A lot of hot air.
And, since hot air rises, yeah, something is up.
UAPs and UFOs: Anyone have any estimates for the computer power the aliens might have if they exist?
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).
<This isn’t a reply to eburacum45, I don’t know how to remove that association>
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.
They have the computational power to simulate a universe. We are inside the alien spacecraft.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I believe in the relativity of wrong. 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.
We are already at the point where processors are so small they run in to the uncertainty principle, in the form of quantum tunneling.
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)”
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.
Or we are just missing something obvious.
Maybe they don’t have any computers at all!
I’m sure that’s what the Clovis culture’s top flint knappers said.
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.
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”.
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.
Throwing more cores at a problem to a nearly arbitrary degree is something we can already do. It is how we make modern supercomputers. 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 </shania>