wormhole to communicate with a distant processor of arbitrary size and power, in which case the limiting factor would be the bandwidth of the wormhole. So the limits are pretty high, if we speculate hard enough. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2023, 6:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uaps-and-ufos-anyone-have-any-estimates-for-the-computer-power-the-aliens-might-have-if-they-exist/960860/26 "2023-10-09T18:56:13Z")
> [@eburacum45](#): > > So the limits are pretty high, if we speculate hard enough. [![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/UnYPaENQVDc/hqdefault.jpg "Scientists Invented Magic (Simpsons)") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnYPaENQVDc) ---
**Author:** ![eburacum45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eburacum45/32/8690_2.png) [@eburacum45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eburacum45)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2023, 7:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uaps-and-ufos-anyone-have-any-estimates-for-the-computer-power-the-aliens-might-have-if-they-exist/960860/27 "2023-10-09T19:02:39Z")
On the other hand, a wormhole connection of significant size would probably be very massive - maybe as massive as a black hole of similar size - and a computer with an extension into the 4th dimension might also be prohibitively massive, which might explain why these objects apparently crash so often. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2023, 8:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uaps-and-ufos-anyone-have-any-estimates-for-the-computer-power-the-aliens-might-have-if-they-exist/960860/28 "2023-10-10T08:30:07Z")
Regarding “magic”, yeah, I am normally the first person to push back against “what the bleep do we know” and try to caution people to be realistic about what science can achieve. But when we’re talking interstellar species coming to earth, it’s very much a special case. Chances are, they will be _millions of years_ of technological progress ahead of us, just due to how old the universe is and the extreme unlikeliness of two species becoming a technological species in a smaller window than this. We cannot begin to fathom what such a species would be capable of achieving, as I alluded upthread, 300 years ago our most advanced transportation technology was the horse. Of course, aliens cannot do anything physically impossible. But time after time we have seen things thought to be impossible have some kind of exception, or loophole, or just turn out to not be a blocker at all because alternative means can achieve the same result. Now imagine making such discoveries over thousands of times the length of all of human history. ---
**Author:** ![eburacum45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eburacum45/32/8690_2.png) [@eburacum45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eburacum45)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2023, 9:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uaps-and-ufos-anyone-have-any-estimates-for-the-computer-power-the-aliens-might-have-if-they-exist/960860/29 "2023-10-10T09:06:35Z")
Well, we should really go back to Wesley Clark’s link to see what could be achieved without magic. The original paper by Seth Lloyd is here. > **[Ultimate physical limits to computation](https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9908043)** > > Computers are physical systems: what they can and cannot do is dictated by the laws of physics. In particular, the speed with which a physical device can process information is limited by its energy and the amount of information that it can process... The idea that we should run the processors at a billion degrees is overkill; just by running them at room temperature we could get an increase in speed of more than a quintillion percent, and by making the bit density as high as possible the processors per kilogram could be increased by a factor of more than a billion. If each alien ship has a tonne of computing substrate then it could have the equivalent of a trillion laptops working a quintillion times as fast as the one I’m typing this on. Who needs magic? Even so, this tonne of alien computer would need a very efficient cooling system to maintain this low temperature, and the processors would be so small they’d run into the Uncertainty principle, so the answers might get a bit weird. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2023, 10:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uaps-and-ufos-anyone-have-any-estimates-for-the-computer-power-the-aliens-might-have-if-they-exist/960860/30 "2023-10-10T10:04:02Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > Of course, aliens cannot do anything physically impossible. But time after time we have seen things thought to be impossible have some kind of exception, or loophole, or just turn out to not be a blocker at all because alternative means can achieve the same result. Now imagine making such discoveries over thousands of times the length of all of human history. I believe in [the relativity of wrong](https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html). We are probably a lot less wrong about what is possible and not possible than the people of hundreds of years ago. And if something is at a physical limit, it doesn’t matter if you are one hundred, one million, or one billion years ahead, it is still at the physical limit. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2023, 10:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uaps-and-ufos-anyone-have-any-estimates-for-the-computer-power-the-aliens-might-have-if-they-exist/960860/31 "2023-10-10T10:08:32Z")
> [@eburacum45](#): > > and the processors would be so small they’d run into the Uncertainty principle, so the answers might get a bit weird. We are _already_ at the point where processors are so small they run in to the uncertainty principle, in the form of [quantum tunneling](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/itiuw8/how_are_chip_manufacturers_getting_around_quantum/). ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2023, 10:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uaps-and-ufos-anyone-have-any-estimates-for-the-computer-power-the-aliens-might-have-if-they-exist/960860/32 "2023-10-10T10:40:55Z")
> [@Darren\_Garrison](#): > > I believe in [the relativity of wrong](https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html). We are probably a lot less wrong about what is possible and not possible than the people of hundreds of years ago. I also believe in that principle. What I am saying to you, is there is a difference between: “What the bleep do we know, maybe water is actually K2T and gravity is powered by human consciousness!?” and “Probably an ETI _millions of years ahead of us_ will have moved beyond a technology that _even we_, a fledgling intelligent species, have reached the likely limit of, and _even we_ have already started developing alternatives that are more efficient in certain domains (photons, qubits, biological etc)” ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2023, 1:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uaps-and-ufos-anyone-have-any-estimates-for-the-computer-power-the-aliens-might-have-if-they-exist/960860/33 "2023-10-10T13:31:47Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > and _even we_ have already started developing alternatives that are more efficient in certain domains (photons, qubits, biological etc)” Let’s look at optical computing, for example. The current fastest CPUs available run at 6 GHz. In 1/6,000,000,000th of a second light can travel only 5 cm. I don’t think you are likely to have chips operating faster than a signal can propagate across the chip any electrical or chemical signalling is going to move even more slowly than that. So that’s a hard physics limit we are already close to. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2023, 2:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uaps-and-ufos-anyone-have-any-estimates-for-the-computer-power-the-aliens-might-have-if-they-exist/960860/34 "2023-10-10T14:09:27Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > If you can travel near or past the speed of light then it’s probably safe to say that you can generate so much energy and, as a side effect, cool so much material using that energy, that you could probably build and power any sized silicon computer that you could ever dream of [Or we are just missing something obvious.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_story)) Maybe they don’t have any computers at all! ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2023, 2:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uaps-and-ufos-anyone-have-any-estimates-for-the-computer-power-the-aliens-might-have-if-they-exist/960860/35 "2023-10-10T14:11:51Z")
> [@Darren\_Garrison](#): > > Except for possible quantum computing as others have mentioned (which has limited uses) I don’t expect aliens to have much more computing power than we do. I’d say that the difference between a 5 MHz 8088 and a [5 GHz modern chip](https://www.pcworld.com/article/563358/heres-why-the-5ghz-wars-are-back.html) would dwarf the difference between a 5 GHz modern chip and a Gleepnerg Inside® alien chip, for the same reason that the aliens aren’t going to have Mach 100 aircraft, ground cars that get 1,000 miles per gallon of gasoline, or terajoule laser pistols: material physics stretches only so far before becoming a mature technology that has reached its limit. I’m sure that’s what the Clovis culture’s top flint knappers said. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2023, 2:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uaps-and-ufos-anyone-have-any-estimates-for-the-computer-power-the-aliens-might-have-if-they-exist/960860/36 "2023-10-10T14:40:29Z")
> [@Babale](#): > > I’m sure that’s what the Clovis culture’s top flint knappers said. I reference back to “the relativity of wrong”. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2023, 2:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uaps-and-ufos-anyone-have-any-estimates-for-the-computer-power-the-aliens-might-have-if-they-exist/960860/37 "2023-10-10T14:53:45Z")
> [@Darren\_Garrison](#): > > I reference back to “the relativity of wrong" And it’s true that flint hasn’t advanced all that much beyond what those Clovis folks were doing. I doubt the aliens would be much better than us at metallurgy, for example - oh, I’m sure they know some nifty alloys that our military would kill for, but nothing _revolutionary_. On the other hand, there are fields we are only dipping our toes into, like metamaterials. And that’s not to mention mastery over existing processes. Imagine how advanced our understanding of genetics will be in one million years, if we last that long as a culture, and what we could accomplish with that. At a minimum, we could build custom made bacteria to do any task that any cell in the animal, plant, fungi, or bacterium kingdom can fulfill. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2023, 3:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uaps-and-ufos-anyone-have-any-estimates-for-the-computer-power-the-aliens-might-have-if-they-exist/960860/38 "2023-10-10T15:12:29Z")
> [@Darren\_Garrison](#): > > Let’s look at optical computing, for example. Well firstly, do you get the point that I was making? Because the point of mentioning optical processors was not to conclude “therefore aliens will use optical processors”. > [@Darren\_Garrison](#): > > The current fastest CPUs available run at 6 GHz. In 1/6,000,000,000th of a second light can travel only 5 cm. I don’t think you are likely to have chips operating faster than a signal can propagate across the chip any electrical or chemical signalling is going to move even more slowly than that. A processor’s clock speed, how many calculations it can perform in unit time, and how quickly signals propagate are three different things. The only relevant thing in this discussion is the second. In recent years, much of the improvements in processor performance have been due to the use of more CPU cores, not the clock speed. And a lot of the point of something like optical computing is that circuits can be stacked and essentially make a cuboid processor. But of course, significantly faster clock speeds could also be employed due to less issues with cooling. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2023, 3:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uaps-and-ufos-anyone-have-any-estimates-for-the-computer-power-the-aliens-might-have-if-they-exist/960860/39 "2023-10-10T15:40:21Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > In recent years, much of the improvements in processor performance have been due to the use of more CPU cores, not the clock speed. Throwing more cores at a problem to a nearly arbitrary degree is something we can already do. [It is how we make modern supercomputers](https://www.statista.com/statistics/268280/number-of-computer-cores-in-selected-supercomputers-worldwide/). That aliens might toss lots of cores at a problem does not impress me as being advanced. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2023, 3:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uaps-and-ufos-anyone-have-any-estimates-for-the-computer-power-the-aliens-might-have-if-they-exist/960860/40 "2023-10-10T15:57:23Z")
> [@Darren\_Garrison](#): > > That aliens might toss lots of cores at a problem does not impress me as being advanced. Firstly, I didn’t claim that aliens would use silicon tech with more cores. Secondly, the reason that we’re talking about processors was because you were citing it as an example of an insurmountable obstacle. Now you seem to be conceding that it is surmountable, but the big problem now is that the solutions don’t impress you 🙄 Finally of course your issue earlier was with magical thinking. So, when discussing ETIs apparently anything too far beyond human tech is magical thinking. But anything too close don’t impress you much \ [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uaps-and-ufos-anyone-have-any-estimates-for-the-computer-power-the-aliens-might-have-if-they-exist/960860.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uaps-and-ufos-anyone-have-any-estimates-for-the-computer-power-the-aliens-might-have-if-they-exist/960860.md?page=3)