[ExI] Are advanced aliens asleep?

[BillK]

Anders Sandberg (remember him?) :)  and colleagues have a new paper
out where they suggest that advanced alien civilizations could be
sleeping (aestivation)
until the far future in order to exploit the low temperature
environment for more computation.

Anders discusses the paper on his blog here:
<http://aleph.se/andart2/space/the-aestivation-hypothesis-popular-outline-and-faq/>

Their reasoning is that rather than using up the universe resources by
computing now, they gain much more computing resources by waiting
until near the end of the universe.

Anders himself seems to feel that this hypothesis is rather unlikely.
Me too. :)

The cooling down at the end of the universe is a loooooong way away
and who knows what computing now might discover?
Resources are being wasted now, exploding stars, etc. and this would
continue as the universe ages.
An advanced civ would already be a machine intelligence, computing at
much higher speeds than humans, so the waste of not computing now
would be greater.
But it depends on what an advanced civ wants to do, and we might not
be able to understand their motivations. :)

BillK