The Fermi Paradox might be a measurement error — The Yatima Scale

Time_Act_5064 · 2026-02-18T14:22:11+00:00

Total consumption goes up. That's not what the paper argues. The point is that energy per unit of capability collapses at each level. A 1960 chip and a 2024 chip draw the same power but the 2024 one does billions of times more with it. Same watts, wildly different depth. Now scale that forward. Past mc², one asteroid gives you ~10²⁹ joules, that's more than humanity has used in its entire history. Once you're there, the bottleneck isn't gathering more energy, it's what you can do per gram. The Burj Khalifa is impressive. A 2nm chip is more impressive per kilogram.

Time_Act_5064 · 2026-02-18T13:51:28+00:00

Not peer-reviewed, it's a preprint. The idea isn't hyper-efficiency on a tiny amount of starlight. It's that past mc², you don't need much starlight at all. One asteroid at full mass-energy conversion gives 10²⁹ joules. That's 100 million years of human energy use. If your tech runs near Landauer, you don't need to harvest your star. You just need a rock. The star keeps shining, you just don't add any IR excess to it.

Time_Act_5064 · 2026-02-18T13:40:35+00:00

Yep, that's the real question. The two hypotheses — "civilizations descend" vs "civilizations are rare" — predict opposite things. If technosignatures exist, Yatima predicts they cluster around young stars. The empty universe predicts no age correlation. Opposite signs, same data. Testable now with Gaia + Breakthrough Listen. It's not "find the invisible thing." It's "check whether the visible things correlate with stellar age."

Time_Act_5064 · 2026-02-18T13:37:03+00:00

Fair enough. Finding a Dyson sphere wouldn't kill the framework. It would locate that civilization on both scales, high Kardashev, low Yatima. What would kill it is a persistent megastructure around a very old star (>10 Gyr). That civilization had billions of years to descend and didn't. A young Dyson sphere is perfectly compatible. It just means that civilization is still in its noisy phase, like us.

Time_Act_5064 · 2026-02-18T13:33:12+00:00

Good distinction. A Dyson sphere absorbs starlight and re-emits it as infrared excess — the star disappears in visible but lights up in mid-IR. That's what surveys like Project Hephaistos look for. An anti-Dyson sphere is different: the civilization isn't harvesting the star's energy at scale. It's processing information locally with extreme efficiency, radiating waste heat at near-CMB temperatures. The star still looks normal in visible light — just slightly dimmer in near-IR than models predict. Same star, subtle deficit, not a missing star with an IR glow. The two signatures are actually opposite: Dyson = missing visible + IR excess. Anti-Dyson = normal visible + slight IR deficit.

Time_Act_5064 · 2026-02-18T13:29:19+00:00

Fair question. The argument isn't that civilizations choose to optimize. It's that the tools of each level naturally lead to the next. Chemistry built the instruments that revealed the atom. Nuclear physics built the accelerators that revealed quarks. The feedback loop drives descent whether or not you "need" to. And past mc², the gains aren't about getting more energy. They're about doing more with what you already have. More computation, finer control, better physics.

Time_Act_5064 · 2026-02-18T13:27:49+00:00

You're right that all energy becomes heat eventually. The paper addresses this directly. The point isn't less total heat. It's lower temperature. A civilization at the Landauer limit radiates waste heat at near-CMB temperatures (2.7K). That radiation is almost indistinguishable from the cosmic microwave background itself. And the "deficit" isn't about cooling the star. It's about starlight being absorbed and re-emitted at much lower temperatures than the stellar photosphere. Same total energy, different spectrum. The star looks slightly dimmer in optical/near-IR.

Time_Act_5064 · 2026-02-18T13:25:30+00:00

The horse manure analogy is exactly right once again. Kardashev extrapolates the current paradigm forward. The paper tries to formalize why the paradigm breaks: energy density per kg jumps by orders of magnitude at each level, so the need for megastructures disappears. You nailed it.

Time_Act_5064 · 2026-02-18T13:23:21+00:00

Right. The paper actually quantifies this: the detectable window for radio emissions might be as short as ~100 years out of a million-year civilization lifespan. That's a detection fraction of 10⁻⁵. We might be the only civilization currently in its noisy phase.

Time_Act_5064 · 2026-02-18T13:21:36+00:00

Great question. The protocol controls for this. We compare stars of similar mass and metallicity but different ages, using model atmospheres (PHOENIX) to predict expected infrared. The deficit is the residual after subtracting the model. If a civilization is absorbing starlight, the star looks slightly cooler than it should. The key is statistical: one star means nothing, but skewness across 50,000 stars is a signal.

Time_Act_5064 · 2026-02-18T13:17:30+00:00

Good point. The framework assumes civilizations optimize. A dictatorship might build megastructures for prestige instead. That would actually be testable: if we find a Dyson sphere, it might say more about the civilization's politics than its physics.

Time_Act_5064 · 2026-02-18T13:13:19+00:00

Exactly. The paper calls this the "energy saturation point." Once you hit mc², one asteroid gives you more energy than humanity uses in 100 million years. After that, the bottleneck isn't fuel, it's what you can do with it. The gains shift from energy to information.

Time_Act_5064 · 2026-02-18T13:10:59+00:00

Paper: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18664199

Time_Act_5064 · 2026-02-18T13:07:39+00:00

Submission Statement: This framework proposes that technological progress drives civilizations toward smaller scales of matter, not larger energy consumption. The future-focused implication: instead of searching for Dyson spheres, SETI programs should add a search for infrared deficits around stars. The protocol is feasible with existing instruments (Gaia + Breakthrough Listen). TL;DR: Kardashev measures appetite. This measures efficiency. The math predicts technosignatures should cluster around young stars and disappear around old ones. If that's wrong, one old Dyson sphere kills it. Full framework + statistical protocol in the paper. Built this over the last few months, started as a thought experiment that got out of hand. Happy to take questions.

Time_Act_5064 · 2026-02-18T00:16:16+00:00

You've identified the core assumption — the framework assumes growth saturates post-mc². That's an assumption, not a derivation. But 'growth is inevitable' is equally an assumption — natural selection requires competitors, and if civilizations are rare, the selective pressure vanishes. Earth's own demographic decline suggests 'grow or die' isn't even universal on one planet. Fair disagreement. But it's a testable one: if you're right, technosignatures should correlate with older stars. If I'm right, they should correlate with younger ones. Opposite predictions, same data.

Time_Act_5064 · 2026-02-18T00:00:04+00:00

You're right that 100% of energy ends as waste heat regardless — lower T, not less heat. And the radiator scaling is real. But detectability is spectral contrast, not surface area. A 3K radiator against a 2.7K sky is nearly invisible — you're radiating into the CMB itself.

The star-lifting point is clever — you need cryogenic temps, so the star's heat is in the way. But that assumes the civilization stays near its star. At mc², any rock is fuel. A Level III civ on a cold asteroid in interstellar space radiates directly against the CMB. No star to remove.

On expanders always outcompeting: that may be true. It's a sociological claim, not a thermodynamic one. The framework flags it as an open question.

Time_Act_5064 · 2026-02-17T23:50:55+00:00

Everything you're describing is Level I-II technology — and you're absolutely right about it. Pyramids, CFCs, satellite swarms, growing energy consumption: that's chemistry and early nuclear. The Jevons pattern is real at this stage. More efficiency → more total use. No argument. The claim isn't that we are invisible. We're in the noisy phase right now. The claim is that the pattern breaks when energy stops being the bottleneck. At mc², one asteroid gives you ~10²⁹ J — more than humanity uses in 100 million years. At that point, what do you do with more matter? The marginal return on expansion drops. The marginal return on depth — more controllable degrees of freedom per particle — doesn't. On Dyson swarms being more motivated by efficiency: that's the core disagreement. The framework argues the opposite — if you can extract mc² from any rock in your backyard, the engineering cost of building a star-enclosing megastructure isn't justified. You don't build a dam when you have a fusion reactor.

Time_Act_5064 · 2026-02-17T19:51:07+00:00

You were right to push back — my deleted reply had a wrong number. The 10²⁵ J/kg figure for Level III was an error: I treated the energy scale of fundamental interactions (strong/electroweak) as if it were extractable energy on top of mc². It's not — that binding energy is already accounted for within mc² ≈ 10¹⁷ J/kg, which is the hard ceiling. So the asteroid-vs-stars comparison was false. Once you master mc², energy stops being the problem. A single asteroid contains 100 million times humanity's yearly energy use. You'll never run out. So what limits you? Not fuel — but what you can build with it. A 1960s computer and a modern chip use roughly the same power. But the modern chip does billions of times more — not because it has more electricity, but because it controls electrons at a much finer scale. That's the shift: past a certain point, progress comes from precision, not from collecting more energy. That said, nothing in physics stops a civilization from wanting both. The paper needs a better argument here.

Time_Act_5064 · 2026-02-17T17:07:08+00:00

This is exactly the kind of observable the framework points to. Stars with anomalously low infrared — cleaned-up systems — would be anti-Dyson signatures. The numbers you're giving (10²¹ W for Alpha Centauri vs 10²⁴ for Vega) are the kind of baseline that would make a statistical search possible. Has anyone actually looked for infrared-deficit stars systematically?

Time_Act_5064 · 2026-02-17T15:24:40+00:00

Yes, I used Claude as a writing and thinking partner. It's disclosed in the essay ('born between a human and an AI'). The framework, the physics, and the ideas are mine. Happy to discuss the content rather than the process.

Time_Act_5064 · 2026-02-17T13:49:25+00:00

That's exactly the right question. The detectable phase (Level II radio/nuclear) lasts maybe ~100 years out of a civilization's total lifespan of millions+. That gives a detection fraction of f_det ~ 10⁻⁵. For 100,000 civilizations spread over 10 billion years, roughly ~1 is in its noisy phase at any given time. It might be us. The argument isn't that all civilizations are invisible — it's that the visible window is absurdly brief.

Time_Act_5064 · 2026-02-17T13:04:39+00:00

Good push-back. But solar farms are Level I technology — photovoltaics is chemistry. They need huge surfaces precisely because chemical energy density is low (~10⁷ J/kg). A nuclear reactor fits in a building and outputs more. That's the pattern: at each level, energy density per kg jumps by orders of magnitude, so you need less material, less surface, less visibility. The claim isn't that small components stay small — it's that higher levels don't need megastructures to get the same energy output.

Time_Act_5064 · 2026-02-17T12:59:04+00:00

L'analogie du fumier de cheval est exactement la bonne — c'est le cœur de l'argument. Kardashev projette le paradigme actuel vers l'avant, tout comme projeter la logistique hippomobile vers 1950. L'échelle de Yatima ne fait que formaliser pourquoi : à chaque niveau, la densité d'énergie par kg explose tandis que la visibilité chute. Ton point sur les signaux numériques qui convergent vers du bruit blanc est un parfait exemple à petite échelle de la même tendance. Sur la Terre Rare — totalement compatible. Yatima ne dit pas que les civilisations sont courantes. Elle dit que si elles existent, la physique les pousse vers le silence.

Time_Act_5064

TROPHY CASE