this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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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.