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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a good theory, but when I read something like this it always makes me think about any of the sci-fi I've read that was written 50-75 years ago.

They're also full of what were at the time good theories, but that are now so wrong it often makes reading the story difficult, even with my fairly rudimentary modern astrophysics knowledge.

In all honesty I think it's more likely any sufficiently advanced civilization capable of interstellar travel has probably descended entirely into virtual reality or a singularity.

I mean, what would you prefer? Being the star of your own personal VR space, the next Malcolm Reynolds, space cowboying around where you are the entire focus of that reality. Or schlepping it over to another star in a generation ship or whatever where even if you were somehow still alive when it arrived, you'd be landing on a planet that will probably instantly kill you.

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There are several differences between these old predictions and now:

1. We're now assuming based on the limits of known physics rather than the expected limits of technology. My father told me he once read a book that said it was impossible to go to the Moon because it would take 750 years to get there. The speed of light was known at that time but assumptions were made about the limits of acceleration and velocity that weren't grounded in science;

2. Things like the rocket equation are important. Specifically, the reaction mass problem. Even more specifically, the only way for an independent body to accelerate in space that we know of is by expelling mass (or energy). You need to carry that mass and this quickly becomes inefficient.

A good example of this is how people have recently started to say "if we just accelerate at 1G we can get to Alpha Centauri in a few years". 1G acceleration sounds easy but it's not.

So how would you travel between stars? I think it most likely that you'd use a ton of energy to accelerate (or decelerate) a vessel with lasers on a solar sail. Why? Because energy from a star is abundant and cheap and it doesn't require carrying reaction mass.

If you accept that, then the need for Dyson Swarms becomes more obvious.

3. Breaking the 2 assumptions I listed makes spacefaring life more common not less. By this I mean we only really need to consider a million light years (of light cone) because of the speed of light. If FTL or even time travel were possible, then you need to consider a volume of spacetime orders of magnitude larger.

> My father told me he once read a book that said it was impossible to go to the Moon because it would take 750 years to get there.

A bit of a tangent, but that seems absurd even based on knowledge from hundreds of years ago. The moon is about 250,000 miles away, so the 750 years figure assumes a speed of less than 1 mile/day. And a quick google search suggests that we've had reasonable estimates of the distance to the moon since about the 2nd century BCE.

I think it's more that we don't know what we don't know.

That's the thing that usually trips us up.

Also, on a more human level, who's going to even pay/bother with these swarms? What will they achieve?

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.")

How 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.

> I mean, what would you prefer?

I would not choose to be the star. Observing substance (ab)use and suicide among celebrities and the affluent, it seems clear that a “starring role” in life is not an automatic ticket to happiness or fulfillment.

For me at least, a lot of the meaning in life comes from dealing with cold hard reality. Updating my strengths and my belief systems to be more aligned with a disinterested external world. Connecting with, learning from, and sharing with other humans what it all means and what it’s like to be part of this whole thing, to get a more complete understanding of the human experience.

Consider—if we were one unified consciousness with total understanding existing in absolute bliss, what would there be to do, to discuss? We might produce a limited world like our own to make existence more meaningful.

No it would probably be a lot more like TikTok or other social media. Addictive at first and then most likely economically driven as well.

Imagine being able to deliver REAL experiences as ads:

"TRY our new toothpaste. Really!"

So like everything in technology we will just kind of evolve into it without even noticing until it's too late like Facebook or some such.

StarTrek TNG’s “Q” had that problem. They’d effectively ascended but were bored out of their minds. Well rather one of them was. It was one of my favorite plot elements.

Even in a virtual reality (perhaps especially in VR?) I’d fear that a single instantly connected human society would stagnate pretty quickly.

At least sub-light speed travel and communications limit would allow future human colonies to grow independently rather than our increasingly homogeneous worldwide consumer culture.

> In all honesty I think it's more likely any sufficiently advanced civilization capable of interstellar travel has probably descended entirely into virtual reality or a singularity.

Or instead of growing larger, growing smaller and becoming more efficient. Microscopic organisms with free will wouldn't be needing Dyson sphere to power their civilization.

Or realization that existence is a pain and that there's no point in pursuing it after the civilization reaches certain level. This is a conversation-ender, So wouldn't even make a good Sci-Fi unless say that civilization decides to put every other civilization out of their misery due their ideology.

> has probably descended entirely into virtual reality

Even if it was possible, what would "descend" mean -- it would mean that someone could make a perfect virtual clone of me inside a virtual world.

What is the incentive for ME to do that? It's like saying that in a parallel universe a perfect clone of me is a billionaire if I so choose.

> singularity

What does that actually mean?

Both tbh. Send the robots (which could even be biological) to do real life work and just chill in VR.

why not both?

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