[ExI] ET Emergence (Was Re: Uploads as a group of AI agents)

[John Clark]

On Tue, Mar 31, 2026 at 9:42 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

*>>>> If ET has found something better than Dyson Spheres/Swarms, an easy
>>>> way to make more energy than 400 billion stars can, then that's fine
>>>> but according to the Second Law Of Thermodynamics, regardless of how ET is
>>>> making that energy, he is going to be producing an amount of waste heat in
>>>> the form of infrared radiation that is literally astronomical, but we don't
>>>> see the slightest hint of that in this galaxy or an in the other.  *
>>>
>>>
>> *>>> Consider: reversible computing technology enables 1 kg of matter to
>>> perform more computations per second than 100 Dyson swarms.*
>>>
>>
>> *>> That is ridiculous. It's true that with a reversible computer you
>> could theoretically complete any calculation using an arbitrarily small
>> amount of energy, however the smaller your energy usage is the slower your
>> calculation is, and as your energy usage approaches zero the time to
>> complete your calculation approaches infinity.  *
>>
>
> *>What's your source for this?*
>

*Reversibility and Adiabatic Computation: Trading Time and Space for Energy*
<https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9703022>

*> As far as I have seen, energy usage has nothing to do with the speed of
> a reversible computer.*
>

*Then you have not seen very far.  *

*> Consider that the glass of water on your desk is performing 10^50
> reversible operations per second per kilogram, and it isn't emitting any
> waste heat.*
>

*It's true that you can think of a glass of water as performing
calculations, but you can't think of it as a computer because the glass of
water is working on its own calculation and not one that you want an answer
to.  *

*>> For great intelligence to be useful an animal needs hands with
>> opposable thumbs or some other organ that can delicately manipulate matter,*
>>
>
> *> When there are social dynamics and kne must kit think others of your
> same species to win mates, then there's no upper bound on selection
> pressure for intelligence. That may explain what happens with whales.*
>

*Perhaps so, and echolocation requires a great deal of data processing, but
bigger animals require bigger brains than smaller animals do, and I think
the intelligence of whales has been overestimated. Whales were hunted
almost to extinction and water is an excellent conductor of sound so the
sounds of whaling boats must have been audible for hundreds of miles, and
yet they never learn to avoid them. And there is the phenomenon of mass
whale beachings which doesn't exactly enhance their reputation for being
bright. Whales certainly never made a radio telescope, or made anything at
all for that matter except for other whales.  *


> *> Their bodies are so large that it costs them very metabolically little
> to have a much larger brain. The relative benefits even if minor, can be
> justified. I think this explains why larger animals tend to have larger
> brains. Not because so many larger brains are needed to control a larger
> body, but because a larger brain can be supported more easily*
>

*A whale's brain is about 5 times as massive as a human brain but a whale's
body is about 500 times as massive as a human body, and pound for pound a
brain uses about 10 times as much energy as any other parts of the body.  *

* >> **If a zebra on the African Savanna had an IQ of 200 that wouldn't
>> help get its genes into the next generation very much, and that's why it
>> never evolved to get that smart. *
>>
>
> *> Why then are crows so smart?*
>

*Crows are not smart enough to build a radio telescope nor are they likely
to evolve into something that could because, although they can learn to
open milk bottles with their beaks, they have no way to manipulate matter
delicate enough to repair a watch in the way that a human can. It's unclear
what environmental factors caused our hominid ancestors to walk bipedally,
but the first one to do so had a brain no larger than that of a chimpanzee;
but after that and it had 2 limbs that could be used for things other
than locomotion the brain size of its descendants grew at an extremely
rapid rate. *

*>> And yet none of those species have even come close to building a radio
>> telescope, in the last 3.8 billion years only one species has managed to do
>> so. *
>
>
> *> You could have said the same about us only a few tens of thousands of
> years ago.*


*It's much worse than that, you could say the same thing about us just a
century ago. And that is exactly why it's so bizarre that we have seen no
evidence that this galaxy, or any other galaxy, has been engineered. The
most obvious explanation for that anomaly is that we are the first.
Somebody has to be. *

* John K Clark  *




>
> *Perhaps a brilliant zebra would have a few minor advantages but
>> unless it had opposable thumbs or something equivalent it would not
>> be worth the price it would have to pay for being smart. The human brain
>> only amounts to  2% of the body weight of a human but it consumes 20% of
>> the body's energy.  *
>>
>> *And there are other disadvantages in having a large brain, a baby must
>> get through a female's birth canal, and that means most of the growth of
>> the brain must occur after birth, and that means for many years after birth
>> the young are completely helpless, and that places a huge burden on the
>> parents that can last for over a decade.  *
>>
>
>
>
>>
>
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