9 ms·
A Dark Forest strike?
by jdiez17 3y ago
A Dark Forest strike?
- teekert 3y agoPerhaps some civilization created a Dyson sphere. Or perhaps a technologically advanced civilization contained an overly aggressive species.
- vkou 3y agoA Dyson sphere wouldn't cause the star to significantly brighten and then wink out all at once.
- sillywalk 3y agoIn the book Pandora's Star (see comment above), the Dyson sphere wasn't physical, it was some sort of energy-type shield.
- teekert 3y agoYou got the reference ;) First thing I thought: if we had wormholes we could observe the event again. And indeed, the brightening is Probably from the construction phase of the sphere.
- vkou 3y agoOkay, if we're going to go that far beyond the realm of physics, perhaps we could consider my hypothesis that the star was obscured by a giant, invisible unicorn?
- sillywalk 3y agoI might add that Pandora's Star is a sci-fi book.
- bell-cot 3y agoDuring final assembly of the Dyson sphere, the astrodynamics contractor cranks the to-be-enclosed star's fusion rate way up - to brake the infall of the segments of the spherical shell with light pressure. Then, once all the shoring joints between the segments pass their load/shear inspections, the general contractor clears the AC to drop the fusion rate back to nominal. From a distance, the now-enclosed star seems to wink out in a very brief time.
- jowea 3y agoFrom what I understand an actual Dyson shell completely covering a star is probably out of reach of even such a civilization. Would a Dyson swarm make the star disappear?
- bloopernova 3y agoSpoilers! Excellent books, I've read them like a dozen times.
- CobrastanJorji 3y agoOr maybe a Pandora's Star scenario!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bloopernova 3y agoI've read those 2 books like a dozen times. It might be time for another reading lol. For those unfamiliar: Pandora's Star is by Peter F Hamilton. It details humanity's encounter with a star system that is completely enclosed in an impenetrable exotic matter/energy shell. It's fantastic sci-fi, a great adventure with fun characters, loads of bizarre future stuff, and very cool action. Highly, highly recommend!
- RHSman2 3y agoWill check it out!
- sillywalk 3y agoHave you read the follow on Void Trilogy?
- bloopernova 3y agoYes, but only once. It didn't grab me like the first one did, even though its scope and imagination were arguably greater.
- sillywalk 3y agoDitto.
- ASalazarMX 3y agoThe article says > [..] a more likely model is that the 2009 brightening was caused by a stellar merger. What appeared to be a bright massive star was a star system that brightened as two stars merged, then faded. But wouldn't it be cool if this was because someone brute-forced the nine billion names of god? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God
- snakeyjake 3y ago>Dark Forest Dark Forest makes no sense. If you are an intelligence capable of faster-than-light interstellar travel, capable of snuffing out stars, capable of collapsing dimensions-- you don't care about anyone else. Nobody's going to compete with you for resources. Scarcity no longer exists. All you care about is energy and you have mastered it. Energy is practically infinite to you. You can sit off to the side of black holes or neutron stars harvesting energy from their relativistic jets. Finding or controlling a consistent supply of physical matter, least of all individual stars and planets, is no longer relevant to you. You can just pluck individual hydrogen atoms out of the interstellar void and rearrange them using your sources of near-infinite energy to transform them into million-kilometer-wide cubes of whatever you want. If someone makes it to your level of mastery of the cosmos, you would just share the locations of any of the other several hundred billion sources of free and limitless energy. You ain't killing a star because an inhabitant of one of its planets might take your planet over. You haven't needed to live on planets for billions of years. You can construct atomically-perfect structures of arbitrary size and composition out of what we perceive to be the nothingness of space. You don't need dirt.
- Tronno 3y agoHumans kill wasps even though we landed on the moon.
- SllX 3y agoWasps and humans live different lives inside a closed ecosystem with finite resources and energy. The hypothetical civilization the parent is describing is further away from us technologically than we are from wasps.
- blacksmith_tb 3y agoI think real problem with the Dark Forest hypothesis is that it assumes alien civilizations at a very high level of technical development would somehow have not also made any sort of moral or ethical progress. Even humans, in a few thousand years have gone from winner-take-all, kill 'em all, to universal human rights, rules of war, etc. (sure, we aren't doing a perfect job, but we clearly have made some progress - by the time we're sending ships to other stars, I'd like to think we'll be farther along yet).