A scalable system is one whose performance doesn’t degrade as it expands, however big it gets (Berners-Lee, 2000). As a network grows, it gets more demands, but if growth increases supply as well as demand, its performance doesn’t degrade. A network is scalable if each new point added increases supply as well as demand. The Internet was designed this way, as each new Internet Service Provider adds more processing to handle demands as well as more users to create demands.
One way to make a network scalable is to decentralize control by giving each point its own processing, so each new point adds processing power as well as load. When the Internet began, pundits expected it to collapse in chaos without central control, but instead it thrived. It was then realized that centralized networks collapse suddenly when stressed because an overload crashes the whole system, but decentralized networks degrade gracefully because an overload gives a local crash but the rest carry on. We think dictatorships are strong but nature knows they aren’t, so scientists expected brains to have a control center but they don’t, because decentralized networks are more reliable (Whitworth, 2008).
Is our space then scalable? The evidence suggests so because the laws of physics didn’t change as space expanded (Sutter, 2022). Space today behaves as it did when our universe was the size of a golf ball, so it is scalable. It follows that new points of space add processing to allow it to expand indefinitely. Each point of space then has a finite ability to process matter, and the evidence agrees:
“…recent observations favor cosmological models in which there are fundamental upper bounds on both the information content and information processing rate.” (Paul Davies, 2004), p13.
We call the upper limit of what space can hold a black hole, so that black holes exist also suggests that our space is scalable.