> Indeed. I almost wonder if it can be proven that thermodynamics is in fact the only possible way to verifiably make something take considerable time and energy, i.e. actually cost in resources that we have no way of faking, especially time.

This seems intuitively correct. So much so that I'm sure there's a paper that either confirms or denies that this is the case (perhaps in information theory). I also wonder how quantum computing affects this idea.