[ExI] Wrong frequency? Astronomers rethink where to hunt for alien signals

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> 
Subject: Re: [ExI] Wrong frequency? Astronomers rethink where to hunt for alien signals

 

On Fri, Jul 24, 2026 at 2:50 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

 

 > What if... Alien life … don't move on our scale, but way slower, more like intelligent trees than our warm blooded scurrying about with our paltry century lifespans.

 

>…If ET thought that much slower than earthly meat machines then I don't think they would've had time to have invented even a primitive radio. … John K Clark 

 

 

An alien life form would not have needed to invent these systems, but rather could have inherited the technology from its meat machine predecessors, who have long since gone extinct.  The meat machines rely on chemical reactions to power their high speed metabolism, producing thought a wildly inefficient manner.  We produce very little thought (defined as reduction of information entropy) per calorie compared to our own silicon mind children.  This notion is illustrated by a cel phone playing chess against a human grandmaster.  Often the opponents struggle to a tense draw after two to four hours.  But the human has metabolized six orders of magnitude more energy.

 

Imagine humans or other chemical reaction based life forms create something analogous to our notion of a Matrioshka brain, then rely entirely on solar energy.  Because of thermodynamic constraints, imagine they can think (reduce collective information entropy) at 1 percent the rate of humans but have operational life spans ten thousand times longer.  Then imagine they are able to overcome destructive competition in ways not available to biological life forms for interspecies competition in inherent to chemical-reaction based life.

 

Given those assumptions and known thermodynamic constraints, we should be looking for alien signals at a frequency of a few bits per day, milliHz, with starlight being analogous to the AM carrier frequency.

 

BillK, please drop that notion on your favorite AI.  As you do, note that we have quietly entered the era when AI has been promoted to the position of arbiter of ideas.

 

spike

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