Dyson

by Nadir on April 30, 2012 at 8:21 am

I checked out the first episode of the Discovery Channel series ‘Into the Universe With Stephen Hawking’ concerning aliens the other day. I had been avoiding watching it (it’s a couple years old) because the trailers made me feel like it was going to be cheesy. It turned out to be lacking at best and a bit stale at worst. Think yesteryears sci-fi (I’m channeling TNG here*). Not to sound too negative, it’s probably a good intro for kids and I love me some HAWK, but the thing that made me roll my eyes was the hypothetical scenario in which a race of aliens, having depleted the resources in their own planetary system, roam around like nomads while simultaneously having the capability to harness the power of an entire star using a Dyson sphere, and use this energy to open up a worm hole to travel anywhere they want, like, oh I dunno, let’s say Earth! The implication is they might end up exploiting us for our resources similar to how the New World and Native Americans were when discovered.

If aliens want raw materials they can find everything the Earth has to offer (and then a lot more) on a billion other dead space-rocks without going through the trouble of messing around with the smelly human race and their itchy trigger fingers. Sure, we’re made of star-stuff, but so is everything else. I heard someone in the back say ‘b-but liquid water’. No. Shut up. No. They have a Dyson sphere, they aren’t hard up for our contaminated water. They can get it or make it anywhere. Hydrogen, oxygen, c’mon, get it together, you have a Dyson sphere!

A Dyson Sphere, for anyone wondering, is any (as yet hypothetical) structure built around a star designed to maximally harness its energy output. It was originally proposed by theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson in 1959 as a potential way for advanced civilizations to harness solar power. Many variations exist, but in sci-fi it usually takes the form of an an entire solid shell surrounding the star. That’s the one we like. But a structure like that around the Sun, at 1AU would have to be at least 600 million times the surface area of the Earth. That’s a lot of real estate! And it would take the entire solar system to build.

So as you can imagine, if a civilization got to a point where they were able to build and harness such power (type 2 civilization), there would be little to no reason to visit Earth. Curiosity wouldn’t even cut it. There is nothing that humanity is, or is capable of, that we haven’t expressed in a form accessible from afar (art, science and history has every nuance of humanity covered). So instead of worrying about what non-existent type 2 civilizations may or may not do, let’s try to focus on the dangers we face presently.

I’m talking about space pirates. Those guys are insane… and they don’t have Dyson spheres.

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This post was brought to you by the planet made out of Diamond. If we inhabited it instead of Earth, we could be reasonably sure wealthy type 2 civilizations would be interested in visiting. I bet they have a ton of glass to cut.
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*Don’t get me wrong, I have Hot Earl Grey running through my veins, but that stuff has been done. Over 20 years ago.

└ Tags: Aliens, Dyson, Stephen Hawking

Zach

Yeah, I’m not too worried about aliens wanting our “natural resources.”

I *am* generally a bit concerned that either they’ll be a warlike race that can’t tolerate others being around or they’ll (rightly) see us as one and either way decide they better get rid of us before we can get rid of them. It’s not something we’ll likely have to deal with soon, though, and if we did have to deal with it, unlike what you see in sci-fi movies, we wouldn’t win at all, so there’s no point in worrying about it, though.
Boundary

This reminds me of the so often called ‘reptilian ancestors’ that one to many nutshell believes in. Something about an alien race coming to earth to plunder our gold from which they harness energy.

Makes me always wonder about the same aspects as in the comic. They have the technology for long distance spacetravel and need the measly amounts of gold we have to power all their civilication? When they could do this long distance travel they are bound to have solved the energy-problems and then i think of systems like PHELIX. So they are also bound to (nearly) have mastered all aspects of heavy ion-technology. Which would mean they’d have a friggin’ philosopher’s stone!

So the whole “plundering earth for ressources”-point is realy nothing but humbug.
Boundary

This reminds me of the so often called ‘reptilian ancestors’ that one to many nutshell believes in. Something about an alien race coming to earth to plunder our gold from which they harness energy.

Makes me always wonder about the same aspects as in the comic. They have the technology for long distance spacetravel and need the measly amounts of gold we have to power all their civilication? When they could do this long distance travel they are bound to have solved the energy-problems and then i think of systems like PHELIX. So they are also bound to (nearly) have mastered all aspects of heavy ion-technology. Which would mean they’d have a friggin’ philosopher’s stone!

So the whole “plundering earth for ressources”-point is realy nothing but humbug.
Violet Nightshade

I just think it’s awesome that you made the Dyson Sphere look like a giant head.
- NBalan
  
  It’s a literal Dyson Sphere. Modeled after Freeman Dyson. Did I not mention that? I didn’t mention that.
  - http://sci-ence.org Maki
    
    I got it! I’d recognize that schnoz anywhere. *NERD BADGE*
Sordatos Cáceres

What if they do it out fun, since they have this incredible achievements of obtaining limitless energy, I would reckon that is a species with no concern for surviving even economy wouldnt be an issue, so they could dedicate themselves with leisure activities, and if they (or some of them) are bastards they could roam the universes just for the sake of being assholes to other species. Even if that were the case, worrying wont do a thing since we would be totally outmatched by them..
- NBalan
  
  I don’t think any civilization could become that advanced without
  outgrowing their warring phase (or biological phase for that matter. And
  once you overcome that you overcome any vestigial destructive
  impulse–but now I’m on a tangent writing fan-fiction).
EBH

Hey now, it’s not Hot Earl Grey, it’s “Earl grey, hot”.
- NBalan
  
  I saw this coming and did nothing about it. #some men just want to watch the world burn
moriturimax

If you had the tech to completely surround your freaking STAR with a shell and harness all the energy it puts out, why couldn’t you just break the star down, and use its material to generate all the fusion power you wanted for billions of years WITHOUT having to build an ugly ass shell around your whole star? You can make smaller stars for light too.
http://twitter.com/liet Can Özmen

It’s all about them earthly women.

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