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I don't think that's a useful framing. There is nothing special about stars, either, but the chance of human engineering resulting in some power generator that

I don't think that's a useful framing. There is nothing special about stars, either, but the chance of human engineering resulting in some power generator that can equal the output of a star any time soon is pretty low. The fact that nature has solved a problem means it can be solved, but it doesn't mean we can trivially figure out how to do it in a manufactured device. Aside from that, there is no "we" here. Some people reading this are 20 and some are 70. The scope of what it means for something to happen in one's lifetime is quite different for those two groups.

dane-pgp 5y ago
To help improve the framing a little more, with rough orders of magnitude: * 10^10 Watts: electrical power generation of the Itaipu Dam[0] * 10^26 Watts: luminosity of the Sun[0] * 10^10 neurons simulated on the Japanese supercomputer K last year[1] * 10^10 neurons in the human brain[2] I'm not claiming that a simulation of the human brain with equivalent capability is just around the corner, just that it is misleading to point to the scale difference between artificial and natural energy sources with the implication that brain simulation is beyond our reach in the same way. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28power%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28power%2... [1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fninf.2020.00016/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fninf.2020.0001... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...