There’s a lot of fun stuff in Anders Sandberg’s 1999 paper The Physics of Information Processing Superobjects: Daily Life Among the Jupiter Brains. One particularly vivid detail was (essentially) how the square-cube law imposes itself upon Jupiter brain architecture by forcing >99.9% of volume to be comprised of comms links between compute nodes, even after assuming a “small-world” network structure allowing sparse connectivity between arbitrarily chosen nodes by having them be connected by a short series of intermediary links with only 1% of links being long-range.
For this particular case (“Zeus”), a 9,000 km sphere of nearly solid diamondoid consisting mainly of reversible quantum dot circuits and molecular storage systems surrounded by a concentric shield protecting it from radiation and holding radiators to dissipate heat into space, with energy provided by fusion reactors distributed outside the shield, only the top 1.35 km layer is compute + memory (a lot thinner comparatively than the Earth’s crust), and the rest of the interior is optical comms links. Sandberg calls this the “cortex model”.
In a sense this shouldn’t be surprising since both brains and current semiconductor chips are mostly interconnect by volume already, but a 1.35 km thick layer of compute + memory encompassing a 9,000 km sphere of optical comms links seems a lot more like a balloon to me than anything, so from now on I’ll probably think of them as Jupiter balloons.
There’s a lot of fun stuff in Anders Sandberg’s 1999 paper The Physics of Information Processing Superobjects: Daily Life Among the Jupiter Brains. One particularly vivid detail was (essentially) how the square-cube law imposes itself upon Jupiter brain architecture by forcing >99.9% of volume to be comprised of comms links between compute nodes, even after assuming a “small-world” network structure allowing sparse connectivity between arbitrarily chosen nodes by having them be connected by a short series of intermediary links with only 1% of links being long-range.
For this particular case (“Zeus”), a 9,000 km sphere of nearly solid diamondoid consisting mainly of reversible quantum dot circuits and molecular storage systems surrounded by a concentric shield protecting it from radiation and holding radiators to dissipate heat into space, with energy provided by fusion reactors distributed outside the shield, only the top 1.35 km layer is compute + memory (a lot thinner comparatively than the Earth’s crust), and the rest of the interior is optical comms links. Sandberg calls this the “cortex model”.
In a sense this shouldn’t be surprising since both brains and current semiconductor chips are mostly interconnect by volume already, but a 1.35 km thick layer of compute + memory encompassing a 9,000 km sphere of optical comms links seems a lot more like a balloon to me than anything, so from now on I’ll probably think of them as Jupiter balloons.