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

[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Oct 19, 2025 at 7:47 PM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:
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> -----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
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> Keith your comment gave me a fun cheerful idea.
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> 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.

>From the outside, a data center full of uploads is going to look the
same, with boring power converters and heat sinks.  From inside the
simulation, it can be any kind of environment you want,

If you care about communicating with other uploads without too much
delay, then you want to be as close to neighbors as you can.  This is
in competition with power in and heat out.  if power receptors face
the star and heat sinks face away, you are left with a 2d surface.
The most valuable places would be in the middle, with the slums being
on the outside edges.

Not sure if uploads in a simulation would ever notice they were in a
low-rent district.

In The Clinic Seed, I had a built-in no reproduction policy for those
in the simulation.  The Tabby's Star aliens (if any) may not.  It may
be that they have spread out to a bunch of stars at about 1/3 of c.
How uploads would reproduce is left as an exercise for the student.

  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?))

I have mostly thought about running fast, but it some really slowed
down their clock, they could watch the stars burn out.

Keith

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