I imagine a scale like:
1: Mosquito
…
10000: Planet (Death Star)
I imagine a scale like:
1: Mosquito
…
10000: Planet (Death Star)
So the log10 scale goes from 1–30, where mosquitos die at 1 and the Earth dies at 30. The 2 PW in the article is about a 15.3. The Vulcan 20-20 project (set to complete in 2029) will register at about 20PW, or a 16.3 on the mosquito-Death Star scale [2].
So on a log scale, we're over halfway to building the Death Star.
[0]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/backyard-star-wars
[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-much-energy-w...
[2]: https://news.sky.com/story/worlds-most-powerful-laser-to-be-...
So true "half way to a death star" is step 29/30?
Say your "endstage" goal is GPU with 200 billion transistors. Using linear scale, the current biggest GPU is only halfway there, and it took all of human civilization to get this far, and it will take another civilization to get to 200b. In reality, we'll have that in a couple years with our current civilization.
A hypothetical "death star" project like this would require improvements in energy generation/storage capacity/etc., which haven't improved in nearly the way transistor production has (and are also much more limited by physical realities, such as the specific heat, enthalpy of combustion etc. of materials).