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CarlShulman comments on Subjective Relativity, Time Dilation and Divergence - Less Wrong
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It's not a question of ruling out the scenario, just driving down its probability to low levels.
Current physics indicates that we can't increase computation indefinitely in this way. It may be wrong, but that's the place to put most of our probability mass. When we consider new physics, they might increase the returns to colonization (e.g. more computation using bigger black holes) or have little effect, with only a portion of our probability mass going to the "vast inner expansion" scenarios.
Even in those scenarios, there's still the intelligence explosion dynamic to consider. At each level of computational efficiency it may be relatively easy or hard to push onwards to the next level: there might be many orders of magnitude of easy gains followed by some orders of difficult ones, and so forth. As long as there are bottlenecks somewhere along the technology trajectory, civilizations should spend most of their time there, and would benefit from additional resources to advance through the bottlenecks.
Combining these factors, you're left with a possibility that seems to be non-vanishing but also small.
This is not clear at all.
Current physics posits no ultimate minimal energy requirement for computation. With reversible computing, a couple of watts could perform any amount of computation. The upper theoretical limit is infinity. The limits are purely practical, not theoretical.
There is also quantum computation to consider:
Why do you think that mass/energy is ultimately important? And finally, there are the more radical possibilities of space-time engineering.
I don't follow your logic.
When we consider new physics, they could do any number of things. The most likely is to increase utilization of current matter/energy. They could also allow the creation of matter/energy. Any of these would further increase the rate of return of acceleration over expansion. And acceleration already starts with a massive lead. The only new physics which would appear at first to favor colonization is speed of light circumvention. But depending on the details that could actually also favor acceleration over expansion.
I don't see any benefit. A colony 10 light-years away would be more or less inaccessible for accelerated hyper-intelligences in terms of bandwidth and latency.
The possible benefit seems to be satisficing the idea that you have replicated, and or possibly travelling to new regions where you have better growth opportunities.