[ExI] A new answer to the Fermi paradox?

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jul 17, 2026 at 2:15 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

*> 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.*
>

*There is absolutely NO reason you can't or shouldn't do BOTH, do
computations now and do computations later. And there is no rationale for
letting the energy of a quadrillion suns radiate uselessly into infinite
space for the last 10 billion years. *

*> 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:*
>

*That figure was obtained by assuming that all matter/energy can be treated
as pure work, and that is ridiculous. It also assumes that Dark Energy will
remain constant or increase over time, but there is increasing evidence
that Dark Energy is decreasing, and if that trend continues then everything
ends in a Big Crunch where things are super hot not super cold. *

*Even if that figure is correct it wouldn't matter, no amount of logical
contortions can avoid the fact that a superintelligent race allowing the
radiation from trillions of suns to go to waste simply makes no sense. So
it's not surprising that at the end GPT says:   *

*"My adjudication: Bennett, Hanson, and Riedel win the central dispute.
They show that the original paper’s immediate-aestivation conclusion
results from an incomplete thermodynamic resource model. Sandberg et al.
retain a valid conditional insight about the value of a colder heat bath,
but not the claimed general implication that rational advanced
civilizations should presently be dormant."*

*When you get to the place where energy, information and entropy meet, you
will find no greater expert than Bennett, so it would be wise to listen
very carefully to what he has to say. *

*John K Clark*











>
> 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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