I got to thinking the other day of the question of planet-sized computers and naturally to how much computing power would the moon have it were a computer?
First, what would the benefits be of having a moon-computer? First, it would act as a backup of all of human knowledge in case the Earth gets wiped out for whatever reason such as an asteroid strike. Obviously it would also act as relay points for the Interplanetary Internet. Making other moons in the solar system computers for internet storage (and additional human knowledge backups) would also decrease latency for non-synchonous internet activities. If I'm on Mars, I don't want to wait a half hour for my funny internet cat videos to download! :)
Nerd_on/
Now some totally SWAG Rough Order Calculations:
The mass of the moon is 7.34X10^22 kg and assuming a chip can execute at 3Ghz with nominal area and volume of a chip and support pad as 400mm^2 x 2mm= Volume 800mm^3 per chip. Also further assuming that 96% of the moon mass would be support structure including memory supporting 4% mass that is turned into computer chips, the number of 3GHz chips would be on order of 1.43X10^24 chips (assuming a mass density of 2.57gram/cc). If this were made to be perfectly but massively parallel system, it would result in a 4.28x10^24 GHz performance which roughly equates to 1.71x10^16 ExaFLOPs. It has been said that to simulate a human brain it would take about 37PetaFLOPs of computational power, though how a brain works is totally different so comparing the 2 is rather moot. Comparing the 2 numbers, one can simulate 4.66x10^17 human brains if the entire moon were a giant computer.
Nerd_off/
That is a LOT of computer power. That is assuming one can get enough power into the giant moon computer (I'll leave that for another post). But assuming one can get enough power via solar or nuclear (He-3!) for even a fraction of that computing power, the applications are unimaginable such as a rather good simulation of reality... :)
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