Recently, the SETI, or Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, released an application called
SETI AT HOME, which allows any regular computer to help the SETI researchers find alien intelligence.
This idea is brilliant since it saves an enormous amount of money by distributing processing
power throughout computers all around the globe instead of buying super expensive supercomputers.
So, anyone can go to their website and download this application to help the SETI researchers
crunch data to find extraterrestrials. This way, the entire internet can be turned into
a giant supercomputer! But what if we needed a processing capacity that far exceeded all
the computers on Earth used in conjunction? Well, for such vast computational power, we
may have to look beyond our planetary resources, directly to the stars! This is where the idea
of the Matrioshka Brain proposed by Robert J. Bradbury comes in!
In his 1960 paper “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infra-Red Radiation”,
physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson proposed the idea of a megastructure. Now
commonly known as a Dyson Sphere, it was conceived to spot other advanced civilizations in the
universe, particularly, Kardashev Type 2 civilizations that are capable of controlling all of the
available energy in their stellar system! Dyson believed that a Type 2 civilization
should be able to build this hypothetical megastructure around its star which would
completely encircle it and harness all its energy.
There have been many variations of the Dyson Sphere since its conception. The simplest
of these megastructures would be a Dyson Ring. It would be made up of a ring of solar power
collectors in orbit around its star with a radius of 100 million miles. But having just
one ring wouldn't be enough. To harness all of the power of its star, a type 2 civilization
would use many Dyson Rings in orbit around its star giving rise to a Dyson Swarm. There
are other variations of this like a Dyson Bubble which would use satellites instead
of solar power collectors suspended by the use of enormous light sails using radiation
pressure to counteract the pull of gravity from the star, or a Dyson Shell which would
be a uniform solid shell of matter around the star intercepting 100% of the star’s
energy output. It is believed that a type 2 civilization would not just build these
megastructures, but also live in them and completely control what goes on inside them
according to Freeman Dyson.
But Robert Bradbury extended this idea in his anthology “Year Million: Science at
the Far Edge of Knowledge”. He proposed that far in the future, we would have the
technology to create a set of nested shells around a star, each of which will essentially
be a Dyson Sphere. Now, because this megastructure is similar to the nested Russian Matryoshka
dolls, Bradbury called his concept a “Matrioshka Brain”. In theory, this solar-system-sized
machine would be the most powerful computer in the Universe, capable of harvesting all
the useful energy from a star, while rendering it "essentially invisible at visible wavelengths".
The Matrioshka Brain would be able to carry out such a vast amount of calculations in
just a single second that even if all the 7 billion-plus brains were put together, that
still wouldn’t be any match for it!
Now, to work as a super-giant computer or the “highest capacity thought machine”,
a Matrioshka brain would draw its power directly from the star and spread it throughout the
network of encompassing shells. The first shell would acquire as much energy as it could
from the star and use it for computational processes. Now, these processes will generate
and radiate heat energy, which can in principle be captured to perform more computation. This
would be done by a second shell that surrounds the first shell. The second shell is just
like the first shell, but it gets its energy from the heat “waste” of the first shell
instead of directly from the star. This process would repeat until all the radiated heat energy
was consumed. For this reason, the inner shells could run at nearly the same temperature as
the star itself, while the outer ones would be close to the temperature of interstellar
space. So naturally, a Matrioshka brain with more nested Dyson spheres would be more efficient
since it would waste less heat energy.
But that’s not all. The shells or spheres of the Matrioshka Brain would be composed
of a hypothetical material nearing the theoretical limit of computational power called computronium.
Computronium can be defined as ‘programmable matter’ which supports computation, especially
in artificial substances suitable for high-efficiency computation. So, in essence, every particle
of computronium would behave like a microcomputer capable of interacting and sharing information
with other particles! Apart from this, we may also need an enormous amount of silicon
which we can mine from the planet Venus as raw material. Now, if we could construct such
a massive structure in our solar system, its shells or spheres would expand from the orbit
of Mercury beyond the orbit of Neptune according to Bradbury. However, a project of this caliber
is far beyond what our civilization can currently accomplish. But there have been several proposals
on how we could potentially build a Matrioshka Brain right here in our solar system!
One of the methods for implementing a Matrioshka brain would be through ‘self-replicating’
machines mentioned by Bradbury which are now being created. Billionaire entrepreneur Peter
Diamandis recently created a company called ‘Planetary Resources’ with the goal of
mining asteroids to make the infrastructure for building a Dyson sphere. Moreover, another
company with the name ‘Made in Space’ is researching and working on designing 3D
printing technology that would work in space with the ultimate motive of setting up factories
that could replicate themselves in outer space. Bradbury predicted, based on our current trends
that humans would be able to build a megastructure like the Matrioshka Brain roughly by 2250.
Now that would be pretty cool, but what can we accomplish with a super-powerful computer
like the Matrioshka Brain on our side?
Well, with the computational power of a Matrioshka Brain, we could do just about anything! From
simulating entire alternate universes to running perfect simulations of human minds into virtual
reality spaces supported by the Matrioshka Brain. We may even upload our own minds into
these virtual spaces and become a completely different immortal species! But how can we
even tell that we do not already live in a simulated reality that engages all our senses?
Well, some entrepreneurs and scientists, including Elon Musk, believe that we may already be
living inside a Matrioshka Brain! One of the reasons for this belief is that it answers
one of the biggest paradoxes of all time, The Fermi Paradox. It proposes that perhaps
we, or some other species, have already advanced to become a Kardashev type II civilization
and have uploaded their consciousness and memories into a Matrioshka Brain. This is
why we do not encounter any other alien life forms in our universe, since no simulation
of them exists within our simulated reality!
So, we may as well be living in one, as there is no way to tell the difference between a
‘simulated reality’ and an ‘actual reality’ if we were to be living in a Matrioshka Brain
simulation! And that brings us to the end of this video!
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