[ExI] A new answer to the Fermi paradox?

[Jason Resch]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 7:39 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On 18/07/2026 10:32, Jason Resch wrote:
> >
> >     >     Anyway, I don't buy this as an explanation for the Fermi
> Paradox.
> >
> >     >
> >
> >     >
> >
> >     >
> >
> >     > 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?
> >
> >
> > 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.
>
> >
> > As to "why not live now?"
> >
> > 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.



You just need to have an intelligent probe sitting near any collection of
matter. The mass of the matter does the preservation.

Also the sleep doesn't imply complete dormancy, it just represents a bias
towards securing rather than exploiting resources in the present era.


So you have to be active to gather energy, which means you aren't asleep.


Yes. But gravity has done most of that gathering for us.

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.
>


That's what this hypothesis suggests. An early phase of reproduction
tobreqch all nearby galaxies and clusters now.


> 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.
>
> >
> >
> >
> >     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.
> >
> >
> > We have billions of years to work that out.
>
> Not if we sleep through them.


I think you have some misconception for what this hypothesis suggests. It
does mean mean every intelligent race immediately puts themselves in
cryonics to wake up in a trillion years. There is still von Neumann
replication and spread throughout the universe.

The only difference, as I see it, is that type II/type III energy
exploiting civilizations in this era may not make sense. Rather having a
single probe around massive non fusing planet (like Jupiter or Saturn) to
later fuse their hydrogen in the long distant future can correspond to
levels of computation far greater than a "type IV" civilization that today
had a Dyson swarm around each of the 10^22 stars in the observable universe
at the current temperature of the CMB.

Jason
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