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Academian comments on An empirical test of anthropic principle / great filter reasoning - Less Wrong
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One argument against the "we're probably doomed" conclusion is that the impact of a roughly speaking "intelligent" system -- say, one that can be interpreted as maximizing some utility -- might not be recognizable to us. As an example to instantiate this possibility, if it were evolved to the point that its optimization procedure was as precise as say, the laws of physics, then we might just interpret it as a physical law.
In other words, the whole situation is really evidence that if intelligence evolves highly frequently in space and time, then it probably evolves in a way that renders it eventually undetectable.
Optimally compressed data is essentially indistinguishable from random noise. Could we tell the difference between a universe that has already been converted into computronium and one that's empty? If you had an awful lot of matter and energy and wanted to make the most powerful computing device possible, would it end up looking a lot like a star? Nuclear fusion is a great energy source, and there's lots of thermodynamic information in the atoms and molecules that make up a hot plasma.
Optimally compressed data also has the highest possible entropy (each bit is maximally informative), so that's how a universe being used as computronium would look. So we're not in such a universe, since:
a) It has too many observable regularities (i.e. we can and do further compress it by identifying laws of physics)
b) black holes have the highest entropy per unit mass, and most of the universe isn't one.
c) ETA: entropy manages to keep increasing, so it can't be at a maximum
YES! C.E. Shannon for the WIN :)
It's a great insight, but not that hard to prove (or at least "get" the reasoning behind it): anything that distinguishes the data from randomness is redundant information, and that redundancy can be used to further compress it.
(Obviously, that doesn't count as a formal proof, &c.)
I'm not too up to date on my cosmology but isn't it still theorized that dark matter accounts for more mass than visible matter? I would expect advanced civilizations to minimize energy wastage through electromagnetic emissions. I'm not sufficiently knowledgeable about physics to know whether computronium would possibly have the theorized characteristics of dark matter however.
There are lots of solutions to the Fermi Paradox, this being one of them. I'm not sure how we're supposed to judge between the various options given our lack of evidence.