[ExI] Will Advanced Civilizations Ever Build Dyson Spheres?

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Will Advanced Civilizations Build Habitable Planets or Dyson Spheres
Posted on November 1, 2024 by Brian Koberlein

<https://www.universetoday.com/169127/will-advanced-civilizations-build-habitable-planets-or-dyson-spheres/>
Quote:
When you think about it, building a Dyson sphere is the cosmic endgame
of a capitalist dystopia. In the never-ending quest to capture and
consume every last bit of energy, your civilization rips worlds
asunder, moving heaven and earth to create an orbitally unstable,
unlivable engine. If you can traverse light-years and transform
planets, why not just move Earth-like planets and moons into a star’s
habitable zone and have a nice cluster of comfy planets to live on? If
this kind of stellar-punk civilization is out there, could astronomers
detect it? This is the question behind a study on the arXiv.

The authors begin by noting that when Freeman Dyson proposed the idea
in 1960, our solar system was the only known planetary system. Star
systems were thought to be rare at the time, but now we know better.
Most stars have planets, and even our solar system has a dozen
water-rich moons that could be made habitable with a shift of their
orbits and a bit of terraforming. Since this would be much easier than
building a Dyson sphere, the authors argue that modified systems
should be much more common. The only question is how to detect them.
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Reference: Narasimha, Raghav, Margarita Safonova, and C. Sivaram.
“Making Habitable Worlds: Planets Versus Megastructures.” arXiv
preprint arXiv:2309.06562 (2023).
<https://arxiv.org/html/2309.06562v4>
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