Down and Fast, Part 1

A number of researchers and theorists lately have tried to answer the question of how densely packed calculation, and possibly intelligence and consciousness, can be in a given volume of space. The initial impetus is to determine how much more intensely useful and pleasurable our computers can get in the coming years…but the implications go far, far, far deeper than that. I will not go into the technical details in this posting, because there are so many things to consider: the nature of information at the quantum level, the requirements of intelligence, the actual complexity of natural environments, etc. So, let’s take a top level view:

Synthesizing some readings in Kurzweil and Lloyd I will throw out the following hypothesis – human intelligence is only 1 in 10^20+ space efficient. OK, in English what that might mean is that we could fit 100 billion billions of intelligent beings of roughly human capacity inside a single human body, if we pursued the maximum capacities of Nature. Holy carp Batman…if that does not blow your mind nothing will!!

If we borrow the essential point of Feynman’s famous essay ‘Plenty of Room at the Bottom’ the realization implied here gets even weirder; once intelligence starts designing and giving birth to ensuing generations of intelligence an accelerating process brings the upper end of capacity in a MUCH shorter time than expected by ‘linear’ thinking. Kurzweil is on record as saying that this incredible moment in history may occur as early as 2080, based on current technical trends.

I myself am a hesitant Singulatarian…we have been promised many things in the past that turned out to be a lot harder to implement than supposed. The gestalts of living systems are indeed a LOT more interesting than merely amped up logic can perceive. BUT! the very real possibility remains that we are entering a historical period as different from its antecedents as the Big Bang is from the vacuum. An exaggeration? I don’t think so…not any more.

Let me coin some terms: a) let us call a ‘planetane’ a space in which intelligent participants experiencing interaction with each other and their environment at the complexity level of our Earth…roughly 10 billion sentient humans on 500 million square kilometers of land with various populations of other creatures, i.e. 10 trillion fish, several quadrillion ants, etc.; b) let us call a billion to a trillion planetanes a ‘galactane’; c) let us call a billion to a trillion galactanes a ‘utane’. A utane, or utanic domain, is an environment as complex as the entire known universe, AFTER it has been inhabited completely by a space-faring ecology-building intelligence.

Now, back to the question of the ultimate ‘density’ of intelligence; the basic query to absorb here is that it appears possible that our creative progeny will be able to generate complexity at the level of inhabited Universes ON THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH IN THE RELATIVELY NEAR FUTURE!!!! Individual bodies may reach utanic complexity, and trillions of these ‘entities’ can safely and ecologically inhabit a planetary environment. Under this regime a grain of sand can contain a planetane, and you can hold multiple galactanes in your hand. Not one, but billions of universes are born the blink of an eye – maybe the Big Bang comparison is not strong enough……