this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
24 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
1430 readers
108 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm not going to inflict a JP video on myself, so maybe someone else can help me with the math. Moore's law says the number of transistors in an IC doubles every 2 years. Earth is roughly 5 billion years old, so there have been roughly 5 billion doublings since his proposed time that life emerged. 2^5,000,000,000 is an absolutely unfathomable number compared to... anything really! So what am I missing here?
And looking at it the other way, if a "law" that has existed for only a matter of decades is being extrapolated back for billions of years, and is only off by a factor of 3-ish... that's pretty fucking solid endorsement of said law!
The authors did not use Moore's law or transistors at all. They just thought it was a nifty idea so mentioned it bunches when talking about exponential growth or something.
Also I'm not sure I totally trust these authors after glancing over the paper, they seem a little too enthralled with the idea of alien DNA versus other possibilities like "Moore's law" not applying in the first place.
Also the paper is a decade old.
And redolent of 'emerita disease' although I don't think the authors have technically achieved that honor.