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> I find the argument that advanced growing alien civilizations would construct "Dyson Swarms" pretty convincing. Why? I know it's a staple of SF that, on a lo
by Analemma_ 8y ago
> I find the argument that advanced growing alien civilizations would construct "Dyson Swarms" pretty convincing.
Why? I know it's a staple of SF that, on a long enough timespan, we will surely eventually build stuff like Dyson swarms and interstellar ships, but the more I observe actual humans, the less convincing I find this argument. Even assuming great advances in technology, Dyson swarms will be ridiculously expensive to build, especially relative to the benefits they provide, and human grumbling about costs and taxes will probably kill the project instead.
More generally, given the conflict between "fund and build this highly exotic and expensive thing now" vs. "don't bother, thus keeping taxes low", humans will always choose the latter in the absence of some kind of external motivation beyond "for science!", or even our own survival. Americans only agreed to spend the zillion dollars to go to the moon because we were in a dick-waving contest with the Soviets, and a lot of the necessary technology was already in existence thanks to money spent on ICBMs.
I think it's more likely than not that we will keep kicking the can down the road vis-a-vis the current problems of our population growth, and then just go extinct when they finally catch up to us. Or, even if you're not that pessimistic, that we just stay on Earth because no one wants to bother with the difficulties of going elsewhere. It's totally possible that the same thing happens to most other intelligent species and so there are no Dyson swarms.
- crpearce 8y agoI think a potential motivation for investing in megascale engineering projects is right there in your comment — military advantage. If humans do manage to colonize other planets it seems inevitable that there will eventually be wars (cold or otherwise) that involve many billions or trillions of people spread over multiple planets or star systems. An ongoing conflict on that scale seems like a great reason to develop a Dyson swarm — we don’t know what kinds of weapons would be involved in a war like that but it’s a safe bet that they require enormous amounts of energy. The first Dyson swarm may well be the result of a dick-waving contest with mass drivers instead of ICBMs. Just think, a military entity with the population and resources of NATO or the Warsaw Pact would have been totally inconceivable just a few hundred years ago.
- pasabagi 8y agoThe problem is, a civilization with the kind of industrial base and know-how to build Dyson swarms, if it was still interested in 'military dick waving', would be trivially capable of knocking everybody back into the stone age, or even, totally rendering every planet with a biosphere uninhabitable. Worse, in such a civilization, it's pretty likely that even small organizations would have the kind of tech you'd need to induce a nuclear winter on a given planet. After all, you just have to crash an asteroid on the right spot, then you have a mass extinction that human civilization would definitely not survive.
- crpearce 8y agoGreat (and terrifying) point. In that light it would seem that the major blocker for these types of engineering projects isn’t technological advancement as much as advancement in governance/social organization/psychology.
- pasabagi 8y agoThe major blocker full-stop. Adorno once used the V2 flying bomb as a metaphor for our society: as the marriage of total technical brilliance with utter futility and idiocy. I think it's frankly surprising that we didn't blow ourselves up in the cold war. We're extremely developed as technical thinkers, but as social thinkers, half of us vote Trump, and the other half don't have the words to express why that's awful.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoLet's not forget about the crazy either. Both those with mental illnesses making them destructive, and those mutilated by the system. Think of the occasional random people going on shooting sprees or bombing runs. Imagine them with access to a home pathogen lab, in 20 years.
- comex 8y agoA civilization with the kind of industrial base and know-how to build Dyson swarms probably also has the ability to create smallish self-sustaining colonies, in space or on/within uninhabitable planets. With enough of those floating around, even if most of civilization was wiped out, it seems likely that someone, somewhere would survive... and potentially be able to reseed a future civilization. So there’s hope.