Images here won't load, but can be seen in the archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20221107200157/https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EEZsTatSoJz4CDvAc/distillation-experiment-chunk-knitting
Not an answer, but there is a beautiful short sci-fi story by Isaac Asimov that touches on this theme called "The last question". I don't know if it is okay to provide a link but it isn't hard to find online.
This reminded me to the Goldfish reading post, and it turns out it's the same author.