[ExI] A new answer to the Fermi paradox?

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 17/07/2026 20:01, Jason Resch wrote:
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> On Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 9:10 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
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>     On 17/07/2026 12:34, Jason Resch wrote:
>     > It is from 2017 but it was new to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aestivation_hypothesis
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>     > 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.
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>     > 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.
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>     The aestivation hypothesis (congratulations on spelling it right, incidentally)
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> Thanks I copied and pasted it I think.
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>     never made a lot of sense to me. There may be advantages in terms of theoretical calculations possible, but the downsides seem much more important. If you are inactive and unaware, you are vulnerable.
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> I don't think it requires perfect inactivity. Think of a sentinel probe sent to every star system running on comparatively low power, rather than an all out race to exploit every piece of energy now, sending a hyper intelligent von Neumann probe out to every seller object to protect itself and stake out resources for later exploitation.
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>     Simple considerations of survival seem to dictate that you'd need at least a minimal consciousness and ability to act, to defend against natural disasters, and attacks from anyone who regards you as competition for resources, either now or in the future.
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> I agree, and none of that is precluded.
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>     Another factor is all the energy that you are letting go to waste. If this cosmic era is so much more energy-dense than future eras, why not remain active and make your primary activity storing as much energy as possible for future use? 
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> The energy waste from stars fusing elements is a fraction of a percent. The bulk long term energy is in the rest mass of these objects.
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> On long enough time horizons, the universe cools to a temperature far lower than the hawking temperature of even galactic center black holes, and black holes convert their entire rest mass to energy.
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> Computations become many orders of magnitude more efficient at these low temperatures operating at slow speeds. To exploit energy resources now is like picking and eating fruit before it's ripe. You might get some nutritional benefit, but you would get so much more if you simply waited.
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>     I imagine that might look like engineering collisions of stars so as to make black holes, so we might see many more black holes than expected. I don't know if we have, but I imagine that activity on a scale that would enable this, would be easily detectable.
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> Actually there is more exploitable energy (neg entropy) in matter before it falls into a black hole, such that if the aestivation hypothesis is true, we might expect any any active sentinels to prevent objects from creating black holes now.
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>     Anyway, I don't buy this as an explanation for the Fermi Paradox.
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> It's just another possibility to consider.


Ok, fair enough but I don't see why it would make sense to just wait for billions of years, doing nothing, when you could be having trillions of subjective years of experience, THEN more trillions or quadrillions or more years in another cosmic era. What would anyone gain by just waiting, doing nothing? What's the downside of living now AND living later, vs. not living now then living later?

There's another factor to consider too: You'd have to be damned confident that your predictions about how the cosmos will evolve are right. You'd feel a right fool if you hibernated for billions of years, then woke up to find that you only had a few seconds of life left!

(Damn, I really should read to the end of these digests before replying to a post. I see John Clark has said basically the same thing already! :D)

-- 
Ben