[ExI] Are Dyson swarms a good idea?

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 27/01/2026 18:30, Jason Resch wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 27, 2026, 10:46 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>     On 27/01/2026 14:51, Jason Resch wrote:
>     > We see the aliens from the movie independence day as evil for trying to wipe out life on Earth. 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?
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>     No it is not.
>     Doing harm to something which exists is totally different to doing hypothetical harm to something which doesn't exist.
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> If you consider life in earth a net good, then any action that precluded life on earth is actually more of a wrong than stamping out life after it had some period of time to exist.

Are you serious?
An action that precludes X is not the same thing as an action that destroys X. In one case, X exists, then doesn't exist because it is destroyed. In the other, X never came to be, so there is no way to even tell what it might have been. Doing something that results in someone not being born is different to killing them. You have to exist for your existence to be taken away.

An action that precluded life on earth has no moral content whatever. Every time I brush my teeth, I'm preventing countless lives that theoretically could have been created from the cells that I destroy. Does that make me a mass murderer? This is basically what you are claiming.

If you want to talk about the potential lives that never came about if a Dyson swarm is built, you have to also talk about the potential lives that never came about if it wasn't built (which would be far more), as well as the consequences of not doing a dozen other different things, like maybe using the planetary masses to create habitats for biological life, using the whole system to make a gigantic transmitter for mind patterns, to send them somewhere else, and a whole bunch of other things that we can think of, not to mention the many more things that we can't think of.

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>     You're talking about the kind of thinking which leads people to conclude that contraception is evil and similar bonkers ideas.
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> There are too many differences between contraception and the preclusion of life on earth, to that make the situations incomparable.

I think you'll have to explain that. Preventing something from happening on a small scale is exactly equivalent to preventing something happening on a larger scale. The end result is the same: Nothing.

Bear in mind that we're not talking about thwarting someone's wishes, which is a different issue.

Do you think that the Big Bang was the greatest evil ever, because it precluded who-knows-how-many-or-what different other universes from coming into being instead of the one we're in?

>
> Try to explain from first principles why it is morally acceptable to prevent life from ever forming on earth. (Assuming we agree life on earth is a net good)

Morality doesn't even enter into it. You might as well ask whether it's morally acceptable for me to drink a cup of coffee before bed, thus potentially changing the number and type of dreams I might have.

The point here, I think, is that stuff that doesn't happen, doesn't happen. I can only agree that life on earth is a net good if life on earth actually exists. If it doesn't, there's nothing to talk about. If the theorised supernova that precipitated the collapse of a nebula into our sun and solar system never happened, can we meaningfully talk about the moral value of life on earth? An earth that never formed around a star that never existed? Could we blame some aliens that somehow averted the supernova because it was threatening their existence, for the 'loss' of all life on earth?
Can we meaningfully assign a moral value to the loss caused by a specific person wearing a condom on the night of the 31st December 2010? To what might have happened if that lady in the supermarket had turned her head to the left instead of the right when she sneezed? Or if she had got her handkerchief out in time?

Far, far, far (to the power of a stupidly huge number, to the power of an even huger number) more things never happened than did. If you ascribe moral significance to this, you're headed down a rabbit hole there's no coming back from.

-- 
Ben