[ExI] Star Harvesting

Stuart LaForge avant at sollegro.com
Thu Jun 28 03:26:46 UTC 2018


Spike wrote:

> https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.05203
>
> Life Versus Dark Energy: How An Advanced Civilization Could Resist the
> Accelerating Expansion of the Universe

[snip]

> We find that such efforts will
> be most effective for stars with masses in the range of M~(0.2~1)M, and
> could lead to the harvesting of stars within a region extending out to
> several tens of Mpc in radius, potentially increasing the total amount of
> energy that is available to a future civilization by a factor of several
> thousand.

Dan Hooper's idea for stellar harvesting is very interesting. But given
that one is able to move stars around efficiently, having a lower cutoff
of 0.2 solar masses seems like leaving energy on the table so to speak. I
understand his rationale that stars of that temperature would not be able
to generate the photonic thrust to make it from the outer reaches to the
civilization's core in a useful time frame.

But my point is that one does not have to move said runt star all the way
to the core, one only has to move it to the next nearest such runt star
and deliberately collide the two. A few such collisions later and one will
have a nice yellow sun to truck back to ones home galaxy.

Considering that red dwarfs make up something like 75% of the stars we
survey, colliding them together to make hotter stars that can accelerate
faster seems like a more efficient use of available energy.

Of course we might want to save the red dwarfs already in our local group
for the distant future since they can burn slowly for trillions of years.
But the red dwarfs that would otherwise be lost to us from dark energy? I
say collide them together and bring them here.

Stuart LaForge






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