Adam Brown

How far down can they be pushed?

In terms of never making errors, I think that's very unlikely.

If for no other reason than that there is a minimum background temperature caused by the expansion of our universe, by the...

again it all coming back to the cosmological constant, that gives a very small but non-zero temperature to our universe that I think will inevitably mean that we make errors.

You might imagine we could just set up some kind of perpetual motion machine that's just like thinking happy thoughts over and over again in a quantum computer that never tires and never stops.

I think that inevitably the universe would leak in and there would be errors.

Yeah.

But what the minimum error rate is, is not, I think, a clear, I don't have a clear answer to that question.

Physics doesn't have a clear answer to that question.

I mean, so in economics, the theory of comparative advantage only applies if

not all resources can be transported.

Like if you can just go in and just disassemble whoever you're doing the comparative advantage with, you might as well just turn them into, apply it all to the party with the absolute advantage.

So maybe the same thing would be true in the universe.

I think there are a number of questions in there.

For starters, not all energy is equally useful in different places in the universe.

If there's a galaxy over there and a galaxy here on this side of the universe, because of the expansion of the universe, if I beamed the energy, if I disassembled that galaxy and tried to send it back here, either by literally sending it on starships or converting it to...

light and beaming the light back in a laser and then having a big, you know, photos here, PV here to collect it or for whatever mechanism, by the time it reached me, there will be a massive redshift.

And so keeping it in place is maybe better than just disassembling it and bringing it back home.

But there's another question, which is, you know, what is the...

Is the plan to, these are all unknowns to do with both physics and the nature of technology.