[ExI] NASA doubts Dyson megastructures will ever be necessary

[BillK]

NASA Scientists on Why We Might Not Spot Solar Panel Technosignatures
William Steigerwald      August 2, 2024.

<https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/planetary-science/astrobiology/nasa-scientists-on-why-we-might-not-spot-solar-panel-technosignatures/>

Quotes:
Now a recent paper published May 24 in the Astrophysical Journal
postulates that if advanced extraterrestrial civilizations exist, one
reason they might be hard to detect with telescopes from our vantage
point is because their energy requirements may be relatively modest.
If their culture, technology, and population size do not need vast
amounts of power, they would not be required to build enormous
stellar-energy harvesting structures that could be detected by current
or proposed telescopes. Such structures, based on our own Earthly
experience, might be solar panel arrays that cover a significant
portion of their planet’s surface or orbiting megastructures to
harness most of their parent star’s energy—both of which we might be
able to spot from our own solar system.
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“We found that even if our current population of about 8 billion
stabilizes at 30 billion with a high standard of living, and we only
use solar energy for power, we still use way less energy than that
provided by all the sunlight illuminating our planet,” said Ravi
Kopparapu of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt,
Maryland, lead author of the paper.
----------------------
“Large-scale stellar-energy harvesting structures may especially be
obsolete when considering technological advances,” adds Vincent
Kofman, a co-author of the paper at NASA Goddard and American
University, Washington, D.C. “Surely a society that can place enormous
structures in space would be able to access nuclear fusion or other
space-efficient methods of generating power.”
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Hmmm.  Yes, it does seem likely that advanced civs could have better
methods of power generation than building huge Dyson space structures.
And that makes the assumption that they would even require such
vast amounts of power utilisation.

BillK