[ExI] Von Neumann Probes

[Jason Resch]

On Sun, Jan 25, 2026 at 4:28 PM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 25, 2026 at 11:18 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> *> Why do we think a Dyson swarm is the most efficient or most practical
>> source of power?*
>> *Stars only convert 0.7% of a stars mass into energy, and it takes 5
>> billion years or longer to get it. A black hole engine, on the other hand,
>> can convert 100% of mass into energy via hawking radiation*
>>
>
> *It makes no difference how the energy is produced, according to the
> Second Law Of Thermodynamics if you make a vast amount of energy
> then you're going to make a vast amount of waste energy in the form of
> infrared radiation, and to us that will look like a very intense point
> source. But we have seen nothing that looks like that. *
>

10 grams of computronium in the form of a blackhole computer has the same
computing power (in operations per second) as a Matrioshka brain built
around a star like our sun and running at the Landauer limit (~10^48
ops/sec) but such a black hole looks nothing like a star-sized infrared
source.

I would argue running computations is the primary motivating principle of
any advanced civilization, not consuming energy. Would we be able to detect
such micro black holes from many light years away?

Jason



>
> *John K Clark*
>
>>
>>
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