From perry@jekyll.piermont.com Wed May 20 10:50 PDT 1998 Return-path: Received: from jekyll.piermont.com by aeiveos.wa.com ; 20 MAY 98 10:50:12 PDT Received: from jekyll.piermont.com (localhost [[UNIX: localhost]]) by jekyll.piermont.com (8.8.8/8.6.12) with ESMTP id NAA25270; Wed, 20 May 1998 13:25:02 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <199805201725.NAA25270@jekyll.piermont.com> To: bradbury@aeiveos.wa.com (Robert J. Bradbury) Cc: perry@piermont.com Subject: Re: Origin of the term "Jupiter Brain" question In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 20 May 1998 09:56:00 PDT." <35630bb60.57fb@aeiveos.wa.com> Reply-To: perry@piermont.com X-Reposting-Policy: redistribute only with permission Mime-Version: 1.0 (generated by tm-edit 7.108) Content-Length: 2106 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Date: Wed, 20 May 1998 13:25:02 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Status: R Robert J. Bradbury writes: > Perry, > > I've been doing a significant amount of work on evolution > of our culture towards Dyson shells/Jupiter Brains. > In that process I've been trying to track down the > origin of the term "Jupiter Brain". Ander's "J" page > says that Keith Henson invented it but he doesn't seem > to recall that being the case. > > Other comments seem to indicate that you may have had a > hand in its creation. Yeah, it was probably my term, though it might require some research to make sure I didn't just hear it somewhere. > Do you know anything about who actually "coined" the > term Jupiter Brain, when that might have occured and > what the context was? We could probably track down the original statement in private archives of the old Extropians mailing list. The context was pretty discussion about the possible future Vingean "singularity". I frequently noted that (this is a 'simulated paraphrase' based on my memory) "as hard as it might be for a dog to imagine what you are thinking, try to imagine how hard it would be to contemplate what a nanotech-based brain that operates a trillion times faster than yours could think about. If you really want to get unimaginable, consider what a nanotech-based brain the size of Jupiter could think about. This is far, far worse than an ant trying to think about what you are trying to think about." (I picked Jupiter as something of a reasonable limit on the practical size of reasonably compact engineered structures -- much larger than that (say, an order of magnitude) and the stuff in the center can no longer hold much in the way of structure because of how powerful the crushing because of graviational forces would be.) This lead to all sorts of "Jupiter Brain" inside jokes of various kinds, including Harry Hawk (then Harry Shapiro's) comment "If your brain is the size of Jupiter, how large is your penis?" Anyway, if it is a matter of importance, we could track it down. What exactly is the nature of your research, btw? Where are you going with it? > Thanks, > Robert Bradbury [bradbury@aeiveos.wa.com]