One curious language category is terms for things that don’t exist yet, but might. Consider the concept of “Dyson spheres.” Named after the great physicist Freeman Dyson, who first hypothesized them in 1960, these spheres would consist of a network of structures orbiting a star that would effectively form a shell around it, capturing almost all of its energy for use as a power source capable of fueling technologies more powerful than any currently conceivable.
Dyson was engaging in a radical kind of speculation, but one that he argued was linked to present concerns by a firm chain of reasoning. Harnessing the power of suns would, he theorized, eventually be an essential energy resource for any sufficiently advanced civilization. It thus follows that in our present attempts to identify any extra-terrestrial life in the universe, searching for the tell-tale infrared energy signatures of any such constructions might be one way of locating advanced alien civilizations.99
The very notion of Dyson spheres has itself driven further technological speculations, including the so-called matrioshka brain—the conception of the late futurologist Robert Bradbury, who named his hypothetical creation after Russian matrioshka dolls, which stack neatly inside each other in a set of ever-decreasing size.100
The matrioshka brain would be a supercomputer of almost unimaginable potential power, consisting of several specially designed Dyson spheres around a star, each one drawing power from the sun’s energy to drive billions of tiny computers, and then passing on some of that energy to the next shell-like layer of the brain. Such a machine could, at least hypothetically, exist without violating the known laws of physics—and would possess a level of computing power able to achieve near-miraculous results.
Among the possible applications of such a vastly powerful computer is the operation of a completely convincing “simulated reality”—a concept long known in science fiction, and connected to a number of the most imaginatively compelling of hypothetical technologies. One of these is the notion of human “uploading”: that is, copying the complete data representing a human life and memory into a vast supercomputer, able either to store that data or to run it within a simulated reality, offering human beings a kind of immortality.
The possibility that we may already be living in such a simulation is one that both authors and philosophers have debated in some form for many centuries. One particularly appealing innovation in this field is the American author Greg Bear’s fictional coinage of the “Taylor algorithms”: algorithms that allow a being trapped within a simulated reality to determine the true nature of their world.101
Testing the boundaries of the thinkable as well as the merely feasible is one of language’s great delights—and technology is, today, perhaps its most fertile arena. As the author Arthur C. Clarke once put it, “the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible”—a journey for which only the right words are required.