Comment by indrax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by indrax | Hacker News Reader

Good evidence pointing towards ~infinite energy or some other 'exotic physics' that invalidate my assumptions for the need for space colonization.

Otherwise They should be trying to grab as much energy as possible, for whatever is it they want to do (as should we) and we should see at least some galaxies going partially dark.

There was a paper I can't find that addressed this somewhat. It said that the energy stars burn is a small part (<1%?) of what they contain in total mass/energy, so it might make sense and harvest that energy later. (The paper did not explain a method for efficient matter/energy conversion but I think black holes can do that?)

That paper didn't fully convince me but it's one of very few arguments that tries to address what I think is the core issue. (At least a few species will want as much energy as they can get.)

> They should be trying to grab as much energy as possible, for whatever is it they want to do (as should we) and we should see at least some galaxies going partially dark.

This sort of reasoning was developed in the late 20th century, when economies and populations were rapidly growing everywhere and it seemed like this was just a law of nature. We’re already seeing population growth decline (or reverse) in developed nations, and economic growth has turned out to be much more contingent lately, to say the least. We should probably reconsider the argument that an industrial civilization necessarily develops to building Dyson spheres if the like, when we expect a long-term stable human population of <20B and 2% GDP growth for the foreseeable future.

Beyond that, even, is it really unthinkable that a civilization would decide that at some point it had enough stuff for any conceivable purpose? There are other aspects of the 20th-century cultural mindset at work there, too, I suspect.

One common counterpoint here is that it's not unthinkable that a civilization would decide that it had enough stuff, but it does seem unlikely that every civilization would decide it had enough stuff, and it only takes a handful of outliers to cause effects that we should've been able to observe.

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