Dinner!
Posted on 05/04/2018 5:48:07 AM PDT by C19fan
Perhaps the greatest 'holy grail' in all of astronomy is the search for life, and particularly intelligent life, beyond Earth. Given that life arose so plentifully and easily here on our home planet, and that the ingredients for life are everywhere we look throughout the Universe, it seems like a foregone conclusion that we wouldn't be alone. The Milky Way, all on its own, has approximately 400 billion stars, each with its own unique history and chances for life to have arisen. Despite how technologically advanced humans have become, SETI searches have all come up empty, perhaps implying that technologically advanced civilizations aren't communicating in ways we would have thought. But an advanced-enough planet might have built a sphere around their Sun — a Dyson sphere — to harness 100% of its energy. Incredibly, we now have the technology to detect them. If, that is, they exist.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
and the aliens everywhere never met Dyson so deprived they are unable to build them.
Maybe we have evolved enough and experienced enough of our known universe to know that all the neighbors are assholes and the wall is just as much to keep them out as it is to keep our energy in.
Giving a concept a name does not guarantee that it actually exists in reality.
Hence "Scrith"
He's said that the tidal forces on the Ringworld would exceed any known substance's ability to resist and hence he invented Scrith and made the walls and floor from that.
I don't recall where I read it, but I've read most of everything that Niven has written but he did an extensive workup of the Ringworld, doing all the math and such. With known substances, it would develop a death wobble almost immediately and fly apart. This of course assumes that you could mine the materials from nearby bodies, manufacture it in space, and move all the bits around. The ringworld would have mass roughly equal to Jupiter and affect every other celestial body in the system. Station keeping alone would require supercomputers continuously fine tuning the orbit. It's a big project :)
IF there is life on another planet, why do we always assume it is intelligently advanced beyond life on our planet?
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And why do we assume intelligently advanced life is friendly. Go to Africa and walk around the game parks without any firearms of sharp objects, see how friendly the locals are, see how they feel about you competing with them for food and water, see how they feel when they get hungry, see how they react when you attract their attention by making noise ... and you imagined that in the vast darkness of space you would just go “sailing bright eternity” in peace and tranquility ...
If we see a gravity well that has no corresponding star, that might be a clue.
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Assuming the putative aliens allow the energy of gravity to go to waste ...
The universe is not only queerer than we think, but queerer than we can suppose - J.B.S. Haldane
constructs such as dyson spheres are the equivalent of navel gazing, and what-if-hitler-had-won pseudo ingtellectualism
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The main point to remember when dealing or thinking about aliens is that they are alien.
The main point to remember when dealing or thinking about aliens is that they are alien.
This was the theme of the SF film Arrival (2016). Nobody could translate the aliens’ weird circular language until the main linguist in the film learned how to think like them.
Great film if you like hard SF.
Hahaha, funny...
LOL. You’re right. Obviously, I do not comprehend agenda science, and how to get rewards from it. I am amused by it though.
As if no evidence of a conjecture means anything.
I tried to watch it but it was so much of a chick flick I gave up. Maybe some other time. The bit I wrote is a quote, and if some Hollywood type used it in a film, then plagiarism
Reading hard SF is so much better than the mostly lame attempts to make a movie, with the exception of Babylon 5.
Read (if you have not) Gregory Benford’s 6 volume very hard SF Galactic Center series:
In the Ocean of Night
Across the Sea of Stars
Great Sky River
Tides of Light
Furious Gulf
Sailing Bright Eternity
There you go, messing with perfection. Real scientists cannot be accused of having an agenda which is a sacrilegious accusation only used by the unwashed, idiotic, ignorant public (so called) who cannot see whom their betters are and are always looking for an angle to get in on all the cash and prestige - plain jealousy.
When the patrons of real science, like global climate change, resume power, people who flout conventional wisdom and settled science or accuse their betters of having a agenda will be ‘dealt’ with forthrightly.
Gravity on the inside surface of a hollow shell. Which way is up? Spinning the sphere makes the poles uninhabitable, since there's no gravity there to hold the atmosphere in place - it either drifts into the sun or migrates to the equator.
Artificial gravity? Maybe, but nobody's done it, so how do you know how much power would be required?
More gravity trouble - assuming artificial gravity is possible, how do you keep the sun in place within the sphere? Sun in exact center, gravity would be equal from all directions, until the sun drifted just a little to one side, then the nearer wall would have greater attraction, pulling the sun further towards it. Unstable, this machine actually wants to tear itself apart!
How about the sheer mass involved? How much material, how many solar systems would you have to loot of material to construct a sphere 93M miles around? How much energy would you consume transporting and processing that much mass, in order to harness the energy of just one star? Would you come out ahead, or would it be better to just colonize all those systems instead of destroying them?
The Dyson Sphere
A Dyson Sphere is inferior to a Dyson Ring, and you’d have so much real estate from a Dyson Ring, you wouldn’t need to worry about that.
Well then, I’m not looking for trouble; so I’d better lay low and refrain from any further common sense observations.
By jove, the emperor’s new clothes are stunning!
Building a sphere around a star?
That would take more than an entire planet’s worth of material.
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