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Star exhibits strange light patterns which could be a sign of alien activity
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Let alone the entire orbit of the Earth as it's been suggested... No way there is enough material for that. Even taking the Ort cloud into consideration, plus every planet in its entirety. I just don't see a way this is possible. Unless there is a way to turn the energy of the sun into physical material.
PantherLotus
Professional Schmuck
wait this is dumb but i always assumed a dyson swarm or sphere or dome would sit much further out than the home planet.
I don't understand why people keep going back to the fantasy of dyson spheres. I have a hard time thinking of reasons to build something like that and it's likely physically impossible. It's not even what Dyson though of when he proposed the idea.
Instead what is much more likely is some kind of dyson swarm. That would be a swarm of satellites orbiting the sun with the purpose of collecting solar energy. We could do this today just not very quickly - but the tech isn't that far away.
As for how much material, it depends on what kind of material the panels are made out of and where the swarm orbits. I imagine you could cover 1 m^2 with less than a kilo if some advanced material was used.
you power it to for example send probes to every star in the galaxy at near light speed.
PantherLotus
Professional Schmuck
Left to their own devices, self-replicating robots could easily build a dyson sphere. not sure why that's such a drastic thought experiment for some of you -- we're not talking about blotting out an entire star.
I don't know about anyone else, but I use Dyson Swarm and Dyson Sphere interchangeably from time to time. I don't mean to, but in my head a Dyson Swarm=Dyson Sphere since a solid sphere is probably near-impossible to maintain physically, or least extremely difficult to do so without much benefit compared to just using a swarm. And I always visualize a complete Dyson Swarm to be spherical in shape anyway, just not, you know, a single solid object. So that doesn't help much.
A literal Dyson Sphere could be possible with far-off engineering, but I figure a Swarm would probably be built anyway. It'd likely be easier to complete and maintain, and basically have the same benefits as a Sphere.
And at least in the case of a Dyson Swarm, the question of how much material is needed to complete becomes irrelevant - they're all seperate pieces in orbit. You run out of materials, you just stop making the swarm. It may not look "complete", but it's still functional, so it's not that big a deal. I bet one isn't gonna have enough material to blot out a star or anything, but there'd certainly be enough to dim it depening on how many planets/moons/asteroids you use and how close to the star it is.
A literal Dyson Sphere could be possible with far-off engineering, but I figure a Swarm would probably be built anyway. It'd likely be easier to complete and maintain, and basically have the same benefits as a Sphere.
And at least in the case of a Dyson Swarm, the question of how much material is needed to complete becomes irrelevant - they're all seperate pieces in orbit. You run out of materials, you just stop making the swarm. It may not look "complete", but it's still functional, so it's not that big a deal. I bet one isn't gonna have enough material to blot out a star or anything, but there'd certainly be enough to dim it depening on how many planets/moons/asteroids you use and how close to the star it is.
MidgarBlowedUp
Member
Is the reason humans are such shit heads because we were hunter/gatherers? What if another form of intelligent being like us doesn't need to hunt or gather for survival? Would that make them friendly?
chrisPjelly
Member
I wonder what other alien "energy" systems that have been established have led to sapient life. Imagine a system of constant travel or a system of thunderstorm photosynthesis, it would be very earth shattering from our perspective.
Depends on how they evolved on their planet. There's so many paths it could take that the possibilities their intelligence and psyche could be different from ours is nearly endless.
But to keep it simple, I don't think roles in nature can be interchanged so easily to get a friendly species. Our species is predatory, but I could see a intelligent species that evolved as passive prey having paranoid and suspicious traits in the same way our species is aggressive and competitive. They could take a "better safe than sorry" approach with other species and either ignore them or destroy them, just due to their evolutionary role as prey before sapience civilization affecting their thought patterns in the same way our predatory patterns likely do for us.
Graphics Horse
Member
I don't understand the advantage of a sphere over a swarm? Isn't a sphere under huge gravitational strain everywhere but the equator, or does it have some funny way of spinning?
Ether_Snake
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Why would they just happen to need ALL the star's energy? Just tapping some of it makes more sense.
it wouldn't, doing so at large scale would cook the planet it. you'd use it to do stuff in space like sending probes and powering super computers. maybe even terraforming, high energy experiments, if we are allowed to dream: transmuting matter and generating exotic matter for alcubierre drives.
andthebeatgoeson
Junior Member
If you have the materials to build one, the knowledge and the ability, you probably inhabit a closer planet, terraform it and be more efficient. The Dyson sphere is all about efficiency.
Well a lot of humanities uglier traits most likely have a source back to our hunter gatherer roots. We evolved to live in much smaller groups that were far more active and competitive with each other and traits were evolved and honed to make us the best at that kind of lifestyle.
Then over like 10 to 20,000 years our entire society and culture changed from nomadic hunting groups to huge civilizations with hundreds of thousands to millions of people all in a small area compared. We were not a species that evolved to live like ants or bee's and we are constantly having trouble with this.
I mean the whole fight or flight response is something that was no doubt essential when we were animal skins, wielded sharp sticks and rocks and had to face off with an angry cave lion but in this day and age it can cause far more problems than it helps solve. Rarely are you in a situation that actually requires you to fight or flee for your life but the instinct and the issues it causes can pop up pretty easily over far less life changing events.
andthebeatgoeson
Junior Member
What? The sphere, the star?
Slayer-33
Liverpool-2
Of course the Dyson sphere lol.
How much energy does one really need. The ones depicted in the picture are impossibly big. I wonder how one would harness such energy
The Elite
BOSS
I think the general idea is that if you want to capture the energy being emitted you need to surround the star otherwise anything that isn't hitting the device would not be absorbed.
I guess you could have a series of smaller devices that orbit the sun instead of building a mega structure.
oreomunsta
Banned
That's exactly right; you can't capture solar energy that you're not even intercepting... Unless you have a point of mass so great in density that you can pull the light in o_o
So maybe black holes are just an intergalactic light sucking contest of several advanced (AI) civilizations battling for resource supremacy. Who sucks in more?
Well it would be under unimaginable stresses if built as a single object, but remember there are also lots of natural points of balance in a solar system like LaGrange points, where the gravity and rotation/speed of two objects effectively nullify each other finding a perfect balance. Which is what Earth's orbit is, effectively.
oreomunsta
Banned
A cosmic-scale version of "My straw is in your milkshake"!
130 years ago we thought the earth was a few thousand years old and had no idea how life arose on this planet. Today we are Gods in comparison, with the ability to create life from nothing, both organic and artificial.
Where will we be 100 years from now, or a thousand? Think of the energy consumption of a city in 1880 vs a single house today.
It wouldn't necessarily need to go to the planet. The swarm or sphere could be the living surface where most of the civilisation exists.
You could transfer energy by microwave but on those scales if you are adding vast amounts of energy to a planet then you will cook it with way too much heat. The principle isn't to power the planet. It's to build a bigger one and power that.
dyson swarms, loose orbital groups of solar collectors orbiting a star and collecting the purest solar energy, and transmitting it, probably via light beam to some converter. I can't imagine how they could efficiently transmit that energy into something that could turn it into something else, but I mean a series of energy directors and diverters could send it to some interplanetary power grid. I guess it could also send it to another star, or really anywhere once it's collected.
wouldn't necessarily need to envelop the entire star, just get decent enough coverage to get trillions of joules of solar power.
wouldn't necessarily need to envelop the entire star, just get decent enough coverage to get trillions of joules of solar power.
Rug Monkey
Member
130 years based on Darwinism?
1774: the Comte de Buffon: 'Epochs of Nature.'
Buffon assumed that the earth started molten, measured cooling rates of iron spheres, scaled up, and calculated the age at at least 75,000 years. He himself was suspicious that this was much too young and, in manuscripts published after his death, suggested longer chronologies, including one estimate of nearly 3 billion years.
and we still don't know (even less reproduce) the mechanism by which life began on this planet.
Errr.... not exactly. Lagrange points are five mathematically determined points between two different objects where their gravity balances out. However, the Earth is not in one of those. After all, the Earth's movement is not locked to any other planet's orbit. Earth is in a stable orbit around the Sun based on its current mass and speed. The gravity of the other planets in the solar system has relatively minor effects on Earth, because they are relatively far apart and small compared to the Sun.
A good example of Lagrange points affecting objects in the Solar Syatem would be the Jupiter Trojans: two clusters of asteroids found at the Jupiter-Sun L4 and L5 points.
Now, a Lagrange point might not be the best place to put a dyson swarm, since you need to put the swarm as close to the star as possible in order to maximize energy collection per collector. Unless you have an available planet that is really close to the star, it might not be practical.
this is not an answer for why dyson spheres as opposed to swarms should be a thing. It just isn't a practical thing to build, what would you even use it for? Even if we had some magical material with the tensile strength needed to hold it together you can't really live there because it doesn't have gravity.
A swarm of solar collectors and a belt of small ring-habitats makes a lot more sense.
Shin Kojima
Banned
Sorry, I meant that LaGrange points and planetary orbits are examples of natural points of stability in a system, not that Earth's orbit was itself a LaGrange point. I imagine a real Dyson swarm would take advantage of multiple useful positions within a (solar) system. A method of transmitting energy efficiently over large distances would be a bigger hurdle, I suspect.
One of the astronomers behind the 'alien megastructure' discovery says we still can't rule out aliens
Pretty much confirmed to be the result of an alien von Neumann device seeking out and destroying advanced civilizations. One can only surmise we're next. We're all doomed. May as well get a head start on looting.
And thus begins to our journey to develop interstellar travel to harvest ancient alien technology. Make it so!
Or, one would hope that by the time we could, their technology would still be significantly more advanced that it would be worth the effort to harvest.
Nope, never. Glad you bumped the thread to ask though!
This was 1480 lightyears away which means that what we observe happened 1480 years ago. So I would say its ancient.
Four words:
Jeff Goldblum
Will Smith
The aliens are doomed.
Sleight of Jam
Banned
Just watched this Ted talk: https://youtu.be/gypAjPp6eps
Interesting look at some of the data and how they came to analysing this star. It's pretty sweet how many people are helping out with this aswell.
Interesting look at some of the data and how they came to analysing this star. It's pretty sweet how many people are helping out with this aswell.
PantherLotus
Professional Schmuck
have to admit i'm pretty disappointed by this video. the cloud of comets theory got little more than a hand wave, while there was a bit of blaming the media for jumping on this story -- but then she just kinda hugs up to the dyson sphere theory without pushing back on it at all.
Reads like fanfiction (aka complete bullshit).
It might be aliens even if it isn't a Dyson sphere/swarm. One of the easiest and cost effective ways for a civilization to signal it's existence is to build a large unnaturally shaped screen to periodically block out large portions of their star's light. It's the only way we're able to detect exoplanets at all. Hell, if we really wanted to, we could almost do it right now.
Maybe if the entire planet put aside their differences and united to do this and even then it would take years and years. In reality it would most likely take entire generations of people pooling their resources, talent, ideas and energy into a project like that.
Sure, but it's not very far from our grasp. We just need to build a web of thin fabric in an unnatural shape, like say a cross or whatever. It would take resources, and we don't really have a good reason for doing this, but it's far more achievable than a Dyson sphere
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