Taking Technology to the Extreme

Though statistics provided by the Immigration and Naturalization Service support the claim that computer nerds are one of the most diverse segments of the new high-tech economy, it has come to my attention that these nerds share at least one universal addiction.

That's right, a large collection of Star Wars action figures.

No, seriously, though an inordinate number of computer nerds do seem to play with Luke Skywalker action figures, the one addiction that they universally share is an enthusiasm for technological advances in their field.

Every time Silicon Valley develops a new microprocessor or somehow manages to further upgrade the Etch-A-Sketch game, computer nerds buy PC World magazine like it's toilet paper and celebrate the unveiling ceremony with huge parties in chat rooms.

Bolstered by exorbitant advertising budgets, these new computer technologies have a measurable effect on business, but they have an even significant effect on normal people, who end up feeling inferior about their now sluggish (pronounced "crappy") home PCs.

"I've got a really crappy computer now," my dad said after the Pentium IV was announced last month, "I'm going to make Luke Skywalker kick Darth Vader's ass to make myself feel better."

Even though new technology is a reasonable impetus for despair, people like my dad are getting worked up over nothing. They don't see the proverbial pixels at the end of the tunnel.

Contrary to popular belief, computers work in an extremely simple manner. Whenever you click something on the screen the small hamster that lives in your hard drive starts running on its wheel. Anybody who has ever peered into their disk drive knows that this is true.

The misinformed public, however, seems to think that a computer works in an extremely complicated manner. The general consensus is that the components on a computer chip act as minuscule switches that can be set to one of two positions: on or off (1 or 0 in computerspeak).

In the early 1960s Gordon Moore, one of Intel's founding fathers, posited the notion that computing power doubles roughly every 18 months. This phenomenon, imaginatively referred to as Moore's Law, has held firm for the past four decades, ringing the death knell for innumerable computer models.

But computer nerds everywhere can sleep easier thanks to Dr. Seth Lloyd, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. Dr. Lloyd has shattered the infinity of Moore's Law, claiming that computer technology has a definitive ceiling.

And he only had to factor in thermonuclear reactions to find that ceiling.

The "apocalyptic laptop," as he calls it, would be "as powerful as the laws of physics will allow. So energetic is this imaginary laptop that using it would be like harnessing a thermonuclear reaction," according to The New York Times.

Ostensibly, the laptop would employ the fastest microprocessor possible in our universe, approximately 10,000 trillion trillion trillion times faster than current models.

It gets even better. "In the most extreme version of this computer supreme, so much circuitry would be packed into so small a space that the whole thing would collapse and form a tiny black hole, an object so dense that not even light can escape its gravity."

The description of the laptop, published in the Journal of Stupid Ideas (well, actually Nature), would require 25 million megawatt-hours to operate, which is the amount of energy produced by all the world's nuclear power plants in 72 hours.

Despite the apocalyptic laptop and its attendant black hole having a cornucopia of uses (think of Brenda from Beverly Hills 90210), don't expect to see it on the shelves of the Campus Store, if ever.

It's certainly intriguing to speculate on the technological ceiling, but I think a little pragmatism might be in order. If this were 1989, I would tell Dr. Lloyd to "buy a clue," but since it's the new millennium I'll just say, "Luke, I'm your father."

Archived article by Devin Smith