I’ll grant that technology advancement isn’t as linear as one might expect. But I’d be pretty doubtful that this sort of scenario is terribly likely.
UAPs and UFOs: Anyone have any estimates for the computer power the aliens might have if they exist?
I agree, it was only a tongue in cheek reference to the book.
Since we’re treating an inherently silly subject seriously, why are we even worrying about size, heat and optical processors. We are talking about a species that does interstellar travel on a whim to explore for . . . reasons. If it’s not FTL, well, the sheer engineering involved is going to still imply a metric ton of applied knowledge we haven’t even considered. And if it -is- FTL, then we’ll just have to accept that some or many of our assumed constraints aren’t that constraining!
For that matter, this is sci-fi! What if their entire species is some form of Star Trek energy state beings that share their consciousness, mental processing power, and operate on an entirely different mental scale? A world mind as it were, would probably be able to process information in parallel, on scale we can’t imagine, and possible at near instantaneous speeds.
Maybe they don’t need, want, or have computers at all, and because it would require you to be part of said species, would have fundamentally uncrackable encryption.
I thought the reason we’re talking about processors is that it was the direct topic of this thread more than a year ago. (Note the thread title.)
You can disagree with me as much as you wish, I remain confident that when it all plays out we will not see another full 10x increase in processing power/efficiency in our lifetimes or anyone else’s lifetimes because we are mear the limits of physics. You can continue to “but what if scientists discover magic” or “but cavemen” as much as you wish, but time will tell.
Well, I think we can. The human brain has a much greater bit density than anything we can build today, and I’m sure we can improve on that without magic.
Not to mention my other point that @Darren_Garrison skipped over - we know that incredibly tiny machines (cells - animal, bacterial, fungus, plant) can do amazing things, and we know how they do it. We can already make our own DNA strands in any pattern you want. Given a million years to tinker with DNA, we will be coding organisms from scratch with, at minimum, the capability to do what any living thing can do at a cellular level (and I am certain that DNA can also code for things which never have evolved and would be incredibly unlikely to ever do so but can be coded easily enough if there’s an end goal in mind - for example, a wheel and axle).
Even if we assume that there will be no new physics (like Lord Kelvin did in 1897) we still have incredibly far to go.
The Aliens don’t have computers. Their home planet is 30 light years away, and they intercepted our television ads and are here to steal our precious VIC-20 technology.
We already have chips that operate faster than signals can propagate across them. It requires very clever chip design, but it’s done.
And, of course, even if their hardware has limits not much beyond what we have, their software might still be far more advanced than ours. We’re currently seeing some huge advances in software capability; what more might aliens have?
Most materials, including metals, could be made orders of magnitude stronger if you could somehow eliminate all of the defects.
Isn’t a material with no defects at the molecular level basically a metamaterial?
I’m not sure if there are precise standard definitions, but when I hear “metamaterial”, I think of something that has lots and lots of “defects”… in exactly the right places. Fractal structures down to the molecular scale, that sort of thing. Of course, there’s also a lot of room for improvement with those, too.
Single-crystal metallurgy is PFM* today. Or might be Pure Alien Magic if they know how to scale it up and we haven’t figure that out yet. A perfect diamond or even aluminum crystal billet the size of a planetoid would be a formidable bit of hell-for-strong base structure.
* Pure F***in’ Magic. A term of art for advanced tech. Standard military slang and I’m not sure what other disciplines might use it.
Ah you’re right: I forgot what was main topic and what was tangent.
So, any response to the rest of my post?
Sure, there are plenty of technologies where we are near the bottom of the s curve instead of the top. Biotech is one of them.
