If a civilization wants to maximize computation it appears rational to aestivate until the far future in order to exploit the low temperature environment: this can produce a $10^{30}$ multiplier of achievable computation. We hence suggest the "aestivation hypothesis": the reason we are not observing manifestations of alien civilizations is that they are currently (mostly) inactive, patiently waiting for future cosmic eras. This paper analyzes the assumptions going into the hypothesis and how physical law and observational evidence constrain the motivations of aliens compatible with the hypothesis.
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I think you are seriously overestimating our current understanding of the universe/physics. For instance we don't even know if our universe is finite or not, if it's infinite then your point is moot and you literally would have access to infinite compute.
I disagree, I have seen research indicating that it's reasonable to have a computing system with on the order of 10^69 bits. There doesn't seem to be anything magical about this thinking at all.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.03394.pdf
This goes together nicely with the Aestivation Hypothesis (https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.03394).
If a civilisation puts itself on hold for a trillion years, just waiting around doing nothing, then when it wakes up the universe is much colder and it can do computations 10^30 times more efficiently. If the civilization consists of minds running on computers then they've increased their own lifespans by the same factor.
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https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.03394.pdf
On a first reading, and accepting the major premises for the sake of argument, this seemed like the weakest point:
The reader might wonder whether starting these computations now is rational since the universe is quickly cooling and will soon (compared to the overall lifespan of the civilization) reach convenient temperatures. The computational gain of doing computations at time t is ∝ exp(Ht): it increases exponentially until the temperature is dominated by the internal heating rather than the outside temperature. Since most of the integrated value accrues within the last e-folding and the energy used early was…
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used exponentially inefficiently, it is not worth starting early even if the wait is a minuscule fraction of the overall lifespan.
Grant that there's an exponential efficiency gap between computing now and computing a trillion+ years from now. There is also an exponential efficiency gap between using the power radiated from stars to power Dyson Swarm computing for the next trillion years and just letting it radiate away without computing anything, like a chump. A coolly rational maximizer isn't going to leave additional gains on the table with the human-like reasoning of "it's only a very small additional gain."
Yeah, their institute just put out a quarterly update a few days ago: https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/quarterly-update-summer-2017/ . It mentions their previous Fermi Paradox paper, "That is not dead which can eternal lie: the aestivation hypothesis for resolving Fermi’s paradox" ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.03394 ), and also a "future paper" that sounds like this one:
> Anders Sandberg, Stuart Armstrong, and their co-author Milan Cirkovic published a paper outlining a potential strategy for advanced civilizations to postpone computation until the universe is much colder, and thereby producing up to a 10^30 multiplier of achievable computation. This might explain the Fermi paradox, although a future paper from FHI suggests there may be no paradox to explain.
The Fermi paradox is the conflict between an expectation of a high {\em ex ante} probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and the apparently lifeless universe we in fact observe.
Despite their massive size, successful deep artificial neural networks can exhibit a remarkably small difference between training and test performance.
In honor of Alan Turing's hundredth birthday, I unwisely set out some thoughts about one of Turing's obsessions throughout his life, the question of physics and free will.