[ExI] Are Dyson swarms a good idea?

[John Clark]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2026 at 9:36 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

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


*No it is not. Efficiency Is the measure of the RATIO between total energy
and the energy that can be used for work. *

*> 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.*


*What the hell?! I thought you were over perpetual motion machines and
ignoring the Second Law Of Thermodynamics. Apparently not. *

*John K Clark*

*John K Clark *


>





>
> 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
>
>> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20260128/37fcd1b3/attachment.htm>