Comment by barkingcat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by barkingcat | Hacker News Reader

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"Why would aliens expend the enormous energy required to engineer this" Is a very similar answer to why humans would make microprocessors out of logic gates.

I'm in school for digital design at the moment, and stuff like oscillators and frequency dividers are at the very base/root of almost all electronic circuits.

One guess could be that alignments of planets in specific ways could be used to generate specific impulses of gravitational waves, the way we generate signals in binary. Imagine an alien race who uses gravitational effects from orbiting bodies as the basic building block of their "mega processors" that are the size of galaxies. So one solar system that has a division cycle of "2/3, 2/3, 2/3, 3/4 and 3/4" could be their representation of a value/"bit pattern" but written with planets in orbital mechanics, just like how we represent decimal 10 in binary 1010.

as an aside, it is very easy to also ask "why would humans spend so much energy taking silicate sand and turning it into intricate patterns at the size of angstroms and nano meters just to consume power? wouldn't it be easier to just let the sand organize itself into components as needed?" of course, the answer seems obvious to us, but the question is analogous to yours.

Or maybe, instead of using radio or a golden disc, the aliens decided to synchronize planets of some system (not necessarily theirs), in order to try to communicate intelligent life using the gravitational waves, so the message can reach much further - maybe even to other universes (there are various theories, that we might communicate with other universes in the multiverse using gravity, or maybe with the previous universe before the Big Bang... As well as an idea that the dark matter is another universe that we interact with only gravitationally).

this is a great idea too!

I studied EE and identity with what you’re saying, but I suppose the natural follow-up questions would include an interrogation of the relative benefits of scale. In other words, why build a solar system sized oscillator? Surely, if one simply needs to maintain a clock—and if one has sufficient advanced knowledge and technology to influence the motion of planetary orbits on a large scale—why bother, when the decay of cesium atoms is readily available? The fun answer is because the intelligence responsible for such an endeavor exists on a scale such that this solar system is its equivalent of a cesium atom. But other smarter folks have already established the more likely scenarios elsewhere in this thread. It’s just fun to think about.

I can understand that it could be done as some sort of cosmic scale performance art. But I find it hard to understand that it would have any practical use. But, there again, aliens are likely to have very different thought processes.

yes exactly, the entire goal of my post was to describe how aliens could have entirely different thinking processes and/or scales than humans.

If one alien entity/organism is actually the size of a galaxy, a single solar system would be on the scale of maybe a transistor at 20-30 nm to us.

At that scale it's no longer performance art, but maybe a small part of a engine of some sort.

What I'm saying is thought patterns like "what is it for" "this is inefficient" or "that would be way too big" ... etc is only defined from our point of view.

For what it’s worth, all your comments on this perspective along with the silicon analogy are excellent and were eye opening for me. I too was dismissive and it took me a sec to really understand your analogy and point but I get it now. Nicely stated!

Super interesting answer, thank you for that.

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