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 ...
Umm. Wasn’t that just a TV show? I don’t think it is based on historical fact.
Yeah—neither are Dyson speheres
Umm. Wasn’t that just a TV show? I don’t think it is based on historical fact.
We’ve found a lot of them, but we don’t call them Dysonspheres. We call them “Dark matter.”
I would think a civilization advanced enough to build a Dyson sphere, would be advanced enough to hide it from our prying eyes if they wanted to.
Why make a structure to collect the energy from a star when you can make a star that fits in your pocket? Dyson spheres are interesting, but they are also a silly extrapolation.
You can probably build an orbiting but continuous “ring,” starting with a few points along the ring and then building towards each other, ultimately connecting. And maybe the ring could be fairly wide -— but all the bits need to be essentially in orbit. (See Niven’s “Ringworld”)
With a Dyson sphere, the “polar parts” are NOT in orbit.
As the belt gets wider and wider, it reaches a point where the orbital velocity of the edges is no longer counterbalancing the tendency to “fall” inward to the star.
At the extreme — the poles — orbital velocity is zero, and the rest of the sphere would have to somehow “hold it all up.”
Unless the ETs have some form of antigravity...
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.
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If that’s the case, why is there only one common ancestor, and one tree of life?
One thing I’ve noticed about serious futurism: the predictions are often correct insofar as future tech _can_ do X, but when people (er, sentient intelligent beings) get there they realize there’s undesirable side effects and forego the vaunted prediction.
We _could_ have Moon hotels. We got to the Moon, it’s a dead rock, too high a price to see too little.
We _could_ exterminate all rodent/insect pests. That would destroy the ecosystem.
We _could_ enlighten everyone with a magic all-knowing glass slate. Cat videos are more fun.
We (well, some species) _could_ build a Dyson Sphere. There’s probably a good reason not to.
Just because He made it look easy doesn't mean it's easy.
I would think a civilization advanced enough to build a Dyson sphere, would be advanced enough to hide it from our prying eyes if they wanted to.
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They would also be very efficient and wouldn’t need such a contraption. Or maybe they figured out a way to harness dark energy.
The most likely explanation is they don’t exist.
TV Show...
“A” Team..
I think.
The Dyson sphere idea is sci-fi fantasy. Intelligent civilizations will do well to just survive much less build something so ridiculously huge. The inability to detect Dyson spheres doesn’t not mean there are no intelligent civilizations out there.
“(See Niven’s “Ringworld”)”
IIRC, Niven later wrote about how the Ringworld would be unworkably unstable.
Why?
Shouldn't the 'holy grail' in astronomy be finding what is there, regardless of what it is?
Science should explore, not for the 7 cities of Cibola, nor El Dorado, but to be like golfers and play it where it lies (and then to work out creative solutions to bad lies)
To specify a 'holy grail' is to set an agenda, like the fools errand of finding, or conjuring, anthropogenic global warming.
I would be laughed out of the seminar if I said the holy grail of all astronomy is to find popsicle sticks. And rightly so.
It only looks easy to those who don’t consider all the evidence.
Actually, MIT students had to point that out.
Niven corrected this by adding ramscoop drives along the walls in “Ringworld Engineers”.
We don’t know that.
Before you say “but Bible!”, be humble enough to accept that what is is, and God told us what we needed to know about it at the time; because we don’t grasp the totality of what is, nor the correct relationship between what is vs what He wrote, none of us know the totality of truth nor is any in a position to condemn another’s understanding thereof.
But he then provided the solution.
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