David Kipping

And you'd think that'd be something that, you know, harvesting stellar energy on a massive scale, you'd think that'd be something we'd see.

So to me, actually, if anything, kind of exacerbates the Fermi paradox, right?

Because if you imagine they're roaming around, all they'd want to do is basically turn planets into computers.

Next planet, let's just turn that whole thing into computer substrate.

Let's just harvest all the goddamn energy off that star.

You would just...

Eat it all up.

You'd be like a virus just transforming the universe from state A to state B. That would be your one reasonable goal because then you could do more computation, more computation, more computation.

If that's your only goal, it does pose more of a problem.

It seems that we're the first, right?

Because we don't see that happening elsewhere.

Yeah, but if those drones are doing labor, they're doing work, that's energy, right?

You're using energy.

So I think, I mean, maybe you can get around- Right, but what is the energy?

I don't think that matters because unless we don't understand thermodynamics, but probably the strongest thing we have is the conservation of energy in thermodynamics, right?

So-

If you do computation in these data centers or even on your laptop, it warms up, right?

And there's no way around that, right?

Whenever you put energy in, that same energy has to come back out.

Otherwise, it's just sort of trapped in there forever.