In writing about the rise of the data centers earlier this year, I suggested the “oklo” as the cgs unit for one artificial bit operation per gram per second. That post caught the eye of the editor at Nautilus Magazine, who commissioned a longer-form article and a series of short interviews, which are on line here.

In writing the Nautilus article, it occurred to me that the qualifier “artificial” is just that: artificial. A bit operation in the service of computation should stand on its own, without precondition, and indeed, the very word oklo serves to reinforce the lack of any need to draw a distinction. The Oklo fossil reactors operated autonomously, without engineering or direction more than two billion years ago. In so doing, they blurred snap-judgment distinctions between the natural and the artificial.

Several years ago, Geoff Manaugh wrote thoughtfully about the Oklo reactors, drawing a startling connection to a passage in the second of William S. Burroughs’s cut-up novels:

I’m reminded again here of William Burroughs’s extraordinary and haunting suggestion, from his novel The Ticket That Exploded, that, beneath the surface of the earth, there is “a vast mineral consciousness near absolute zero thinking in slow formations of crystal.” Here, though, it is a mineral seam, or ribbon of heavy metal—a riff of uranium—that stirs itself awake in a regularized cycle of radiative insomnia that disguises itself as a planet. Brainrock.

Revising the definition,

1 oklo = 1 bit operation per gram of system mass per second,

brings the information processing done by life into consideration. Our planet has been heavily devoted to computation not just for the past few years, but for the past few billion years. Earth’s biosphere, when considered as a whole, constitutes a global, self-contained infrastructure for copying the digital information encoded in strands of DNA. Every time a cell divides, roughly a billion base pairs are copied, with each molecular transcription entailing the equivalent of ~10 bit operations. Using the rule of thumb that the mass of a cell is a nanogram, and an estimate that the Earth’s yearly wet biomass production is 10¹⁸ grams, this implies a biological computation of 3×10²⁹ bit operations per second. Earth, then, runs at 50 oklo.

Using the Landauer limit, Emin=kTln2, for the minimum energy required to carry out a bit operation, the smallest amount of power required to produce 50 oklo at T=300K is ~1 GW. From an efficiency standpoint, DNA replication by the whole-Earth computer runs at about a hundred millionth of the theoretical efficiency, given the flux of energy from the Sun. The Earth and its film of cells does lots of stuff in order to support the copying of base pairs, with the net result being ~200,000 bit operations per erg of sunlight globally received.

Viewed in this somewhat autistic light, Earth is about 10x more efficient that the Tianhe-2 supercomputer, which draws 17,808KW to run at 33.8 Petaflops.