If you wanted to build the most powerful computer you could, you can't do better than including everything in the universe that's potentially available.

Some folks think life and technology and mind can keep expanding forever. Others say it can't. We are still not clear on that.

For hundreds of millions of years, Sex was the most efficient method for propagating information of dubious provenance: the origins of all those snippets of junk DNA are lost in the sands of reproductive history. Move aside, Sex: the world-wide Web has usurped your role.

The history of the universe is, in effect, a huge and ongoing quantum computation. The universe is a quantum computer.

Every physical system registers information, and just by evolving in time, by doing its thing, it changes that information, transforms that information, or, if you like, processes that information.

Thinking of the universe as a computer is controversial.

Programmed by quanta, physics gave rise first to chemistry and then to life; programmed by mutations and recombination, life gave rise to Shakespeare; programmed by experience and imagination, Shakespeare gave rise to Hamlet.