I reject the idea that energy consumption is inherently bad. We want more energy for everyone. Energy is freedom. You could measure economic and social progress largely by the useful energy individuals have at their disposal.
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Horizon radiation actually gives a lower bound to temperature. Still, Robin pointed out one can cool further with absurd insulation; am still working out the total thermodynamic cost and optimizing. Would love to see time bounds too - reversible is *slow*.
What horizon are you referring to? If you simply mean there's ambient noise due to the rest of the universe, the standard approach is to isolate the system. I'm not sure what the fundamental physical limits will be to that, but (a) they'll be incredibly low; and (b) they seem
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I am thinking of the de Sitter radiation, ~10^-30 K - due to cosmological constant, so in a sense fundamental. Seems unavoidable, but can be isolated at the price of literal parsecs of foil insulators. (thickness due to need to avoid near field couplings)
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Even without the isolation, kT ~ 10^{-53} Joules is the scale of the energy fluctuations. The noise effects will be pretty small. I guess it's relevant and will require isolation on sufficient computational scale, but far beyond what happens on Earth today.
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likely to be mostly an accident of initial conditions, not a fundamental fact. I'd be curious to see a serious analysis.
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