[ExI] Dyson Sphere? Why? Just move planets into Habitable Zone.

[Keith Henson]

This is a remarkably stupid idea.

The amount of laser power needed to move a planet is just crazy, even
if you are willing to spend millions of years.

if you want living area, rotating space colonies are a much more
efficient use of material.  If you want to maximize computation, i.e.,
living area for uploads, you probably don't want to locate in the
habitable zone at all.

I don't know where this leads to considering the physics, but energy
to run the computation is one factor, another big one is getting rid
of waste heat, physical material is a consideration and speed of light
makes smaller units better by some metric than larger ones.

I discussed this at some length years ago, but I am not sure I got the
model right.  Considering a social species, there does not seem to be
an upper limit on how fast they think.  But speed of light causes
communication delays that limit communicy size.

Keith

On Tue, Sep 26, 2023 at 8:32 AM BillK via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> Why Build Megastructures? Just Move Planets Around to Make Habitable Worlds
> September 25, 2023 by Matt Williams
>
> <https://www.universetoday.com/163245/why-build-megastructures-just-move-planets-around-to-make-habitable-worlds/>
>
> Quote:
> Dyson’s ideas were proposed at a time when astronomers were unaware of
> the abundance of exoplanets in our galaxy. The first confirmed
> exoplanet was not discovered until 1992, and that number has now
> reached 5,514!
> ----------
>
> There are many problems with building a Dyson Sphere that are removed
> by using planets instead. (See article for details).
> e.g. exposing the sphere to outside cosmic rays, no protection from
> solar flares, CMEs, solar wind, etc., as there would be no natural
> magnetic field, no gravity, continuous illumination, etc.
>
> They suggest that advanced civilisations wouldn't build Dyson Spheres,
> We should be looking for unusual clusters of liveable planets in the
> sun's habitable zone.
>
> BillK
>
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