[ExI] Are Dyson swarms a good idea?

[Jason Resch]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 9:10 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 28, 2026 at 7:59 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> *> Do you agree Landauer's limit depends on the temperature of the
>> heatsink?*
>
>
> *Certainly, but when your heat sink gets colder and colder eventually
> you reach a point of diminishing returns, and at 2.7° kelvin that point has
> been reached because the difference between **0.99353% efficiency and **0.9999999999983% efficiency
> is too trivial to worry about. It's certainly not worth the trouble of
> compressing Jupiter into a 20 foot wide Black Hole which, correct me if I'm
> wrong, I believe would be rather troublesome to do. *
>

Efficiency is the amount of useful work per unit of energy.

If the "99.953% efficient" (to use your wording) computer performs N
computations per watt-second, then the "99.99999999983% efficient" computer
performs 3,805,941,691.36N computations per watt-second.

Is not a 3.8 billion fold increase in the number of computations that you
can perform for the same unit of energy worth pursuing? It hardly seems
trivial to me.



> *> this is just grasping at straws to defend Dyson swarms in the face of
>> better methods having already been demonstrated.*
>
>
> *If there are better ways of producing amounts of power that are
> LITERALLY  astronomical and keep doing so for billions of years than Dyson
> spheres I have not heard of them,*
>
* but I do know one thing, even if they exist they would still have to obey
> the Second Law Of Thermodynamics, and that means we should be able to
> observe them. But we have seen nothing.   *
>

If they shunt waste heat into black holes (which is thermodynamically
optimal) then we wouldn't see anything.

If they run reversible computers (which is optimally efficient) then we
wouldn't see anything.

Jason

>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20260128/d8fe2cb4/attachment.htm>