[ExI] A new answer to the Fermi paradox?

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 18/07/2026 10:32, Jason Resch wrote:
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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.
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>     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?
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> When you are asleep time moves at infinite speed. (The "unfelt time gap"). So there is no subjective loss incurred by waiting for the latter era when everything becomes more efficient.

There is a loss, though. If you are asleep for billions of years, you are losing those years, regardless of what happens after them.

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> As to "why not live now?"
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> For every unit of energy you spend in the present era, you could have gained 10^30 X more utility by saving that energy to spend it in the later era.

You have to obtain energy in the first place, which you can't do when you're asleep. So you have to be active to gather energy, which means you aren't asleep. To gather enormous amounts of energy, for use in the future, you'd have to be very active in the present, so there's no time to aestivate! Creatures that hibernate or aestivate do it when there's a shortage of energy, not an abundance of it. So it would make sense to stay active, collect and store as much energy as possible, and only when there's not much left to collect, or it becomes cost-ineffective, go into aestivation. And by that time, you're probably into the future that you're talking about when things are so much colder and computation so much more efficient, in any case.

Another aspect is, if you want to maximise the number of computations, you'd want to multiply the number of brains as early as possible, and keep doing so, without any lengthy pauses. Reproducing is going to be much much harder in billions of years when everything (presumably) is so much farther apart, and energy is in shorter and shorter supply.

I'm sure there's some maths that can compare a civilisation that aestivates now with one that doesn't and instead reproduces itself now, spreading as widely as possible, in terms of the total number of computations each one will have experienced in the distant future.

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>     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.
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> We have billions of years to work that out.

Not if we sleep through them. 

-- 
Ben