[ExI] A new answer to the Fermi paradox?

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 18/07/2026 18:45, Jason Resch wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 7:33 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
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>     We don't know if Dark Energy is constant so we don't know if the universe will ever reach these super low temperatures, and even if they do there is no reason for not doing some computations right now.
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> No one is saying we can't do some computations now. They're only saying: don't exhaust all energy sources now because it's wasteful and the price of expending energy now is comparatively much greater.


Exhaust all energy sources now?
How could we possibly do that?

You're saying that the energy sources of the far future will be matter. Fine. So we don't use up all the matter, don't use our matter-to-energy converters (which we don't have (not in any practical or large-scale sense)), and instead make use of the abundant energy available to us now, that won't be available in the future (whether or not we use it now).

I call that a win-win scenario. Even if the future energy and the computation it can fuel is many many orders of magnitude greater than what we can have now, if we can have something now, and it doesn't disadvantage what we can have in the future, why on earth not take advantage of it?


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>     There is no reason to let the low entropy light from a quadrillion suns radiate uselessly into infinite space.
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> It's the equivalent of picking up pennies in front of a steam roller. You say this is vast energy being wasted by not building Dyson swarms now, but it amounts to just 1/10,000th of the energy of the star. Meanwhile you dismiss the potential 10^30 X benefit of saving energy for the future.

You're implying that using this energy now is going to preclude using it in the future. It won't be there in the future anyway.

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>     There is no reason for not converting a low entropy photon into a high entropy photon PLUS A CALCULATION, before it is released into infinite space.
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> Read the link I sent and you will see that this too is mere pennies compared to the future bounty that becomes possible later, and also consider the difficulty of preserving this vast memory resovoir over trillions of years in a comparatively much hotter and active universe.

Doesn't matter. Being able to figure out ways of preserving vast amounts of memory over trillions of years is a completely different argument anyway.

If the argument is equivalent to choosing to have a million pounds in 10 years, or a million pounds in 10 years and 40 pence now, why would anyone turn down the 40 pence?

> 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.

Fine, so let's keep the gas giants intact for our million pounds in the future, while still collecting 40 pence from intercepting a fraction of the large amounts of radiant energy being wasted now. As John points out, if we don't use it, nobody ever will be able to, no matter how long they wait.

I'm sure there's some kind of compromise solution (no, it's not a compromise, it's a positive-sum game) that lets us have our immense future cake while still eating a much smaller cake that won't even exist in the future, on the way there.

-- 
Ben