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"Strange, why can't we detect any Dyson spheres in this area of space?" Is the astrological equivalent of: "Strange, why can't we detect any shambling ghouls in
by HlessClaudesman 3y ago
"Strange, why can't we detect any Dyson spheres in this area of space?"
Is the astrological equivalent of:
"Strange, why can't we detect any shambling ghouls in this area of the graveyard?"
Perhaps we should stop wasting time and money confirming that reality does not correspond to our fiction.
I offer my solution to the Drake equation, which can be neatly expressed by the notion of opportunity cost: We don't see Dyson spheres because at every order of scale and complexity there are an almost infinite variety of possible time and resource consuming projects, the overwhelming majority of which will be not be encoded as light emitted from a distant star.
- JustBreath 3y agoThere's a rebuke to this argument in the article: > In some sense it doesn’t matter how a galactic civilization gets or uses its power because the second law of thermodynamics makes energy use hard to hide. They could construct Dyson spheres, they could get power from rotating black holes, they could build giant computer networks in the cold outskirts of galaxies, and all of that would produce waste heat. Wright’s team went right to the peak of the curve for where you’d expect to see any sort of waste heat, and they’re just not seeing anything obvious. In any case their funding came from The Templeton Foundation and all they did was look at existing imagery. Either way, I'd rather live in a world where we looked and didn't find anything than one where we didn't bother looking.
- matthewdgreen 3y agoThe other answer is excellent, but also: waste heat from star-system-scale processes is what we can rule out with existing tech, so that's what we're ruling out.