[ExI] A new answer to the Fermi paradox?

[John Clark]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2026 at 9:00 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

*> It is from 2017 but it was new to me:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aestivation_hypothesis
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aestivation_hypothesis>*
> *The aestivation hypothesis is a hypothesized solution to the Fermi
> paradox conceived in 2017 by Anders Sandberg, Stuart Armstrong and Milan M.
> Ćirković. The hypothesis, published on 27 April 2017, suggests advanced
> alien civilizations may be storing energy and aestivating (hibernating in
> times of heat instead of cold), until the universe cools to better make use
> of the stored energy to perform tasks. **As the universe cools, the
> potential work producible by stored energy can increase by a multiplier of
> 10^30 per Landauer's principle. If the goal of an advanced civilization is
> to maximize the number of calculations done, to generate information
> processing for tasks like mass-producing simulations, then aestivation
> would be purposeful to achieve this end.*
>

*My instant reaction on reading this is that the behavior of these
hypothetical aliens doesn't make any sense, they are not storing energy, at
this very instant huge amounts of nice juicy low entropy energy from
quadrillions of suns is radiating uselessly into infinite space. After a
little digging I realized I was far from the only one who thought that
aliens need not wait to be active. *

*Take a look at the article below by Charles H. Bennett, Robin Hanson, and
C. Jess Riedel. Robin Hanson should be familiar to longtime readers of this
list, and Charles Bennett is one of the world's greatest experts on the
connection between physics and information. Bennett is the one who
revolutionized the field of reversible computing, and he is the one who
finally explained the exact reason why Maxwell's Demon would be impossible.*

 *If the demon did not have an infinite memory then at some point he would
need to start erasing information, and although the amount of energy needed
to perform a calculation can theoretically be made arbitrarily small thanks
to reversible computing, the same thing cannot be said about the energy
needed to erase a bit of information if you are at any finite temperature
above absolute zero. And if you use energy to do that erasure then you have
increased the total amount of entropy in the universe, and the Second Law
Of Thermodynamics is still true.  *

*Comment on ‘The aestivation hypothesis for resolving Fermi’s paradox’*
<https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.06730>

*John K Clark*
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