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If nothing else, we would see stars fade away as civilizations built Dyson swarms around them to collect more and more of their energy. That wouldn’t even requi
by philwelch 6y ago
If nothing else, we would see stars fade away as civilizations built Dyson swarms around them to collect more and more of their energy. That wouldn’t even require interstellar travel. Interstellar travel would in turn enable exponential growth across star systems, which would show up.
- elorant 6y agoDyson spheres are a stupid idea to harness power. You need ridiculous amount of resources to cover even a fraction of the surface of a star. An advanced civilization could simply harness fusion.
- philwelch 6y agoAt which point they need to get hydrogen, and guess where all the hydrogen is.
- credit_guy 6y agoOur Sun burns 1 GT of hydrogen every 2 seconds [1]. This is the mass of the hydrogen in 9 GT of water. The dwarf planet Ceres was discussed just yesterday on HN. It contains about 200 million GT of water. If that's not enough, we can go and use Jupiter, which contains about 1 quadrillion GT of hydrogen. Enough to last for a few billion years. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#/media/File:The_Sun_by_the_Atmospheric_Imaging_Assembly_of_NASA's_Solar_Dynamics_Observatory_-_20100819.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#/media/File:The...
- TeMPOraL 6y agoA star IS a fusion reactor. Already built, already working, already fusing hydrogen. If you want to power an interplanetary civilization, there's zero point in building your own, when you already have a working one, and all you need is to keep adding energy collectors as the demand grows.
- credit_guy 6y ago> there's zero point in building your own That's quite a strong assumption.
- adrianN 6y agoOr alien civilizations just stop growing eventually before consuming all the energy their star provides.
- philwelch 6y agoWhy would all of them do that, universally?
- adrianN 6y agoBecause those that don't eradicate themselves before they reach the stars for example. Maybe eventual stasis is the only stable form for civilizations. We don't know either way, but I wanted to point out that curiously dimming stars are not the only possible outcome.
- oh_sigh 6y agoOr they continue growing but grow inwards(into smaller spaces/dimensions), rather than outwards.