There is a hard limit. If you want to get somewhere, you have to get there before the expansion of the universe moves it away forever. Our accessible universe i

There is a hard limit. If you want to get somewhere, you have to get there before the expansion of the universe moves it away forever. Our accessible universe is constantly shrinking. It's a natural law that places firm discontinuities on optimization. This may seem silly, but microcontroller shrinking is running into a similar problem with quantum noose, which is by far the closer boundary. The accelerating expantion of the universe also importantly bounds availible time, which makes the specific equation governing how fast optimization can be achieved relevant. For example, if the cost of increasing intelligence is sufficiently exponential past a certain point, a true singularity may never come. And if it's more like busy beaver then exponential then it may be impossible for it to ever get very far indeed.