The computing resources in one star system are already huge and it’s not clear to me that you need more than that to be certain for all practical purposes about both the fate of the universe and how best to control it.
Besides computational resources one need experimental data and observations. Sabine Hossenfelder wrote somewhere that to discover new physics we probably need accelerators which have energy like 10E15 of LHC. Also to measure changes in the speed of universe acceleration probably billions of years are needed.
Also, the problem of other ETI arises. If one civilisation is sleeping in aestivation, another could come to power and eradicate its sleeping seeds. Thus sleeping seeds should be in fact berserkers, which come to a activity from time to time, check the level of other civilizations (if any) and destroy or upgrade them. It is a rather sinister perspective.
Unimaginably large amounts of theory can often compensate for small amounts of missing empirical data. I can imagine the possibility that all of our current observations truly underdetermine facts about the universe’s future large-scale evolution, but it wouldn’t be my default guess.
For what it’s worth, my intuition agrees that any superintelligence, even if using an aestivation strategy, would leave behind some sort of easily visible side effects, and that there aren’t actually any aestivating aliens out there.
I think an argument could be made that they have left subtle visible effects, and we just haven’t been able to reach consensus that that’s what it is, and one of these days we’re going to correlate the universe’s contents, and when we do, we’re going to be a bit upset.
We don’t seem to be sure what the deal was with oumuamua, and we’re constantly getting reports of what look like alien probes on earth, but we (at least, whatever epistemic network I’m in) can only shrug and say “These things usually aren’t aliens.”
The computing resources in one star system are already huge and it’s not clear to me that you need more than that to be certain for all practical purposes about both the fate of the universe and how best to control it.
Besides computational resources one need experimental data and observations. Sabine Hossenfelder wrote somewhere that to discover new physics we probably need accelerators which have energy like 10E15 of LHC. Also to measure changes in the speed of universe acceleration probably billions of years are needed.
Also, the problem of other ETI arises. If one civilisation is sleeping in aestivation, another could come to power and eradicate its sleeping seeds. Thus sleeping seeds should be in fact berserkers, which come to a activity from time to time, check the level of other civilizations (if any) and destroy or upgrade them. It is a rather sinister perspective.
Unimaginably large amounts of theory can often compensate for small amounts of missing empirical data. I can imagine the possibility that all of our current observations truly underdetermine facts about the universe’s future large-scale evolution, but it wouldn’t be my default guess.
For what it’s worth, my intuition agrees that any superintelligence, even if using an aestivation strategy, would leave behind some sort of easily visible side effects, and that there aren’t actually any aestivating aliens out there.
I think an argument could be made that they have left subtle visible effects, and we just haven’t been able to reach consensus that that’s what it is, and one of these days we’re going to correlate the universe’s contents, and when we do, we’re going to be a bit upset.
We don’t seem to be sure what the deal was with oumuamua, and we’re constantly getting reports of what look like alien probes on earth, but we (at least, whatever epistemic network I’m in) can only shrug and say “These things usually aren’t aliens.”