[ExI] Silence in the sky—but why?

[Mirco Romanato]

Il 07/09/2013 20:30, Eugen Leitl ha scritto:
> On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 06:03:52PM +0200, Mirco Romanato wrote:

>> Maybe, just maybe, civilizations reach a point where they "transcend"
>> what we are able to detect and move to another level altogether.

> Tracelessly, and every single time out of a trillion? Just a single
> retarded civilization will be detectable.

You could be right, but the time from undetectable because too primitive
to undetectable because too advanced could be very short.
If we are in this short time period we would be unable to detect them.

They could be undetectable by us now but maybe not one hundred years
from now, or ten.

>> If we were cavemen, we would look for advanced civilizations in caves.
>> But if the advanced civilization moved to seasteading or cloud cities,
>> they would have problems to detect them.

> They must be terribly low in numbers, though, as a mere Avogadro
> number of human equivalents will consume the complete solar output,
> and most of materials in this solar system.

How much wood would be needed to heat and cook 500 M Europeans and power
all their industries? A lot more than exist in Europe and around the
world. We just moved to something else and keep woods for wildlife.

>> The same is probably true with advanced space civilizations:
>> if they are able to manipulate gravity, build mega scale habitats, move
>> faster than light, etc. they could have hardly any interest in coming
>> down to a gravity pit like a Earth-like planet.

> Nobody talks about coming down. We're still able to see the stars.

If we discover some different way to obtain energy that is cheaper than
building Dyson Spheres why should we build Dyson Spheres?

> Nobody is talking about planets. We're wondering why not every stellar
> system is a FIR blackbody. 

Because there is no need for them to be transformed in one to be useful.


>> Africa, but expanded out at every chance available and even today the
>> savanna of East Africa is very scarcely populated.

> They rechristened Holocene into Anthropocene for a reason. We're a force
> of nature, already.

They called the Middle Ages the Dark Ages but it didn't made it true.

Mirco