Alien Supercivilizations Absent from 100,000 Nearby Galaxies
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
The sheer amount of resources available in our own solar system, one solar system, is mind-boggling and enough to sustain a civilization for millions, maybe billions of years.
At least for humans, there would be no need to waste resources encasing the Sun in some gargantuan structure.
Instead, we'd have local nuclear fusion reactors that would be powered by a steady stream of materials from the outside. Small, effective, no single point of failure, perfectly in line with our love for individualism.
That, plus the optimization of resource usage (lower energy consumption, more recycling, etc.) - we'd be more likely to reach a certain technological point and expand as far as possible (=pretty much infinitely in space) instead of building some crazy s&&t in our galactic downtown.
To make an analogy, once we created sailing ships and navigation, we explored and conquered the whole planet. There was no need to create internal combustion engines or advanced life support systems. Those are optional even today.
If you do need an energy amount that a star produces, would it be possible to get a source that's more compact than a star itself? The fusion in a star is a runaway process. Does physics let us do it better than a runaway process?
edit: It is interesting to examine this from an artistic and play perspective too. If I had the means, I imagine it would be fun to have "planet sculpting" as a hobby. We ought to be able to detect such civilizations by looking for non-spheroid planets? As a kid I've burnt leaves and written on paper by focusing sunlight using a lens. Imagine a type II kid being told "go to the other solar system and play with your megalens there, dear".
Would type II civilizations have "kids"?
"Look mommy, I made a tetrahedron by welding four planets."
"Wow, this circus rocks! How they juggle 5 intersecting solar systems without the planets crashing into each other!"
It's based on our limited view of thinking that that's the best way of harnessing all energy needed
Do you really think someone with a very advanced technology needs to surround an existing star to get all the energy they need?
They'll probably need less energy than we do, and have more smart ways of getting it (probably with Fusion, but on a small scale)
http://accelerating.org/articles/transcensionhypothesis.html
Unfortunately, I have to stop reading at this point.
(In case anyone doesn't know, this foundation is motivated by religiously-conservative ideology, although I'm not sure if they overtly admit it. More often than not, studies funded by them result in conclusions like 'this universe could not have been created by accident', 'we humans are special', problems with evolution, etc, etc).
At the university department I worked at, the Templeton Foundation funded a pile of quantum computation research. They fund a lot of pure research projects by cutting edge researchers that wouldn’t otherwise get funding & the results are published in major peer-reviewed journals. It’s hard to see the bias there frankly.
The Dyson sphere is really just the extrapolation of 1950s USA - maximize comsumption, ignore pollution, expand at all costs.
That has nothing to do with "maximize comsumption, ignore pollution, expand at all costs."
Exactly this. I don't think a supercivilization would emerge as one with this maxim. It would die in its own cradle. Likewise, I believe our problems of this nature must be solved here, at home, before moving out and spreading our tragic narrative elsewhere.
What if the smart cultures have realized the best way is to live quietly, sustainably in balance with nature on their planets. This might well mean not expending the vast energy needed to go to space. Perhaps also they are comfortable with themselves and do not need to seek out everyone else.
Edit. I just wanted to add that any civilisation capable of building Dyson spheres would not waste any energy that can be captured. The emissions of any energy at any temperature more than slightly above the background radiation level would be inefficient.
For example, you can use energy in computer calculation. Other use is transport operations (like car and naval ships) they move but the energy is transformed into air or water movement and later into heat. Another use is steel blending, you change the shape of the metal, that makes the metal slightly hot. ... Anything you do, you get a lot of heat to dispose.
Also, to dispose that heat fast enough, the dissipater has to be hot or big, because the black body radiation is the faster you can emit. A big dissipater require a lot of material, a hot dissipater waste energy, it's a tradeoff.
[1] You can store energy for a looong time making coal and burying it, the plants we have done that unintentionally . An alternative is to make a lot of aluminum and try to avoid the oxidation. But they don't look like a sensible use of energy for a civilization.
The Sun radiates ~ 10e26 Watts, or ~ 1.21e8 W/m^2 at a temperature of ~ 5800°K. Given that radiated power is proportional to (area)*T^4 and making simplifying assumptions about emissivity, etc., I get that a Dyson sphere around our Sun at Pluto's orbit would have a temperature of about 76°K, and a Dyson with a diameter of the Kuiper Belt would have a surface temperature of about 24°K.
So if the radiator is large enough (i.e., if your civilization is sufficiently advanced), you can dump stellar levels of power to space at quite modest temperatures.
I read through the original paper and the lowest object temperature they were able to detect was around 150˚K. Any Dyson sphere dumping that amount of energy would be pretty inefficient.
There is really no basis to assume that another life-form should in anyway resemble a human, a mammal, or some funny green dude. This should go for assumptions about an alien-life forms energy-use/requirements as well.
And even if you were designing a life form, it's hard to get creative with the "features". What would you invent to replace eyes? You may put eyes on the back, you may triple the count, you may call them "the seeing things"...but you still need to have something that makes the life form aware of its surroundings.
Now, the fact that we have evolved from monkeys may be a matter of luck. On other planets the dominant life form may evolve from birds or fish but I don't think it's very likely that it will be something that we can't even imagine now.
Of course, with all this I'm assuming a "simple" model of our universe - no God, no intelligent design, no artificial intelligence and no "living in the matrix".
That's exactly the anthropomorphic bias. Why wouldn't it be a huge mycelium? How do we even know there aren't types of life-forms made of structures that current scientific theories wouldn't consider possible?
More so it's entirely unclear why the life should have to be intelligent - or intelligent in a individual-animate-tool-building-animal kind of way.
> And even if you were designing a life form, it's hard to get creative with the "features".
It's hard to get creative, because creativity after-all builds from experience, therefore our imagination of alien life is still derived from the experience of Earth.
For that matter I'm very unconvinced that even Human civilization or life (should it survive for another 10,000 let alone 100,000 or a million) years will resemble anything like the organic individuals, with similar interests (i.e. space-travel, colonization) as it has today.
Why hadn't it? I mean, not only doesn't it posses a drop of intelligence, there isn't even something similar that does. And that's after billions of years. My guess is something like this - intelligence is the most powerful evolutionary weapon and due to the way evolution works, you only get that weapon if you have to survive among powerful adversaries. However, intelligence is of no use if the species can't react fast enough according to changing circumstances. Something with mycelium's structure can't run, can't hide and can't attack fast enough. If it somehow evolves to the point it could, it would start resembling existing intelligent species.
> More so it's entirely unclear why the life should have to be intelligent - or intelligent in a individual-animate-tool-building-animal kind of way.
All life doesn't have to be intelligent and it's not, even here on Earth. It's just that here we are discussing intelligent life that can build stuff.
> I'm very unconvinced that even Human civilization or life (should it survive for another 10,000 let alone 100,000 or a million) years will resemble anything like the organic individuals
Come on, we've had millions of years of evolution and we're still monkeys with less hair. Unless we start meddling with our DNA and/or actually develop artificial intelligence, we won't be changing much.
If you were an intelligent fungus (on a planet without humans) and could express similar thoughts, you would be saying exactly the same thing about monkeys. Same goes for all of your other reasoning.
Type I: this civilization harnesses the energy output of an entire planet.
Type II: this civilization harnesses the energy output of a star, and generates about 10 billion times the energy output of a Type I civilization.
Type III: this civilization harnesses the energy output of a galaxy, or about 10 billion time the energy output of a Type II civilization.
A Type I civilization would be able to manipulate truly planetary energies. They might, for example, control or modify their weather. They would have the power to manipulate planetary phenomena, such as hurricanes, which can release the energy of hundreds of hydrogen bombs. Perhaps volcanoes or even earthquakes may be altered by such a civilization.
A Type II civilization may resemble the Federation of Planets seen on the TV program Star Trek (which is capable of igniting stars and has colonized a tiny fraction of the near-by stars in the galaxy). A Type II civilization might be able to manipulate the power of solar flares.
A Type III civilization may resemble the Borg, or perhaps the Empire found in the Star Wars saga. They have colonized the galaxy itself, extracting energy from hundreds of billions of stars.
By contrast, we are a Type 0 civilization, which extracts its energy from dead plants (oil and coal). Growing at the average rate of about 3% per year, however, one may calculate that our own civilization may attain Type I status in about 100-200 years, Type II status in a few thousand years, and Type III status in about 100,000 to a million years. These time scales are insignificant when compared with the universe itself.
On this scale, one may now rank the different propulsion systems available to different types of civilizations:
Type 0
Chemical rockets, Ionic engines, Fission power, EM propulsion (rail guns)
Type I
Ram-jet fusion engines, Photonic drive
Type II
Antimatter drive, Von Neumann nano probes
Type III
Planck energy propulsion
... yeah, no. Their history is of attempting to get scientific support for religion. Their aim in practice appears to be to corrupt the public discourse concerning science in the interests of religion, by swaying academics with much more money than they'd get any other way. Anything or anyone funded by Templeton should be viewed in this light.
Of late, they have expanded beyond religion to funding climate change denial. https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/templeto...
Not directly, of course, there are many other assumption that come first, as discussed above, but it's fascinating nonetheless.
Second, the fact that we didn't find any sign of a Dyson sphere, doesn't prove that they are not there. We definitely can not see every (Dyson) star in those 100,000 galaxies, so even if supercivilizations require Dyson spheres, they still might be there and we could just have missed them.
There's also the fact that life arose on Earth almost immediately after conditions allowed for it. If it were an extremely rare event then there likely would have been some lag. Again, not conclusive, but suggestive.