The proof relies on one weak, nearly tautological principle rooted in the definition of progress:
What actually is this universally accepted “definition of progress”? Is there evidence that even all humans do or ever will accept it, let alone all aliens?
For that matter, what’s a “civilization”?
This dynamic leads to gravitational collapse into a black hole if engineered
I’m not sure that any number of bits of information smeared over the surface of a black hole can meet any reasonable definition of civilization, or is anything that anybody would engineer for. Maybe you can get some kind of computation out of the process, and maybe you can’t. Maybe the people doing the engineering would be satisfied with that kind of computation as a “civilization”, and maybe they wouldn’t.
or to stagnation if not (both outcomes are externally silent).
You could become “stagnant” at the size of a galaxy, and only reach that stage after many distinctively noisy radiation-emitting events.
Sharding or interstellar spread remains theoretically possible, yet the energy overhead of synchronising distant shards (Fig. 3) makes expansion uneconomical,
The assumption that they should all have to be synchronized is unjustified and counterintuitive. You may say that it’s not a “civilization” if it can’t keep itself synchronized to some particular degree, but the response to that is that “civilization” by that particular definition isn’t necessarily a goal.
Humans already have explicitly stated desires to shed tons of never-to-be-synchronized shards in the form of von Neumann probes or whatever… even if there’s also a collapsing core. There are a whole bunch of people on this very Web site who want to populate the entire downstream light cone. That implies that the outer reaches will, by design, never, ever communicate back to the point of origin, and will never receive anything from the point of origin after their departure. So we have an existence proof for people who don’t care about synchronization and want to do very observable things.
The interesting formulation of the Fermi paradox isn’t about why you don’t communicate with whole civilizations, necessarily. It’s about why you never see any signs of anybody at all.
Thanks for the detailed feedback. It helps clarify things.
On progress and civ defs. Progress here means net info growth with r greater than 1. Civ means any entropy reducing info system or negentropic node. It is pure thermo and physical not cultural. Reject it and the paradox is trivial. No growth means no visibility.
BH as civ or engineered. Fair. Smearing bits on horizon does not sound like a livable setup and computation seems dubious. But the model does not need it. Theorem forces external silence via density. Compact dark states whether engineered or not.
Galaxy stagnation with noisy buildup. Possible but thermo makes it impossible to reach that scale. Spreading costs explode before full system takeover. Noisy phase is short decades or centuries then quiet. If stagnant big it is r=1 no ongoing emissions just frozen silence.
Sync assumption. Not mandatory. Unsynchronized shards or probes each r greater than 1 hit own bounds turn silent minis. No light cone fill physics blocks early.
Human desires for probes. Cool but energy math says no post 2075 barrier hits too soon.
Resolves no signs at all. Growth self silences finite or no growth invisible. Article updated on unsynced thanks to input like yours.
Counterpoint: the optimal signal to noise ratio does not require preservation of noise. Most information is noise. Civilization may optimize for forgetting much but not all, with a stable amount of information that never collapses.
Thanks for the insightful counterpoint is spot-on that optimizing for signal-to-noise by forgetting noise could stabilize info without collapse. In fact, thanks to feedback like yours, I’ve updated the article to more clearly integrate this in the “noise forgetting” note, showing it leads to r=1 (silent stagnation) or, if any growth remains, eventual finite-time silence via the theorem. It strengthens the model without changing the core resolution: Silence prevails either way
Black holes can theoretically be viewed as computers of maximum density. However, it’s highly speculative that we could exploit their computational power. From an external perspective, even if information could be retrieved from Hawking radiation, it would come at the cost of dramatic computational overhead. I also wonder how one would “program” the black hole’s state to perform the desired computation. If you inject any structured information, it would become destructured in the most random form possible (random in the sense that Kolmogorov formally defined a random sequence). General relativity also implies tremendous latencies.
To me, this is not very different from—and arguably worse than—sending a hydrogen atom to the Sun and trying to exploit the computational result from the resulting thermal radiation. Good luck with that.
Now, if you consider the problem from inside the black hole… virtually everything we could say about the interior of a black hole is almost certainly wrong. The very notion of “inside” that applies to conventional physics may itself be incorrect in this extreme case.
Edit : To offer another comparison, would a compressed Turing machine be superior to an uncompressed one ? In terms of informational density, certainly, but otherwise I doubt it.
it’s valid critique and highlights the speculation in BH computation (overhead from Hawking decoding, scrambling of input, GR latencies, unknowable interiors). But the model doesn’t rely on it: The theorem proves external silence via density bounds alone (growth intersects finite limit, forcing compact non-emissive states), internals irrelevant, whether computable or not. If impractical, systems stagnate earlier (r≤1, silent anyway). Resolution holds: Thermo + geometry = quiet universe.
Updated article emphasizes this (thanks to feedback like yours)
What actually is this universally accepted “definition of progress”? Is there evidence that even all humans do or ever will accept it, let alone all aliens?
For that matter, what’s a “civilization”?
I’m not sure that any number of bits of information smeared over the surface of a black hole can meet any reasonable definition of civilization, or is anything that anybody would engineer for. Maybe you can get some kind of computation out of the process, and maybe you can’t. Maybe the people doing the engineering would be satisfied with that kind of computation as a “civilization”, and maybe they wouldn’t.
You could become “stagnant” at the size of a galaxy, and only reach that stage after many distinctively noisy radiation-emitting events.
The assumption that they should all have to be synchronized is unjustified and counterintuitive. You may say that it’s not a “civilization” if it can’t keep itself synchronized to some particular degree, but the response to that is that “civilization” by that particular definition isn’t necessarily a goal.
Humans already have explicitly stated desires to shed tons of never-to-be-synchronized shards in the form of von Neumann probes or whatever… even if there’s also a collapsing core. There are a whole bunch of people on this very Web site who want to populate the entire downstream light cone. That implies that the outer reaches will, by design, never, ever communicate back to the point of origin, and will never receive anything from the point of origin after their departure. So we have an existence proof for people who don’t care about synchronization and want to do very observable things.
The interesting formulation of the Fermi paradox isn’t about why you don’t communicate with whole civilizations, necessarily. It’s about why you never see any signs of anybody at all.
Thanks for the detailed feedback. It helps clarify things.
On progress and civ defs. Progress here means net info growth with r greater than 1. Civ means any entropy reducing info system or negentropic node. It is pure thermo and physical not cultural. Reject it and the paradox is trivial. No growth means no visibility.
BH as civ or engineered. Fair. Smearing bits on horizon does not sound like a livable setup and computation seems dubious. But the model does not need it. Theorem forces external silence via density. Compact dark states whether engineered or not.
Galaxy stagnation with noisy buildup. Possible but thermo makes it impossible to reach that scale. Spreading costs explode before full system takeover. Noisy phase is short decades or centuries then quiet. If stagnant big it is r=1 no ongoing emissions just frozen silence.
Sync assumption. Not mandatory. Unsynchronized shards or probes each r greater than 1 hit own bounds turn silent minis. No light cone fill physics blocks early.
Human desires for probes. Cool but energy math says no post 2075 barrier hits too soon.
Resolves no signs at all. Growth self silences finite or no growth invisible. Article updated on unsynced thanks to input like yours.
Counterpoint: the optimal signal to noise ratio does not require preservation of noise. Most information is noise. Civilization may optimize for forgetting much but not all, with a stable amount of information that never collapses.
Thanks for the insightful counterpoint is spot-on that optimizing for signal-to-noise by forgetting noise could stabilize info without collapse. In fact, thanks to feedback like yours, I’ve updated the article to more clearly integrate this in the “noise forgetting” note, showing it leads to r=1 (silent stagnation) or, if any growth remains, eventual finite-time silence via the theorem. It strengthens the model without changing the core resolution: Silence prevails either way
Good demonstration, but I’m not convinced.
Black holes can theoretically be viewed as computers of maximum density. However, it’s highly speculative that we could exploit their computational power. From an external perspective, even if information could be retrieved from Hawking radiation, it would come at the cost of dramatic computational overhead. I also wonder how one would “program” the black hole’s state to perform the desired computation. If you inject any structured information, it would become destructured in the most random form possible (random in the sense that Kolmogorov formally defined a random sequence). General relativity also implies tremendous latencies.
To me, this is not very different from—and arguably worse than—sending a hydrogen atom to the Sun and trying to exploit the computational result from the resulting thermal radiation. Good luck with that.
Now, if you consider the problem from inside the black hole… virtually everything we could say about the interior of a black hole is almost certainly wrong. The very notion of “inside” that applies to conventional physics may itself be incorrect in this extreme case.
Edit : To offer another comparison, would a compressed Turing machine be superior to an uncompressed one ? In terms of informational density, certainly, but otherwise I doubt it.
it’s valid critique and highlights the speculation in BH computation (overhead from Hawking decoding, scrambling of input, GR latencies, unknowable interiors). But the model doesn’t rely on it: The theorem proves external silence via density bounds alone (growth intersects finite limit, forcing compact non-emissive states), internals irrelevant, whether computable or not. If impractical, systems stagnate earlier (r≤1, silent anyway). Resolution holds: Thermo + geometry = quiet universe.
Updated article emphasizes this (thanks to feedback like yours)