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The thing about the "they'd just descend into VR" is that you must explain why one hundred percent of all entities capable of doing that decide to do that. Mor
by jerf 5y ago
The thing about the "they'd just descend into VR" is that you must explain why one hundred percent of all entities capable of doing that decide to do that.
Moreover, even if you do descend into VR, if you have a civilization capable of safely doing that, you need to explain why 100.0000...% of them never say "hey, I sure could have a lot more VR resources all to myself if I just sent this probe over to that star system over there and converted it into computronium".
By the time you get to this level, you don't need to worry about "planets that will instantly kill you".
Some sort of "singularity" where they escape our universe would explain the emptiness of the sky. However, every year the places where such a thing could hide in our physics gets a bit narrower, and we have literally zero reason right now to believe that such a thing is possible. I have no problem speculating, but I prefer to keep the grounded and ungrounded speculation clearly delimited, and right now this is definitely on the ungrounded side.
(Side not, not targeted at you mattmanser but just to prevent me posting another message, it's really tedious to attack someone engaging in grounded speculation by pointing out that ungrounded speculation exists. Yes, it's possible that humans are just uniquely stupid and there's some easy mechanism to create and escape into infinite energy subuniverses and half the planets in the universe have had dozens of alien civilizations already do so, it's possible that aliens are using energies we've never even heard of to communicate, and it's possible that psychic waves are radiating right through us this very second telling us how to do it, but that's ungrounded speculation. It doesn't mean that we must therefore give up all grounded speculation because "what if, like, the aliens are all psychics that escaped into the ninth dimension? you can't prove they aren't, man.")
- mattmanser 5y agoHow would they build these things? In a practical sense? The world has moved entirely virtual. Humans are able to achieve their every dream in another reality. They can even make dyson swarms, on their own, and fly with it, in VR. But in the real world? Actually make a Dyson Swarm? Elon Musk is trying to go to Mars with the help of thousands of people directly and the indirect help of hundreds of thousands of people. It takes a huge collective effort for an engineering task so big. Yeah, sure there might be a few 'real worlders', but it'll be a lonely place out there on their own, they'll have no infrastructure, no backing, nothing. So while they may want to build that Dyson swarm, they won't be able to. There might even be all sorts of laws in their way to make sure no-one can spoil it for everyone else by eating up resources unnecessarily or putting others at risk. As for your side note, the speculation was about what's most likely, not what's possible. My point is that while Dyson swarms might be theoretically possible, my belief is that they're not practically possible because by the time you reach that level of technology, society will have already moved to a different reality. And mine is a speculation just as much as the GP's.