His idea presaged the concept of Dyson spheres, massive structures that completely surround a star and capture most of its energy. Burroughs, in his novel The Ticket That Exploded, imagined that beneath a planetary surface, lies “a vast mineral consciousness near absolute zero thinking in slow formations of crystal.” The astronomer Fred Hoyle wrote dramatically and convincingly of a sentient hyper-intelligent “Black Cloud,” comparable to Earth-sun distance. What about on the supersize end of the spectrum? William S. If both our brains and our neurons were 10 times bigger, we’d have 10 times fewer thoughts during our lifetimes. It’s likely that the first true artificial intelligences will occupy volumes that are not so different from the size of our own bodies, despite being based on fundamentally different materials and architectures, again suggesting that there is something special about the meter scale. But they are also simpler in their behavior, and require a superstructure of support (energy, cooling, intercommunication) that takes up a substantial volume.
Electronic circuit elements, for example, are now substantially smaller than neurons. We can imagine building neurons that are smaller than our own, in artificially intelligent systems. Constrained: The height of redwood trees, like these Giant sequoia trees in Sequoia National Park, California, is set by the balance between gravity on the one hand, and transpiration, water adhesion, and surface tension in the plant xylem on the other. Given that our brains are composed of neurons, which are themselves, in essence, specialized cooperative single-cell organisms, we can conclude that biological computers need to be about the physical size of our own brains in order to exhibit the capabilities that we have.
Progress in the theory of computation suggests that sentience and intelligence likely require quadrillions of primitive “circuit” elements. When it comes to known sentient life, the range in scale is even smaller, at about three orders of magnitude. The honey fungus that lives under the Blue Mountains in Oregon, and is arguably a single living organism, is about 4 kilometers across. In these 45 possible orders of magnitude, life, as far as we know it, is confined to a relatively tiny bracket of just over nine orders of magnitude, roughly in the middle of the universal range: Bacteria and viruses can measure less than a micron, or 10 -6 meters, and the height of the largest trees reaches roughly 100 meters. The size of things in our universe runs all the way from the tiny 10 -19 meter scale that characterizes quark interactions, to the cosmic horizon 10 26 meters away.
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