[ExI] Gaian Bottleneck

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Sun, Jan 24, 2016 at 5:39 PM, Tomaz Kristan <protokol2020 at gmail.com>
wrote:
>
>
> Dyson sphere it's pretty much out of the question, since they would be
> building it also here by now.
>
>
### Yes, absolutely. In the most likely situation, if we see a single Dyson
sphere being built, there would be an astronomical number of Dyson spheres
built in the past. The odds of just catching the first ever Dyson sphere
being built among trillions of star systems that are under our observation
are minuscule. By "under observation" I include stars in other galaxies,
which would show global changes in luminance, spreading from local centers,
and we would see millions of galaxies in various stages of being overrun by
diverse aliens. Plus, of course, chances are that some aliens would have
visited here already.

On the other hand, fluke natural variations of luminosity are just that -
fluke variations, which do not imply other high-frequency, visible
processes. If this particular star is being covered up by a rare break-up
of a planet, or a rare conjunction of dense dust clouds, or other rare but
standard physical processes, there is no reason to expect that others stars
should commonly exhibit similar behavior (this is a tautology).

To summarize:

One alien implies a gazillion aliens.

One rare dust cloud does not imply a gazillion dust clouds.

Failing to see a gazillion aliens means it's very unlikely you will ever
see a single alien, so any news about single aliens have to be met with a
very high level of skepticism, whether they dim stars or do anal probing.

Rafał
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20160124/652129fc/attachment.html>