[ExI] Von Neumann Probes

[Jason Resch]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 6:37 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Jan 27, 2026 at 11:40 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>
>
>>
>>>> *> Ite not a "slight improvement." It's an efficiency improvement of
>>>> many billions of times. Even a small black hole (a few meters across, with
>>>> the mass of Jupiter) is 10^-8 degrees, so close to a billion times colder
>>>> than background radiation. A galactic center black hole can be a trillion
>>>> times colder than the background radiation. So it is not a "slight
>>>> improvement in efficiency," it's equivalent to being able to perform
>>>> billions or trillion of times as many non-reversible computations for the
>>>> same expenditure of energy.*
>>>>
>>>
>>> *Nope, you'd barely increase the efficiency at all. The Carnot
>>> Efficiency (X) depends entirely on the temperature of your heat source (Th)
>>> and your cold sink (Tc), formula is: *
>>>
>>> *X=1- Tc/Th*
>>>
>>> *The surface of the sun is at 5,800 K and the CMBR is at 2.7K, and
>>> you're right that a Black Hole with the mass of Jupiter would have a
>>> temperature of about **10^-8 K, so let's plug in some numbers: *
>>>
>>> *If we use the CMBR as the cold sink then*
>>>
>>> *X= (1-(2.7/5800) = 0.99353 efficiency *
>>>
>>> *If there was something that was just twice as efficient then you'd have
>>> something that was nearly 200% efficient, in other words you'd have a
>>> perpetual motion machine. And you were talking about something that was
>>> many billions of times more efficient.   *
>>>
>>>
>>> *Now let's look at what would happen if we used a Jupiter mass black
>>> hole for the cold heat sink:*
>>>
>>> *X = 1 - 0.00000001/5,800 = 0.9999999999983 efficiency *
>>>
>>> *To summarize, if you use empty space as your cold heat sink you'd only
>>> lose about 0.047% of your energy, and I think that's pretty damn good. If
>>> you use a Jupiter size black hole as your cold sink you'd lose about
>>> 0.00000000017% of your energy. Doesn't  seem worth all the trouble to me,
>>> and I wonder where you'd get the vast amount of energy necessary to
>>> compress Jupiter into a black hole. I think ET should be more concerned
>>> with trillions upon trillions of suns radiating all that nice juicy energy
>>> uselessly into infinite space. *
>>>
>>
>> *> Now work out the number of non reversible computations that can be
>> performed under the two efficiencies you calculated.*
>>
>
> *The maximum number of bits any physical object can compute depends on how
> massive it is. No computer, regardless of its serial or parallel, can
> compute more than 1.36*1^50 bits per second per kilogram.*
>

You are avoiding my question.

Earlier you insisted energy consumption (i.e. power) was all important for
running non-reversible computations (which it is). And this was your reason
for concluding it was obvious ETI would build Dyson swarms.

Now, when I show there were better ways, you seem to forget this, and
retreat to citing an unrelated fact we all agree on. I have to conclude
you're just trolling at this point, or suffering some severe form of
cognitive dissonance.

Jason

P.S.
You have also forgotten the 4X improvement over Bremmermann's limit as
shown by Margolus and Levitin, which you earlier acknowledged when you said
"4E/h"



> *John K Clark*
>
>
>>
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