[ExI] Tabby's star

[Darin Sunley]

That's not how speed-of-light delay works.

We are seeing their 1470 years ago in real time. If, 200 years after what
we're seeing - 1200 years ago, they started expanding towards us, we won't
see that for another 200 years.

Anyone who can build a Dyson swarm can build von Neuman probes, which can
be accelerated up to large percentages of the speed of light via lasers
that remain in the launching system. this would be utterly trivial given
the infrastructure we're - per hypothesis - seeing at Tabby's Star.

When and if we see laser flares, that will mean the probes are literally
right on top of us.

That's the big problem with relativistic probes or weaponry - you get no
warning until hours, maybe days before arrival. A few months tops. Far too
little time to do anything about anything moving at 80%+ of C.

See Pellegrino's "A Killing Star" for how this works out for humanity.
Spoiler: not good..

On Thu, Oct 31, 2024 at 8:38 AM BillK via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Tabby’s star is approximately 1,470 light-years away, meaning we're
> observing it as it was 1,470 years ago. If an advanced civilization
> were indeed building Dyson-like structures around their star back
> then, we would expect them to have made exponential technological
> progress over the intervening 1,500 years. Given that timespan, they
> would likely possess capabilities far beyond ours—potentially even
> reaching a level of technology that could allow them to spread
> throughout the Milky Way.
>
> However, if this civilization had expanded toward our region of the
> galaxy, we would likely detect clear signs of their development around
> stars closer than Tabby's star. The absence of such observable
> megastructures or activity in nearby systems might suggest either that
> they haven’t expanded toward us or that they've intentionally chosen
> not to spread widely. But perhaps the most likely answer is that an
> advanced civilization doesn't exist at Tabby's star.
>
> BillK
>
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