Ty's Power

Space, space! Gotta go to space!

Ty considered where, off-planet, to construct the colossal supercomputer he needed in order to reassemble Lisa from four billion pieces in under half an hour. El Capitan was about 600,000 kg, and he needed 90 billion times that. 45 quadrillion kg! Either the moon or Mars might work, but people might be upset to discover that part of either body had been turned into an enormous computer system. What could he use as a source of mass, that for the most part people wouldn't miss?

Jupiter, he realized. The 50 quadrillion kg needed was less than a fifty billionth of the mass of Jupiter. No one would even notice.

But Jupiter had no solid surface. Or at least none that he could use. Jupiter might have a solid metallic core, ten times bigger than Earth, but so deep within it that the pressure would crush anything he tried to construct there. His supercomputer would have to be in orbit around Jupiter.

For the supercomputer size and mass required, Ty decided that a ring-shaped space station, entirely circling Jupiter, would be the best approach. Of course, that considerably increased the amount of mass required, but it was still inconsequential compared to the total mass of the planet. And the radiation there would be fairly intense, so the station would have to have even more mass for shielding, to prevent data corruption in the supercomputer.

It didn't even make sense to call it a supercomputer, Ty realized. The term wasn't adequate. Hypercomputer? Ultracomputer?

And then he thought about the power requirements for the computer, and the station. If he couldn't create mass out of nothing, presumably the same wss true of energy, as well. The amout required would be staggering. Where could that much power come from? The only suitable energy source in the system was... the sun! But solar panels wouldn't be able to provide it, even if they covered the entire immense surface of the space station. He'd have to come up with a way to directly siphon off energy from the sun.

And the computer would produce a near-astronomical amount of waste heat, that had to be radiated out. The station would need an immense cooling system, with gigantic radiators.

The task seemed daunting, but Ty couldn't see any other solution. He just had to do it.

What do you do now?

• It's a long way to the station O added A month ago

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