[ExI] Tabby's star

[Keith Henson]

Rafal Smigrodzki <rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote:

> ### It's been a day, and nobody yet contacted me to make an easy 1000$ by
> betting 100$ against me...

> C'mon, guys, it's easy money :)

For you, yes.  I doubt even the most gung-ho mega structure guys would
give it a ten percent chance of being aliens.

Still, it's worth thinking of tests that could distinguish between
something "natural" from constructed heat sink structures.

And if aliens are common, then there really needs to be an explanation
as to why *none* of them travel.

On the other hand, there is a close by M type star, around 900 AU.
One of the objections is that this F star has not lived long enough to
evolve intelligence.  Could we have a case where very old aliens moved
over to the F star as it went by?

Spike wrote:

> BillK, think end-game.  Look at the equations for entropy and work
> backwards.  Assuming energy streaming out from a star in the familiar form.
> Now imagine matter arranged to its optimal configuration for creating the
> most information per unit energy that comes out from that star, or most
> effectively reduces entropy for a given limit of matter and a known flux of
> energy.

> Assume all the other engineering problems have been solved.  From that
> perspective, what is that configuration?

> When I do that exercise, the solutions I get tend toward small bits of
> matter widely spaced.

I think you might have left out the time cost of communications.  But
widely spaced, I agree.  These things are on the same scale as a star.
Rather than a fog of computronium, consider a flat sheet out at least
10 AU.  If the computational nodes are small, what do we use as a heat
transfer medium out to the radiator surface?

> We will likely be metal limited and heat control is
> the path to maximum entropy reduction.

Has anyone worked out the optimal temperature for computation?