[ExI] fermi paradox just got worse

[John Clark]

On Sat, Aug 8, 2026 at 3:09 PM BillK via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

*> I didn't believe the suggestion that an advanced civilization would
> decide to send out thousands of small, cheap probes to explore the galaxy.*
>

*And I don't believe that every single individual in every single advanced
civilization, without even one single exception, decides not to build even
one (and you only need one) von Neumann probe. Do you really expect
absolute 100% agreement between trillions or quadrillions of individuals? *


> > *I asked Qwen AI to review the video. Qwen found the original paper
> that the video referred to and also thinks that thousands of probes is
> unlikely to happen.*
>



> > *Qwen AI: **You correctly noted that probes must be self-repairing to
> survive journeys of 10,000+ years. The interstellar medium is not an empty
> void; it is filled with cosmic radiation, extreme cold, and
> micrometeorites. Over millennia, radiation causes "bit-flips" in
> electronics and degrades semiconductors  *
>

*Although not as intense as cosmic radiation life on earth has also been
subjected to radiation and has been producing random mutations in its
genetic code for the last 4 billion years, but life still exists; the
genome of humans and of millions of other species are NOT filled with
gibberish, they still make sense because of redundancy and a primitive
repair system. And we can do a lot better than life, it's not surprising
really that an intelligent designer can do a better job than natural
selection.  If you use radiation hardening technology and very small
transistors then the main danger that radiation would pose to electronics
would not be damaging the hardware but in scrambling the software.  *

*Claude Shannon told us that if you tell him the minimum amount of error
that you're willing to tolerate then as long as it's greater than zero no
matter how much noise (a.k.a. random cosmic radiation) there is he can show
you an encoding scheme that achieves that low error rate with a minimum of
redundancy. *

*Although not the primary danger I cannot deny that cosmic radiation would
also produce some hardware damage to a von Neumann probe, but that could
also be managed. You can build arbitrarily reliable computation, not just
arbitrarily reliable transmission**, out of arbitrarily unreliable
components, using redundancy; as long as the per-component error rate stays
below a threshold. It's the computational counterpart to Shannon's theorem**,
and von Neumann (the man not the probe) proved it in his 1956 paper,
published after he died,  Probabilistic Logics and the Synthesis of
Reliable Organisms From Unreliable Components
<https://mriedel.ece.umn.edu/wiki/images/a/af/Von_Neumann_Probabilistic_Logics_and_the_Synthesis_of_Reliable_Organisms_from_Unreliable_Components.pdf>*


*> QWEN AI:* To survive, the paper suggests probes must be "seed factories"
> capable of self-repair. However, manufacturing at a macro or micro scale
> requires immense infrastructure
>


*Immense? If you have Drexler style nanotechnology then nothing needs to be
"immense", life has already proven that, and we can do better than life.   *



> >  *QWEN AI*:  *A** probe taking 10,000 years to reach a  star (and
> another 10,000 years for the data to return) requires a civilization to
> maintain a cohesive project over 20,000 years.*
>

*No it does not. All that's needed is that one individual in one
civilization makes one von Neumann probe, after that it doesn't matter what
the individual or the civilization does or does not do; in less than 10
million years it would be obvious that the Milky Way has been engineered.
And once Drexler style nanotechnology has been developed there will only be
two different types of objects: *

*1) Things that are impossible to make because they violate a fundamental
law of physics. *

*2) Things that are easy and dirt cheap to make. *

*Nothing will be expensive and difficult to make. And **Drexler style
nanotechnology requires no new science, just improved engineering. *

*QWEN AI:* *O**nce** a civilization has massive localized computing power
> (like a Matrioshka Brain), the physical universe offers very little
> novelty. Exploring a dead, rocky exoplanet via a slow robot probe is
> incredibly slow and low-bandwidth. By contrast, retreating into virtual
> reality allows an advanced mind to simulate trillions of perfect,
> customized universes at the speed of light*


*Good virtual reality requires massive amounts of computational power, and
as is becoming increasingly obvious, massive amounts of computational
power requires massive amounts of energy, and yet the low entropy photons
from quadrillions of stars continue to radiate uselessly into infinite
space. I can only think of one explanation for that anomaly, we are the
first.  *

*QWEN AI:* *Even if a small, cheap probe successfully reaches an exoplanet
1,000 light-years away, how does it report back?*

*Why does it need to report back? *

*QWEN AI*:* Accelerating a 10 kg payload to 0.01c (3,000 km/s) requires a
> kinetic energy of roughly **4.5 × 10¹³ Joules—equivalent to the explosive
> yield of a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb. *


*OK but I don't think that would sound like an excessive amount of
energy to an individual living in an advanced society with Drexler style
nanotechnology, but if I'm wrong and it is then only accelerate the probe
to 0.001c, you could still engineer the galaxy in the blink of an eye,
astronomically speaking.  *

*John K Clark*


>
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