[ExI] A new answer to the Fermi paradox?

[Jason Resch]

On Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 7:50 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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. *
>

I saw their response paper and had an AI explain the impact of their
addition. It wasn't a refutation, but rather just the idea that the erasure
of bits could be delayed until the universe is cooler, in the end it
doesn't change very much in terms of the benefits of waiting to gain
efficiency advantages:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a5a6575-f488-83ea-ba97-89f5dfdffb8b

Jason


*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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