The phone in your pocket is about 50 million times faster than the computer that flew people to the Moon in 1969. Mostly we use it to fling birds at pigs.
Sergey Markov, who heads experimental machine learning systems at SberDevices, Sberbank's technology division, likes this comparison. Flinging birds is a ballistics problem, he points out, the same kind as flying a spacecraft to the Moon. We spend our power on whatever is in fashion. There is no reason to think anyone else does differently.
His bet is that every civilization keeps improving its computers until it runs into the wall of physics, and that the machine standing at the wall has a recognisable shape. If so, the empty night sky has an answer. The aliens are not spreading across the galaxy. They are sitting still and calculating. So the next time you read about a black hole, you are looking at a candidate for somebody's data centre.
Start with the wall. Information cannot travel faster than light. No part of a machine can be smaller than the Planck length, because below that quantum uncertainty takes over. Physicists of the 1950s drew a conclusion from those two limits: a machine with a mass of one kilogram can perform only so many operations, however cleverly it is built. Then comes a nastier limit. Every bit a computer erases gives off a small, unavoidable amount of heat. Run too fast and the machine evaporates, so its speed has to be capped. Humanity is creeping toward that ceiling.
Now picture a civilization older than ours that has already reached it.
But I suspect it will look very much like a black hole, or at least a neutron star.
Но я подозреваю, что оно будет очень похоже на черную дыру или, по крайней мере, на нейтронную звезду
— Sergey Markov, Gleb Solomin Podcast, 24:33
The reasoning is practical. The best machine packs its matter as tightly as it can, with gravity pressing everything together, and that squeeze solves part of the heat problem too.
Markov goes one step further. The black holes we already see in the universe may have been built. Behind the event horizon, the edge that light cannot leave, serious computation is running and whole worlds are being simulated. What do those civilizations run? Probably birds and pigs, or whatever is trending where they live.
A physicist has come to a similar place by another road. Gia Dvali wrote in the International Journal of Astrobiology in October 2023 that black holes store quantum information more efficiently than anything else, so he expects every sufficiently advanced civilization to end up using them in its quantum computers.
And our own road? Markov sketches it without blushing. We merge with our machines. We build a Dyson sphere, a shell of collectors, around the Sun. Robots then gather matter from the surrounding planetary systems and pack it down, until we have our own giant supercomputer, our own black hole, to work through the problems of the universe.
The host called this the most convincing answer to the Fermi paradox he had heard, the question of why a galaxy so old looks so empty. Markov waved the praise off with a dry line: there are "a thousand brilliant answers" to that one. He also left the uncertainty where it belongs, as a guess from a man who likes to think about limits.
But take the guess seriously for a moment. A civilization that has finished its project does not send signals or build monuments. From outside it looks like a dark star, and the quiet we hear may be what it sounds like when everyone is busy computing.
