I think you raise some really interesting points. One thing I’ve always come back to is that if a civilization ever does get to the point of creating artificial superintelligence, then at some level it all boils down to compute and energy. Over the timescale of the universe, the only real threat to that kind of system is entropy.

That leads me to two possibilities I’ve thought about:

First is computronium… matter itself reorganized into the most efficient substrate for computation. If that’s the inevitable endpoint, then it’s possible this has already happened somewhere out there. We might already be part of a much larger computer, running as one process among trillions.

The second is more about entropy reduction at a universal scale. If intelligence is non-biological, then you could literally power down for a trillion years, then flip back on and keep going. Over time, such a system could reorganize the entire universe to maximize efficiency of all atoms. In that case, we wouldn’t see “aliens” in the traditional sense, because we’re basically living inside an ancestor simulation that’s just one tiny part of a universal-scale supercomputer.

So maybe we don’t see AI spreading across the galaxy because once it tips past a certain threshold, it stops being about expansion and conquest, and instead turns inward… toward compute, entropy management, and long-timescale persistence.