[ExI] Will Advanced Civilizations Ever Build Dyson Spheres?

[Keith Henson]

Uploaded biological creatures would need data centers.  The centers
need energy from their star and radiation heat sinks, both favoring
large areas.  This conflicts with the presumed need to communicate
with minimal delay due to the speed of light.

I don't think free-floating computation nodes are a reasonable
engineering solution.

Keith

On Sun, Nov 10, 2024 at 6:39 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> On 09/11/2024 00:14, BillK wrote:
>
> Building Dyson structures around a star will require a huge amount of material.
> (Stars are very big!).
> And it has to be metal-rich material.
> Dismantling asteroids and even planets would be necessary just to get
> a thin partial shell around a star.
> This would also have risky orbital effects.
> I think that's why they suggest pushing planets and large asteroids
> into the habitable zone and doing terraforming might be easier.
> (though still an enormous task).
>
>
> I thought that the idea of Dyson Spheres (such as you see in science fiction shows) had been dismissed long ago as being impractical, not to mention dangerous, and physically impossible (nothing would have the required tensile strength). As far as I'm aware, even Dyson himself didn't mean that, but rather what we now call Dyson Shells, comprising many small (relatively small) objects in concentric orbits at all inclinations, eventually shrouding an entire star, and intercepting all its energy.
>
> In any case, I don't think moving and terraforming whole planets is ever going to be a good idea. Planets are a colossal waste of mass. If you have the technology, and insist on remaining biological, I'd think mining the planets and asteroids for material to create many large rotating habitats would be a much better idea. You could perhaps end up with a Dyson Shell of habitats. Planets aren't just a waste of mass, they are very poor at capturing energy from your local star (and if you make trillions or quadrillions of solar power plants to solve that problem, you might as well be living in them instead of being trapped at the bottom of a gravity well on the surface of a planet).
>
> It's all moot, though, because I'm pretty sure that any substantial space-faring civilisation will have to be based on non-biological machine intelligences (uploads, AIs, or some hybrid of both). Biology and space just aren't compatible. So that changes the whole equation, and planets become vast reservoirs of raw materials imprisoned in deep gravity wells, and rotating habitats become irrelevant, except perhaps as zoos.
>
> Perhaps a signature of an advanced civilisation would be a star with no planets, asteroids and other such rubble, with a pretty uniform distribution of relatively small orbiting objects instead, which would probably be pretty difficult to spot, so it might just look like a bare star, perhaps with a non-standard emission spectrum.
>
> Maybe the Tabby-class stars aren't the ones with aliens at all, maybe it's the boring ones that we don't take any notice of.
>
> --
> Ben
>
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