What we actually want to optimize is how much subjective time we survive, not surviving as long as possible on the physical timeline.
If for some reason we wanted to survive as long as possible on the physical timeline, the best strategy might be storing energy/negentropy harvested during early periods rather than finding ways to harvest remaining energy during late periods.
AFAICT, it might be possible to harvest energy without stars or even black holes, by collecting cosmic gas and doing nuclear fusion, or something even better than nuclear fusion (e.g. inducing proton decay or throwing matter into small rapidly evaporating black holes).
AFAIK, it’s possible that there are bound states of neutrinos held by the weak force, and bound states of such “multi-neutrinos” held by gravity. And, the particles dark matter is made of open even more possibilities. Maybe we can build computers out of this stuff after all protons decay.
If our vacuum is only metastable, we might be able to induce some kind of controlled vacuum collapse and escape into the resulting new universe, which opens a bunch of more options.
Some random observations:
What we actually want to optimize is how much subjective time we survive, not surviving as long as possible on the physical timeline.
If for some reason we wanted to survive as long as possible on the physical timeline, the best strategy might be storing energy/negentropy harvested during early periods rather than finding ways to harvest remaining energy during late periods.
AFAICT, it might be possible to harvest energy without stars or even black holes, by collecting cosmic gas and doing nuclear fusion, or something even better than nuclear fusion (e.g. inducing proton decay or throwing matter into small rapidly evaporating black holes).
AFAIK, it’s possible that there are bound states of neutrinos held by the weak force, and bound states of such “multi-neutrinos” held by gravity. And, the particles dark matter is made of open even more possibilities. Maybe we can build computers out of this stuff after all protons decay.
If our vacuum is only metastable, we might be able to induce some kind of controlled vacuum collapse and escape into the resulting new universe, which opens a bunch of more options.