[ExI] Alien Civilizations May Only Be Detectable For A Cosmic Blink Of An Eye

[John Clark]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2025 at 5:06 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

* > Travelling physically will always take a subjective eternity, whether
> you're an upload or not. Unless you're not conscious. *
>

*And unless you're only traveling a finite distance. *

* > Travelling as information encoded onto some suitable photons will take
> no time at all, subjectively.*
>

*Yes.*


>
> *> Setting things up so that this is possible will take a few million
> years, as the hardware will need to be built, presumably by Von Neumann
> probes of some type, scattered throughout the galaxy and programmed to
> build the required receiving stations and processing substrates. Once that
> is done, people can zip around the galaxy at the speed of light. Providing
> they are willing to sacrifice a few thousand objective years while their
> peers back home are fitting billions of years of experience into the same
> time.*
>

*Yes.*

*> This could already be the case, for alien civilisations, and we'd be
> none the wiser. The galaxy would still look the same to us, for having a
> few million data centres scattered about.*
>

*No. If "they" are numerous and very smart then it would take a lot of
energy to run all those conscious intelligent agents and allow them to live
in a virtual world that they found interesting, and that would be possible
if you had a Von Neumann probe near every star in the galaxy. But then it
would be very obvious to us that the galaxy had been engineered, but we've
never seen even a hint of that in this galaxy or in any other. *

* > I wouldn't be surprised if there are at least some brave and
> adventurous individuals willing to do this,*
>

*Once Drexler style Nanotechnology is developed if just one individual
figured it would be fun to make a von Neumann probe and send it to another
star then the galaxy would never look the same again. But there is no sign
that has ever happened, that's why I think we are alone; after all the
observable universe is finite, so somebody has to be first.  *

*John K Clark*


>
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