[ExI] A new answer to the Fermi paradox?

[John Clark]

*Another thing I should mention is that one of the foundations of modern
economics is that a dollar that you have today is worth more than a dollar
you will have a year from now, and I think even for Mr. Jupiter Brain a
real computation performed today is worth more than a hypothetical
computation performed in 10 trillion years.*

*John K Clark *

On Fri, Jul 17, 2026 at 3:30 PM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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*
>
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>>
>> 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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