[ExI] Von Neumann Probes

[Jason Resch]

On Sat, Jan 24, 2026, 8:07 AM John Clark via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 23, 2026 at 5:44 PM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> *> Even if there are many many technological civilisations in our galaxy,
>> it would be like a handful of fireflies in a continent-spanning
>> rainforest. *
>
>
> *Not if one of those many technological civilizations had
> developed Drexler style Nanotechnology, then they'd be about as obvious as
> a supernova.   *
>

That's not at all obvious. See:
https://alwaysasking.com/are-we-alone/#They_Leave_our_Universe (and the
section below that one)

Nanotechnology combined with mind uploading allow "dust ships" computers
the size of a grain of sand with the computational capacity to run a brain
emulation of every member of their civilization.

More computation doesn't require more energy, this is a common
misconception. But more computational speed does require more density. And
higher computational speed effectively seals you off from the rest of the
universe. If you run your minds a million times faster, the speed of light
becomes a million times slower from your perspective (about the speed of an
airplane).

To email or text someone, or to download a web page from the other side of
the planet takes hours. To download a website from another planet in your
solar system would take decades.

All this implies a strong incentive for miniaturization and centralization.
If a civilization wants to explore, their best bet is to make a copy of
their entire civilization and send a copy outward in a miniaturized single
ship which (using the best physically possible computer substrate) need be
no larger than a grain of sand.

The Kardashev scale has led us astray.

Jason



>
>> * > I appreciate the 'von Neumann probe' argument, but not all
>> civilisations are going to go that route*
>
>
> *It would only take one. And I'm not talking about one civilization, I'm
> talking about one individual in a civilization. It is simply not **tenable to
> maintain that precisely 100% of the technologically savvy individuals in
> the observable universe have decided not to make a Von Neumann Probe. I
> think William of Ockham would agree with me that the best explanation of
> the Fermi Paradox is simply we are the first. And as I keep saying,
> somebody has to be. *
>
> *> I have a hunch that we tend to vastly underestimate the difficulty of
>> interstellar travel.*
>
>
> *You don't need interstellar travel to make a Dyson sphere/swarm, and
> something like that should be very noticeable, but we have noticed nothing.
> And any technological civilization worth its salt should be able to get a
> Von Neumann Probe moving at 1% the speed of light because its mass would be
> very small, and so it could get from one side of the galaxy to the other in
> just 10 million years, a blink of the eye cosmically speaking. But just how
> much would a Von Neumann Probe weigh? *
>
>
> *Estimates vary, Freeman Dyson thought it would be about a kilogram but
> George Church and Zaza Osmanov think that's much too high, they think with
> advanced Nanotechnology one Von Neumann Probe could be about the size of a
> bacteria and, depending on various engineering considerations, weigh
> between a trillionth of a gram (10^-12) and a thousandth (10^-3) of a gram;
> and, if it had access to raw materials and light energy from a star, it
> could make a copy of itself in about a year. Then after 79 years there
> would be an Avogadro's number of Von Neumann Probes, 6.02*10^23. And one
> year after that it would be obvious to a blind man in a fog bank that not
> all the technologically knowledgeable minds in the galaxy were on the
> Earth. But we have seen nothing like that. I think I know why. *
>
> *John K Clark*
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