[ExI] A new answer to the Fermi paradox?

[Jason Resch]

In a slightly longer conversation with GPT, the AI concluded that the
response paper by Bennet et al. only amounts to being able to perform a
small fraction of early computations now.

When you compared these early computations to the total number of
computations that can eventually be performed later, the early computations
represent only 10^-24 to 10^-46 of the whole:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a5a6ffc-053c-83ea-81f2-e8cbc60670b4

Jason

On Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 1:31 PM Jason Resch <jasonresch at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> 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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