The Sun is the most nutritious thing that's reasonably close. It's only 8 light-minutes away, yet contains the vast majority of mass within 4 light-years of the Earth. The next-nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is about 4.25 light-years away.
By "nutritious", I mean it has a lot of what's needed for making computers: mass-energy. Seth Lloyd's "Ultimate physical limits to computation" imagines an "ultimate laptop" which is the theoretically best computer that is 1 kilogram of mass, contained in 1 liter. He notes a limit to calculations per second that is proportional to the energy of the computer, which is mostly locked in its mass (E = mc²). He also notes that computer memory is limited linearly by energy, and that energy expenditure can be reduced a lot with reversible computation.
So, you need energy to make computers out of (much more than you need energy to power [...]
First published:
January 8th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Fo8fjvpL7pwCTz3t/on-eating-the-sun)
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