Instead of a radio signal from a extraterestrial intelligence it would be a LOT damned scarier to find evidence of active stellar engineering going on.....
How do you fight against THAT?
Now that would be man-made global warming.
The problem is that there are a lot of scientific visionaries who think that everything is possible. I just don’t buy it.
The first one is obvious, Ringworld by Larry Niven; a gigantic ring rotating around a white dwarf star. The second one is the Citadel from the Mass Effect series of video games, and that construction was made by a race ancient and extinct compared to the ones that occupy it, including humans.
“n advanced civilization inhabiting a solar system might break up the planets into very small planetoids or pebbles to form a loose shell that would collect all the light coming from the star. The shell of planetoids would vastly increase the available “habitable” area and absorb all of the visible light. “
Moties?
Using data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, scientists recently discovered a gigantic, mysterious structure in our Milky Way galaxy comprised of two enormous gamma-ray emitting bubbles. (Image courtesy of NASA)
It was a man who worked for the British Post Office that created that first digital computer.
Tommy Flowers
Tommy Flowers' work was unsung due to the secrecy surrounding it. He designed and created the first electronic binary digital computer for Bletchley Park. Bletchley was the center for allied cryptography in WW2. He was assisted in it's design by Alan Turing, Turing was quite possibly the greatest mind of the 20th century.
The digital computer is not simply a box that sits on your desk and lets you surf the web and play video games. It is the ultimate tool, it amplifies the human mind and body. It will soon allow total manipulation at the atomic level (nanotechnology) and at the macro scale via automatons controlled by computers at our direction.
The nano scale abilities will deliver to us physical immortality. The macro scale abilities will deliver to us the control of everything you can see, the Earth, the Solar system...eventually the entire galaxy and beyond.
Once you control both the micro and macro world there simply is no limit.
This is why things such as Dyson Spheres are possible.
But where would we find all this material??
Oh yeah . . . .
I forget where I read it, but it was a sci-fi conceit that many of the red giants are actually much brighter stars seen through dyson spheres. I guess you could say the same for red dwarfs, that they are even more common than we think, and explain all the theorized extra mass the the universe is supposed to have by saying it is in red dwarf dyson spheres that we can’t see.
Freegards
or perhaps a Ringworld?