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Comment by di456 | Hacker News Reader

> So we are probably just one of the first.

We don't really have any way to know that. Considering that there may be as many stars in the sky as grains of sand on Earth, there are many many unknowns.

For another example we don't know for sure if our universe is the only one and it's entirely possible that everything that could ever happen plays out in real time across and infinite number of universes. We don't have any way to physically measure that possibility yet. We only have mathematical theories.

Similar to how Copernicus proposed the heliocentric model, maybe our universe is not even the center of existence?

It is humbling to imagine.

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Astrophysicists tell us that star formation will continue for 100 trillion years.

We are indeed among the first simply because of the sheer amount of time left ahead of us vs. behind us. It's basic math. We are at 0.014% of the expected duration of this universe.

All those stars you see in the night sky? That’s an astronomical waste of energy. No technological energy limited civilization would let that waste continue, entirely unhindered.

The fact that we don’t see the light of stars, or whole galaxies replaced by dim infrared waste heat emissions means either (1) new physics will point to free energy solutions that circumvent thermodynamic laws [unlikely], or (2) we are the first.

or 3) the assumption that advanced civilizations consume more energy is wrong.

Or 4) - interstellar mega-engineering is impossible, or essentially impossible, or it's ROI is negative.

Which seems to be the most likely explanation to me.

The really advanced civilizations developed their technology just enough so they could build a really safe and reliable Matrix to live out their lives in.

They would still consume their local stars to extract and store the energy so their matrix can survive for trillions of years, rather than a few million or billion.

We may not have the capability to build a Dyson cloud around our own star (yet), but we do already have the technology. You could do so with 21st century tech, and the ROI would be positive.

Even then, there are two issues:

1. disassembling the stars to make them live a thousand times longer

2. it only takes one expansionist civilisation seeking interstellar exponential growth — even if 99.9% of civilisations are quiet, that's just 3 digits of the 22-digit number of stars in the observable universe.

> disassembling the stars to make them live a thousand times longer

Why would they do that when there are insane amounts of start with billions of years of life ahead of them. What purpose would that serve at this point in time?

Even though the numbers are too big for humans to feel them out, the bigger one is bigger than the smaller one.

Because trillions is bigger than billions.

That was (1) new physics. Because otherwise, entropy is a bitch.

Already today, having passed peak-child a few years ago, we can see that there are futures possible where humanity doesn't grow. I.e. humanity might be fine advancing with a fixed amount of power.

In that case, the stars are not 'waste'.

Historically, this idea of growth as method for advance is only a few centuries old. It's not hard to see its end as efficiency keeps increasing.

That'll change once we solve disease and aging.

Or just maybe civilizations advanced enough for Kardyshev level 2 engineering feel no need for exponential expansion. Fermi paradox is essentially Malthusianism extended to outer space.

If nothing else, eventually civilizations are confronted by questions (in math, say) that can only be solved by extremely large amounts of computation. We know there must ultimately be succinctly stateable problems that cannot be solved easily; this follows from the undecidability of math.

It could well be that harnessing the energy of one star is sufficient for most of that. This is very hard to detect for an observer.

Going K3 to 100 billion stars of the galaxy "only" gives you a 10^11 constant factor speedup at enormous expense and with Amdahl's penalty at galactic scales.

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