The Intake was monstrous because it was involuntary — not because it was impossible. The unsettling claim underneath the whole series is that nothing the ETI did sits off humanity's own tech tree. Walk the six steps; run the numbers yourself at each one.
Femtoscale manufacturing, a solar-powered substrate, brains kept alive and lit — every ingredient is something a sufficiently advanced human government or corporation could in principle build. The ETI supplied the will and removed the consent. The capability is ours to reach.
Eight billion preserved brains, plus their life-support, draw on the order of 0.4 TW. The Sahara — already the chosen site — can deliver roughly 230 TW. That's under a fifth of one percent, with a ~550× margin.
A brain runs at ~20 W and you cannot simply overclock tissue — neural firing, synaptic delay, the binding rhythm of consciousness and neurotransmitter depletion all cap it. A pure biological vat tops out near 2×. The hard part was never the power bill; it's the meat.
Replace chemical synapses with photonic ones, then more of the cortex, and the ceiling climbs — ~50×, then thousands, then substrate speed. Each rung trades away a little more biology, and the question stops being "can we power it?" and becomes "is it still the same mind?"
Once the substrate can run fast, a single calendar year buys subjective centuries — and at the series' upper rates, a million subjective years per year. Lifetimes of art, study, and company, folded into ordinary wall-clock time. That is the prize the dilation tool measures.
San Junipero is on the tech tree. The energy is lying in the desert; the biology is an engineering problem with visible rungs; the payoff is centuries of subjective life. The only thing the ETI added was the decision to build it — and the refusal to ask first. The series leaves the reader holding the obvious follow-up.