[ExI] Extreme observational astronomy

[Stephen Van Sickle]

On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 8:29 AM, David Lubkin <lubkin at unreasonable.com>wrote:

Q: Assume Drexlerian molecular nanotechnology. If you took apart the solar
> system for raw materials, what is the largest effective diameter telescope
> you could create? What would its capabilities be?
>

How about a gravitation focus telescope?  As I understand, the solar focus
starts at about 550 AU and extends usefully out to 1000 AU or more.  It is
a focal line rather than focal point, and extends along the line made by
the sun and the target object.  So the light detector could be a 500 AU
tether with EM sensors along its length, pointing at the Sun at one end,
and The Rest of the Universe at the other.  At 1 mg/meter mass, the tether
would be roughly 100,000 tons.

Now multiply that, with tethers pointing inward towards the sun and
outward, kinda like a sea urchin.  At 1 for every square kilometer of a
sphere at 550 AU, the total mass would be around 10^30 kg (assuming I
counted the zeros right, by no means a sure thing), roughly the mass of the
Sun.   But 1 tether every 1000 or 1000000 km^2 would put it in the range of
the mass of some planets.  And it need not be built round our sun, some
other systems may be better suited.  The resolution and light gathering
ability I leave as an exercise for the Student.  The engineering details, I
leave as an exercise for my post-human self.

As a guess, I would think that the resolution is considerably less than
that of Ander's design, but it would be collecting data from all directions
simultaneously rather than narrowly focused.  An All Seeing Eye.

Now, to extend this, in time honored extropian fashion:  You can have not
only EM detectors along the length of the tethers, but EM emitters.  Could
this not make a giant phased array transmitter, using the total power of
the central star, as collected by a Dyson swarm? Then, if you find any
aliens, you can send a message detectable with with whatever the alien
equivalent of fillings are.  Then you can use the phased array to send out
a power beam for sail probes to visit. Or, possibly, to fry the planet of
your potential competitors.

Now, of course, the Dyson swarm is an array of computronium, Thinking Deep
Thoughts on what the sea urchin array is seeing.  After a while of doing
this, not long in astronomical time, the self replicating probes the sea
urchin array have sent out start arriving at their destinations and build
their own Dyson swarms and sea urchin arrays.  In less than a million
years, the entire galaxy is not only a extra large size packet switch array
of computronium, but a galaxy sized telescope and phased array transmitter,
snooping on the neighbors and sending out the occasional Kardashev class 3
"Howdy, there!" to likely looking galaxies.

I will stop there, lest even my head spontaneously detonate.

s
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