[ExI] Discussion of whether the Fermi Paradox is a fallacy

[John Clark]

On Tue, Apr 7, 2026 at 4:11 PM Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:

* >>  it doesn't matter if a civilization goes extinct after it has made a
>> Von Neumann Probe, and we are less than a decade away from being able to
>> make one ourselves.*
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> * > There might be something fundamentally wrong with von Neumann Probes.
> If they are sentient (and I don't see them being otherwise), they could, on
> a common logic basis, every one of them, decide that the time between stars
> is too long to be out of communication.*
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*It would take a lot of intelligence for a Von Neumann Probe to do what it
was designed to do when it got to its destination star, so yes I agree with
you it would have to be sentient. But during the decades or centuries it
would take to get to its star all that intelligence would not be needed,
and in deep space between stars the energy needed to make the huge number
of computations required to produce consciousness would be hard to come by.
So the probe would likely go into hibernation by dramatically slowing down
the speed of its computer or power down completely until it got close
enough for the star to be able to provide useful amounts of energy. And as
a bonus this would solve the boredom problem, from the probe's subjective
point of view regardless of how far away its destination was, it could get
there in an arbitrarily short amount of time.  *
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> * >>  So I don't see how to reconcile that fact with intelligent life
>> being common in the observable universe.*
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> * > You are most likely right that we are the first.  But if you are not,
> there is some kind of wall we don't know about yet that universally keeps
> life from spreading out.  For example, if intelligent life universally
> takes the speed-up route, the stars recede subjectively to millions of
> years.*
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*The Milky Way has a radius of about 50,000 light years, so even if the
probe's maximum speed was only 0.001 c (I think I'm being very conservative
here) there could be a Von Neumann Probe around every star in the galaxy in
50 million years, which is a short amount of time by cosmic standards, and
by a Von Neumann Probe's subjective standards the entire process would be
nearly instantaneous. And yet we don't see the slightest indication that
such a thing, which should be easily detectable, has actually happened. And
I can only think of one explanation for that oddity.*

* John K Clark*



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