[ExI] SETI for Post Singularity Civs

[Anders Sandberg]

Stuart LaForge <avant at sollegro.com> , 15/1/2015 7:53 AM:

Large structures are therefore thermodynamically inefficient. And considering that our state of the art telescopes are only barely capable of find earth-sized exoplanets under ideal conditions, it is very likely any reasonable structures such as dyson swarms or M-brains would escape our notice. Perhaps simply causing their parent stars to appear as a cooler spectral class. 


No. A Dysoned star will not have a natural stellar spectrum: it will not look like a ball of cool plasma (absorption lines from various metals in the stellar atmosphere would be absent). If it is a cloud, it would be a mixture of a stellar spectrum with a cold black-body spectrum. It would look odd. But it might be missed because of its faintness or because the software is not looking for things like that.


Thermodynamic efficiency depends on what you want to make. 
So to summarize, the methods we are using to find ET are weak and heavily biased toward meat-civilizations. 

Yes. I agree.

Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
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