Re: Howlers

Rich Weyand wrote:
In article <1hwke3y.12pdr7z10htdllN%mbottorff@xxxxxxxxxxx>, mbottorff@xxxxxxxxxxx (Michelle Bottorff) wrote:
Rich Weyand <weyand@xxxxxxx> wrote:

The problem I have with it is that big things require big machinery to
accomplish.
Once upon a time sf writers wrote about computers the size of planets.
Big problems, after all, require big calculating machines.

Not relevant. FTL without large energy expenditure is an issue for me. The way computers got small is by limiting the amount of energy that each transistor needs to handle. Power transistors, however, which send power off the chip still need to be large. Look at a die (or photograph of one): the largest structures on the chip by far are the output transistors, just to send a single bit of signal off the chip.

If I ever write about FTL, my method will probably involve use of some ambient characteristic of the fifteenth dimension, the one where all energy tends to structuralize (flow into patterns implicit to the universe), and entropy leads ineluctably toward the cold death of that universe, while perpetual motion is impossible because the closed system would tend to accelerate to destruction.

Bill

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