So you know the Great Filter, right?
It’s what happens when you look up at the stars and ask “Where the fuck is everyone”.
There are so many planets out there, yet it’s radio silent. The intelligent life to planet ratio is really, bad. So far we’re the only ones.
You gotta ask, why?
Enter, the Great Filter. Something, at some point in the pipeline, prevents planets from developing and maintaining intelligent life capable of electromagnetic communication.
We don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s a quirk of chemistry that makes the chance of multicellular life forming ridiculously low. Maybe it’s a quirk of biology that makes sapience incredibly rare. Maybe it’s a hyper intelligent space worm that eats any civilisation that makes too much noise. Maybe it’s runaway climate change.
The thing is, we really don’t want to be on the wrong side of that filter, because that suggests that an imminent demise is in our civilisation’s future. And with every discovery of non-intelligent life on other planets, it becomes increasingly likely that we’re on the wrong side of that filter.
Enter, the recent discovery of life on Venus. It means that we’re much more likely to be on the wrong side.
But, watching that debate tonight, I began to feel a sense of relief. At least if we’re on the wrong side of the filter, it’s not as though we’re wasting a once-in-a-galaxy chance. We’re just yet another civilisation that failed to get past that filter. I can live with being unexceptionally mediocre.
Yes, it's possible the great filter is "everyone plays computer games". But you can run much better computer games much faster on a Matrioshka brain.
That's also an answer, the accelerando hypothesis they all uploaded, spent upwards of a trillion subjective years doing stuff we can't imagine, and decayed in a few thousand objective years. Still, we should be able to see the ruins, but I'm not sure we've checked for what a Dyson swarm looks like after a billion years of neglect.
The issue is it has to explain every civ from every plausible origin. It just takes one species to go expansionist in the real world and suddenly our planet is getting devoured by nanobots.
To me at least on paper a super large computer just sounds dumb. The smaller the computer the better. The larger the scale the slower the communication between parts. And if you want a super large network of computers, to me it makes way more sense to distribute that on the surface of the planet instead of hauling it to space. And hell cooling and powering it would be easier on earth probably, too. And of course a space computer will mean that anime matrix ping would be shit.
Expansionism may be impossible, because of the scales involved and the impossibility of faster than light travel. I'm not sure how feasible those super large generational ships that are common in sci fi are. Maybe there isn't an energy source that could get you into the next galaxy and power your ship for centuries/millenniums. And honestly, it takes one accident, one civil war or mutiny, and the generational ship is over.
It's not one computer. It's a very large number of networked computers in a swarm around the sun. The first shell uses the sun's light, the next shell uses the waste heat from the first shell etc. Its true there's a trade off between complexity of the computer and speed, you'd have microscopic fast thinkers mediating more complex machines all the way up to "jupiter brains"
The problems of interstellar travel are easily solved by Von neumann probe. It's very unlikely that your alien invasion is by anything bigger than a coke can. It hits the outer Kupier belt and begins building. By the time you notice it's too late. Swarm noms solar system, turns it into habitat for host species if that's it's thing, makes a bunch of probe copies and launches them.
I still don't get how that computer would not overheat massively, current computers need cooling solutions and so would any complex computation, the computer is also getting blasted by full spectral radiation from the sun. Current electronics and ultra violet-gamma ray spectrum go about as well together as snails and salt. I honestly don't know what kinda computation wouldn't get interrupted by it. Biological and optical solutions would have problems as well.
And of course, anime matrix ping is still shit.
You make it a diamonoid (possibly ferrousoid to prevent melting on the inner shells) molecular rod logic device.
You also make the architecture reversible to reduce heat, now most waste heat is from the entropy of the mechanical operation.
stirling engines on the front to reduce the light to usable energy, heat radiators on the back to cool, computation moves down the energy gradient.
All of these elements are very small.
The ultra violet-gamma spectrum will run havoc on molecular logic device, as well. And probably more so than on a transistor. Heat will also breakdown the molecules. And just radiating heat away is not feasible for the current computers (that are also around cold air, don't have that in space), but it will be enough to cool of a future computer, that is also being blasted by the sun?
And my waifu is teleporting all over the place, because anime matrix ping is so dog crap.
Real "A Topiary" hours