[ExI] Are Dyson swarms a good idea?

[Adrian Tymes]

On Tue, Jan 27, 2026 at 11:54 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 27, 2026, 9:50 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Jan 27, 2026 at 8:32 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>> > Is it not an equivalent evil to build a Dyson swarm around an alien star and preclude any chance of life from emerging on any planet in that system?
>>
>> I don't think so, I feel that converting dumb matter into smart matter is the very opposite of evil, but that's just my opinion.
>
> Fortunately for us our star was not converted a time when the solar system was dead.

By that line of thought, any action at all - including inaction - is
of the utmost evil, for any choice whatsoever inherently excludes
countless other possibilities.

Let us assume the multi-world hypothesis from quantum mechanics, for
ease of framing.  Literally everything you do dooms our universe to
not be any of the other universes that branch off from that decision
point - and is therefore, by your logic, evil in equal measure to the
nigh-infinite (or maybe literally infinite) combined potential in
those other universes that ours will never experience.

If everything you could do, including nothing, is infinitely evil,
then that measure of evil is rendered meaningless.  There would be
nothing that is more evil or less evil: they'd all be infinitely evil.