Also,

[davv]

In the sweep of a second, all the people who live on this world experience what would sum up to two centuries of life for a single person.

In a single second.

(Sleep is not a problem, as the same share of those two centuries would be given sleep were it divided up to seven billion or condensed to one person.)

Comments

[davv]

Let's see. The circumference of the Earth is 40 megameters. To cross that in a second, the sweep has to have a veocity of 40 Mm/s, while c is 300 Mm/s. That's 13% of c. Still with v = 13% of c, gamma is only 1.009, so it's not going to be all that influenced by relativity.

More sophisticated tricks might lower the velocity needed - e.g. if every crow (to use that reference) were to report to the switching system rather than the switching system polling each of them in turn, then each report can go through shortest distance instead of having to follow a fixed sweep line. That would, I think, halve the velocity required, since a crow just to the left of the system could send a report a meter instead of having to go the long way around of nearly 40 Mm.

Either way, that's a digression. It just surprised me how much is actually going on in the world in terms of experience. (I suppose crows could use it to argue for the power of appropriate coordination, e.g. "if we had complete coordination, we could solve centuries-long problems in a second", though again, that ignores the inefficiency from parallelism as well as whether people would actually want to be that connected.)

[lhexa]

Crust to surface, I'm thinking, using some decent synchronization system. And I'm talking about relativity-of-simultaneity effects, not time-dilation or length-contraction effects. If the scale is large enough -- Earth sized, for instance -- the intervals between disparate parallel-processing events will be spacelike, whereas normal computing schemes assume that all intervals are timelike.