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Comment by burtonator | Hacker News Reader

We don't have conversations with paramecium.

If you wanted to build a Dyson sphere you would capture all the light from your star and might not exhibit ANY radiation.

We wouldn't see such a species and if there's such a small blink of time between the industrial age to the singularity the probability that there is an overlapping species is very very low.

We would only have about 20-40 years to actually have the technology to find them before we hit the singularity.

We have NO idea what happens after that point but my plan is to just chill with my wife in a virtual Yosemite park once we hit the singularity.

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> might not exhibit ANY radiation

That would be against thermodynamics. Every object that has a temperature (above 0K) emits radiation.

You're right obviously, but a Matrioshka Brain would put out such a small amount of radiation, it'd be invisible for all sensor technology outside of, say, black hole lenses.

> a Matrioshka Brain would put out such a small amount of radiation, it'd be invisible for all sensor technology

A huge object emitting infrared radiation would be quite detectable.

At the level of energy output from our Sun, a Dyson sphere with a diameter of the Earth's orbit, would actually have a surface temperature of 395K or 122C. It would put out lots of infrared radiation, and would be very detectable against the cosmic background which has a radiation temperature of 2.7K.

Some SETI programs have looked for these, and already in 1984 we had the technology to observe, and as it turns out, to rule out any of these (Dyson spheres around stars with energy output comparable to our Sun) existing within the nearest 300 light years.

https://www.aleph.se/Nada/dysonFAQ.html#HEAT

https://www.aleph.se/Nada/dysonFAQ.html#OBS

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/weirdastronomy....

>We don't have conversations with paramecium.

If paramecium became advanced enough to form a society and want to say something to us, we'd be extremely interested in communicating with it, I think.

How interested are most humans in communicating with the other reasonably advanced species on our own planet?

>once we hit the singularity

I am charmed to read someone here expects this to potentially happen in our lifetime. I know it’s not a completely uncommon sentiment in these circles but I’m not informed about why people hold it - personally, I wouldn’t mind being convinced of it myself. Do you expect us to reach the singularity in our lifetimes, if so why?

Offhand, from the science fiction I've read Dyson spheres make more sense as military installations for the reason you list.

From the perspective of an easier and safer engineering problem even 'wide' "ring worlds" make more sense; those also have the option of using the start inside as a drive for travel. (Probably not very fast, but much like interstellar freight class travel)

> might not exhibit ANY radiation.

They'd still radiate it out, unless they converted it into matter. E=mc² works both ways.

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