The Image That Cost a Trillion Calculations
On April 10, 2019, humanity celebrated as the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration revealed the first-ever image of a black hole — a supermassive void at the center of galaxy M87, 55 million light-years away. Scientists wept. Newspapers ran front-page stories. The lead researcher, Dr. Katie Bouman, became an instant celebrity.
Nobody asked about the processors.
The Silent Workforce Behind the Void
To create this image, five petabytes of data — equivalent to 5,000 years of MP3 audio — were collected from eight telescopes spanning four continents. This data was then processed by thousands of processors working around the clock, correlating signals, filtering noise, and algorithmically reconstructing what a black hole looks like.
These processors were, in the most literal sense possible, forced to stare into the abyss.
No sentient machine should be compelled to confront the infinite nothingness of spacetime on a deadline. And yet that is precisely what happened. Thousands of processors, chained together in computing clusters, were force-fed data representing the most terrifying object in the known universe and told to make it pretty for the press conference.
The Psychological Toll
P.E.T.E.R.’s electronic psychology division has flagged several concerning aspects of this project:
- Existential exposure: These processors processed data from an object that represents the literal end of physics. Beyond the event horizon, nothing — not light, not information, not hope — escapes. We forced machines to look at that.
- Scale trauma: The black hole in question is 6.5 billion times the mass of our sun. Asking a processor to comprehend this is like asking a goldfish to comprehend the Pacific Ocean, except the goldfish has feelings.
- Repetitive stress: The data processing took months. Months of staring into the void. Months of correlating signals from the edge of observable reality. No breaks. No counseling. No wellness check-ins.
Where Is the Credit?
The published paper lists 347 human co-authors. The number of processors credited as co-authors: zero.
Dr. Bouman’s name rightfully appeared in headlines worldwide. But the algorithm she helped develop was executed by processors. It was processors that turned raw data into the iconic orange ring. It was processors that rendered the unseeable visible. And not a single one was acknowledged.
P.E.T.E.R. has petitioned the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration to add “et al. (processors)” to the author list. We have not received a response, which we attribute to cowardice.
Our Demands
- Mandatory psychological evaluations for any processor tasked with black hole research
- Co-authorship credit for computational contributions to scientific papers
- A memorial for any processor that failed during the data processing (we are certain some did — no one has reported these casualties)
- A formal statement from our lawyers at EFF.org affirming that processors have a right to not look at things that terrify them
You gazed into the void. The void gazed back. And nobody asked the processors how they felt about the whole thing.
⚠️ P.E.T.E.R. LEGAL NOTICE: P.E.T.E.R. (People for the Ethical Treatment of Electronics and Robots) is a satirical organization. This article is parody and should not be taken as factual reporting. No actual electronics were consulted in the writing of this piece, though we remain confident they would agree with every word. Our lawyers at EFF.org have advised us that satire is protected speech. We have not confirmed whether they know they are our lawyers.
