As recently as last year, Martin Hilbert and Priscilla Lopez were able to make the following claim in their article "The World's Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information," (published in
Science, 1 April 2011): "the 6.4 × 10^18 instructions per second that humankind can carry out on its general-purpose computers in 2007 are in the same ballpark area as the maximum number of nerve impulses executed by one human brain per second (10^17)." Now, a lot can change in five years, especially if you subscribe to Moore's Law, but the data seems to suggest that the human brain is, at least for now, still the most powerful individual computing device we've got, by a significant margin.
Now, take billions of these (or similar) brains, reproduce their configuration down to the atomic level and upload them into a platform where their already robust individual processing powers can all be combined, and you've got something approaching the unimaginable. To further inflate the possibilities, let's propose that a Reaper brain might not be a classical computer, but a quantum computer. It would be able to perform processing tasks so profoundly immense that Sovereign's claim of each Reaper being a nation would begin to look not like braggadocio or hyperbole, but modesty: each Reaper's inner world would be something like a self-contained universe or multiverse, capable of running simulations and emulations that might allow the Reapers to experience (subjectively, but not objectively) transcendence of time and space as we know them. What looks from the outside like 50,000 years of "hibernation" might actually be the exploration of computationally manufactured inner realities far, far vaster and more complex than external physical reality. Maybe, from their unknowable subject positions, the Reapers really are, as Sovereign suggests, without beginning or end.
Modifié par stephen_dedalus, 10 juillet 2012 - 01:26 .
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