05-17-2015, 08:26 AM
The Dragon's Egg case is fairly terrifying, actually. Just imagine how powerful an event a technological singularity might be, when the entities triggering it run at a million times the clock rate of humans to start with.
The very matter they have to work with is grossly abnormal by human standards; chemical bonding in matter under a trillion-gee gravitational field, trillion gauss magnetism and at a temperature of tens of thousands of degrees more or less has to be abnormal. It must be possible for solid matter to exist under such conditions, because we are fairly sure that a neutron star crust is solid.
The very matter they have to work with is grossly abnormal by human standards; chemical bonding in matter under a trillion-gee gravitational field, trillion gauss magnetism and at a temperature of tens of thousands of degrees more or less has to be abnormal. It must be possible for solid matter to exist under such conditions, because we are fairly sure that a neutron star crust is solid.