[ExI] NASA doubts Dyson megastructures will ever be necessary

[robot at ultimax.com]

I think this is an extremely parochial point of view, even by human 
standards.

A simple math illustration:
A manual laborer adequately nourished in good physical condition can 
generate about 75 watts of mechanical power over an 8-hour work shift.  
For a typical desk jockey like myself, this figure is closer to 10 
watts.  That may be too generous - most of my colleagues broke a sweat 
and had to switch arms after only a minute of this when I made them lift 
a liter bottle of water through 1 meter to illustrate 10 watts in a way 
that they would remember.
The average member of the human race already consumes 300X this amount 
of primary power 24/7.  (20 TW divided by 8 billion.)  The average 
member of the developed world consumes an order of magnitude more than 
that.  (20 TW divided by a billion.)

We put cold beer in cans of thin metal that was worth more than gold 
less than two centuries ago.  And then throw the cans away, mostly.  We 
have Netflix to stream pron, computer games to p*ss away p a large 
nation-state's worth of brainpower, and at least half of us carry 
supercomputers-cum-transceivers in our pockets which are principally 
used to endlessly scroll useless s**t AFAICT.  We light up our 
skyscrapers in colors at night for urban art.  You could think of a 
zillion more examples, virtually any one of which would have been 
absolutely magical/ incomprehensible to our Neolithic ancestors, only 
~10K years ago.  Even Columbus would be gobsmacked by GPS, though he'd 
probably appreciate its utility in short order.  D'ya think Alexander 
Graham Bell ever imagined his invention would by used for 1 (900) phone 
sex?

Right off the top of my head, I can think of worthwhile constructive 
activities that would require six to twelve orders of magnitude more 
power than what we use now:
- Fast Interstellar flight with machines.  (Having won a NIAC Phase I 
grant, my colleagues and I will be presenting our work on an 
interstellar probe swarm to Proxima Centauri to NASA at the Pasadena 
Hilton in September.  I'll be turning 65 whilst there.  Can't think of a 
better way to celebrate a milestone birthday than not acting my age.)
- Terraforming Lite, using techniques you already know about.
- Terraforming Heavy using Shell Worlds, which I also helped pioneer.
- Slow Interstellar Heavy with Worldships or Fast with some other 
small-ish craft with a live crew.

That's just the actually useful stuff.  For humility, I like one of the 
background plot elements in one of David Brin's "Uplift" novels - that 
the big intragalactic war was essentially a difference of opinion 
between art critics.  Vernor Vinge (may he RIP) touched on this too in 
"A Fire Upon the Deep".

We have absolutely no idea what aliens would find interesting, fun, or 
compelling to do.  We'd be like ants to them, and that's being generous.

Hooey.

K3

On 2024-08-18 16:15, extropy-chat-request at lists.extropy.org wrote:

> Date: Sat, 17 Aug 2024 13:21:31 -0700
> From: Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>
> To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>,
> 	extropolis at googlegroups.com
> Cc: BillK <pharos at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [ExI] NASA doubts Dyson megastructures will ever be
> 	necessary
> On Sat, Aug 17, 2024 at 4:24?AM BillK via extropy-chat
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>> 
>> 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.
> 
> Tabby's star and the 24 other blinking stars around it we can see with
> existing telescopes.
> 
> The biggest dip corresponds to an object equal to over 400 times the
> area of the Earth.  Even though it is way out from the star, it
> intercepts 1.4 million times the total energy humans use.
> 
> snip
> 
>> 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.
> 
> How big does a structure need to get to be considered a Dyson 
> structure?
> 
> Keith
> 
> PS amusing, my great great grandmother was Mary Virginia Dyson.