This was actually explained in the article, which is about cooling things down close to absolute zero. I haven't thought about this enough to see if it makes sense, but the claim is that:
It's not too difficult to cool a system down to the temperature of the cosmic background radiation. All you need to do is build a radiator in interstellar space with a very large surface area, and connect it with the system you're trying to cool with some high thermal-conductance material.
However, even at the cosmic background temperature of T=3K, erasing a bit still costs a minimum of kTln 2 = 2.87e-23 J. What is needed is a way to efficiently cool a system down to near absolute zero. I think the only way
to do it is with black holes.
Comments
This was actually explained in the article, which is about cooling things down close to absolute zero. I haven't thought about this enough to see if it makes sense, but the claim is that:
It's not too difficult to cool a system down to the temperature of the cosmic background radiation. All you need to do is build a radiator in interstellar space with a very large surface area, and connect it with the system you're trying to cool with some high thermal-conductance material.
However, even at the cosmic background temperature of T=3K, erasing a bit still costs a minimum of kTln 2 = 2.87e-23 J. What is needed is a way to efficiently cool a system down to near absolute zero. I think the only way to do it is with black holes.