A scalable system is one whose performance doesn’t degrade as it expands, however big it gets (Berners-Lee, 2000). A network gets more demands as it grows, but if that also increases supply, performance doesn’t degrade. A network is scalable when each new point adds supply and demand in tandem. The Internet was designed this way, as each new Internet Service Provider adds processing to handle more demand.
Scalable networks decentralize control because each new point must add processing. When the Internet began, pundits called this feature a bug, because they expected a system without central control to collapse in chaos, but instead it thrived. Computing then discovered that overloading a centralized network anywhere crashes it, while overloading a decentralized network gives a local crash, but the whole carries on. Under stress, centralized networks collapse but decentralized networks degrade gradually. The same view led scientists to expect brains to have a control center, but they don’t. The brain’s network of nerves distribute control because that is more reliable (Whitworth, 2008).
If our space is based on a network, is it scalable? The evidence suggests it is, because the laws of physics haven’t changed as space has expanded over billions of years (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 hasa 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 the amount of matter that space can hold a black hole, so that black holes exist also suggests that space scalable.