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Comment by paxy | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you're comprehending the sheer difference in scale between 10^60 and 10^80.

Our galaxy has ~10^70 atoms. At an atom per compute element, we will use 1/10^10 of our entire galaxy for our own compute? 10^60 is a bit more than the number of atoms in our sun. Given our sub-exponential space advances over the last 50 years, it seems... ambitious... to turn our sun into a computer in the next 300.

If they're saying we'll be an interstellar spacefaring civilization in much less than 300 years, they really buried their lead :)

> If they're saying we'll be an interstellar spacefaring civilization in much less than 300 years, they really buried their lead :)

If you think we can't reach Kardashev scale I in 300 years you are really pessimistic!

We have, right now, the technology to go visit other stars. It would take a sizable amount of the world's GDP but it is possible. I certainly hope that in 300 years we will have explored other systems!

Actually, people are already working on getting to Alpha Centauri within a reasonable timescale and without exhausting the world's GDP [1] !

[1] https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/Initiative/3

I'm not saying it's impossible, but I wouldn't trust these guys to do anything. The funding is basically all from one russian oligarch who probably does it for fun then gets board. Their last initiative was much less ambitious, yet after several years the website just says "Details of the competition will be announced soon."

[1] https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/Initiative/2

http://www.positrondynamics.com

Where a sizeable amount is about the size of the Manhatten Project, so, in fact, not all that much.

Perhaps quantum computers 300 years from now won't use an atom per compute element.

Mass of the sun: 2 x 10^30 kg

Mass of a hydrogen atom: 1.67 x 10^-27 kg

So there are 1.2 x 10^57 atoms in the sun. And we need the sun.

The mismatch is caused by someone extrapolating an exponential trend in one area well into the future, ignoring physical reality. Anyone with a good grasp of high-school physics should have noticed this before the slides were released.

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