Once centuries have passed, you’ve already sent out huge amounts of space probes that roughly saturate reachable resources. (Because you can convert Proxima Centauri fully into probes within <20 years probably.)
It doesn’t take that much energy to pretty much fully saturate on probes. In particular, Eternity in six hours claims getting the energy for most of the probes you want is possible with just 6 hours of solar output (let alone eating 0.1% of the sun). Even if we assume this off by 2 OOMs (e.g. to be confident you get everywhere you need), that still means we can saturate on energy after 1 month of solar output. If we’re willing to eat 0.1% of the sun (presumably at least millions of years of solar output?), the situation isn’t even close. In fact, the key bottleneck based on Eternity in six hours is disassembling mercury (I think on heat dissipation) though it is hard to be confident in advance.
The argument is (I assume):
Once centuries have passed, you’ve already sent out huge amounts of space probes that roughly saturate reachable resources. (Because you can convert Proxima Centauri fully into probes within <20 years probably.)
It doesn’t take that much energy to pretty much fully saturate on probes. In particular, Eternity in six hours claims getting the energy for most of the probes you want is possible with just 6 hours of solar output (let alone eating 0.1% of the sun). Even if we assume this off by 2 OOMs (e.g. to be confident you get everywhere you need), that still means we can saturate on energy after 1 month of solar output. If we’re willing to eat 0.1% of the sun (presumably at least millions of years of solar output?), the situation isn’t even close. In fact, the key bottleneck based on Eternity in six hours is disassembling mercury (I think on heat dissipation) though it is hard to be confident in advance.
Yes, I wanted to argue something like this.