[ExI] Alien Civilizations May Only Be Detectable For A Cosmic Blink Of An Eye

[spike at rainier66.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: spike at rainier66.com <spike at rainier66.com> 
Subject: RE: [ExI] Alien Civilizations May Only Be Detectable For A Cosmic Blink Of An Eye



-----Original Message-----
From: Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> 
Subject: Re: [ExI] Alien Civilizations May Only Be Detectable For A Cosmic Blink Of An Eye

>>...Spike, I don't think you ever want a Dyson object to be thick,

Keith





>...Agreed, but how thick do we not want it?   spike



Keith your comment gave me a fun cheerful idea.

Suppose we find out that an early Dyson object sees the advantage of being both sparse and clumpy, kinda like we humans do: we live in wilderness areas, in rural areas, suburbs, cities, superdense metropolis, etc, so we see advantages in all of these and have people in all of these.  Imagine a Dyson object concluding likewise.  Then imagine that early Dysons are more clumpy, after which they get more and more nodes built, at which time thermal concerns and compute efficiency become more important than speed (what's the big hurry?  (are there big disadvantages to being slow, if you have billions of years on the main sequence?))  

If so, then older wiser more advanced Dyson objects would be more evenly distributed about their star than whatever is causing Tabby and her neighbors to wink at us.  This would cause their Dyson objects to be much more difficult to detect.  They could be there all along, and we didn't know it.  

It could be that most stars have a Dyson "atmosphere" and it is just now dawning on us scarcely-evolved apes.

Kewaaaaalllll!

spike