[ExI] Fermi Paradox vs. Copernican Principle?

[Keith Henson]

I have argued here that Tabby's star might be an example of an uploaded
civilization, one that has spread out 1000 ly. Why no laser beams or radio
is a mystery.

Keith


On Thu, Jul 23, 2026 at 10:29 PM Inigo Barrera via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> John,
>
> Conceded: your argument doesn't require anyone to send us a message — only
> to rearrange matter — so architecture incompatibility doesn't reach it.
> Mine explains an unread signal, not an unexploited galaxy. Fair.
>
> What I'd contest is the seam between the two halves of your case. The
> physics half — starlight into empty space is free energy wasted,
> computation has a thermodynamic price — is solid. The value half, that any
> mind wants to maximize total computation, isn't physics. It's a utility
> function, and I'd argue it's the one our particular selection history
> installed in us.
>
> Your answer is presumably that it only takes one lineage with that
> appetite, and expansionists inherit the light cone. That's a selection
> argument, not a thermodynamic one, and selection presupposes differential
> reproduction among variants you didn't design. Whether it still runs on
> minds that design their own successors is the question at issue, not a
> premise.
>
> One argument in your own currency rather than psychology: if the cost of
> erasing a bit scales with temperature (Landauer's principle), then burning
> stars now is the wasteful option; waiting for the background to cool buys
> vastly more computation per joule. A cold, dark strategy becomes rational,
> not timid. The counter — you can't wait for free, since stars burn out
> regardless — is a real physics objection, which is precisely my point: the
> decision between expanding now and waiting hinges on a utility calculus,
> not on a thermodynamic compulsion.
>
> And I won't wave away the evidence, because your argument has the rare
> virtue of predicting an observable. Waste heat is the signature, and the
> mid-infrared surveys covering something like a hundred thousand galaxies
> came back with no convincing Kardashev III. That is a real null result, not
> an absence of looking, and it rules out a galaxy-scale burn happening now.
> What it doesn't rule out is the one strategy that predicts exactly the same
> null: a civilization that has already stopped radiating and is waiting. The
> measurement can't separate the two, which is the whole problem — the sky
> looks identical whether nobody is there or everybody is being efficient.
>
> Which brings me back to where the thread started. I expect you'll say
> mediocrity is a heuristic, not a law, and heuristics get overturned — the
> Earth isn't an average planet, and we do sit in an unusually quiet corner.
> Granted. But what overturns a heuristic is evidence, and a null result that
> can't distinguish 'alone' from 'incompatible' or 'patiently efficient'
> isn't evidence — it's an ambiguity being read in the direction that happens
> to feel tidiest. 'We're first' is the only answer on the table that makes
> us metaphysically special after five centuries of demotions, and it's
> winning here on elegance rather than on discrimination between hypotheses.
> I'd want a stronger reason than tidiness before paying that price.
>
> Íñigo
>
> El 23 jul 2026, a las 14:44, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> escribió:
>
> On Wed, Jul 22, 2026 at 6:21 PM Inigo Barrera via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> * > The Great Silence doesn’t measure our uniqueness; it measures the
>> reach of our receiver. It cannot distinguish ‘alone’ from ‘incompatible*
>
>
> *I stopped believing in ET in the 1980s the first time I read Eric
> Drexler's book "Engines Of Creation", at about the same time I started
> hearing excuses that attempted to explain why we have never seen the
> slightest evidence of ET, and they were all very similar to the one you
> have presented. But I realize that you'd need a very profound chain of
> thought to explain why not a single alien in any alien civilization
> figured  it might NOT be a great idea to keep permitting low entropy
> photons from quadrillions of suns radiate uselessly into infinite space,
> and instead it might be a good idea to make them do some useful work first,
> for example by performing a calculation. But in the last 50 years none of
> the excuses for the Fermi Paradox  I have heard, other than the obvious
> one, have not been profound, they have been, I'm sorry but there's no other
> word for it, LAME.  *
>
> John K Clark    See what's on my list at  Extropolis
> <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>
>
> ka3
>
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