From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of LizR
The Fermi paradox gets sharper.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.03418
This makes it even more important that we don’t blow it on our own little
world. Or perhaps it is evidence that *we are going to blow it* just like every
other species has on every other star that has developed intelligence. Our
current race towards global war certainly seems to indicate that the second
hypothesis has merit.
Why have we failed to detect any signs of civilization outside of our own
earth?
On the one hand we have only looked at a very few stars (for short periods of
time), but surveys such as this seem to indicate either that civilization
either does not go down the road of maximum energy use within its host galaxy;
hence no signature, or that no such civilization exists (though they did
suggest a few galaxies worth further study)
Perhaps at some level of intelligence growth in energy consumption no longer
appeals. Why assume that a super advanced civilization would go down the route
of creating Dyson spheres around every star in its galaxy, which is what the
study was surveying for. Perhaps at some level of intelligence other things
become more important than consuming more and more energy to effect the
physical world through the application of energy. I have a few observations
about the study: it did not eliminate civilizations that transformed under 50%
of the stars in their galaxy into dyson spheres. I am thinking that a galactic
scale civilization might refrain from scaling out to complete Dysonization of
its galaxy for esthetic reasons for example. If say they had transformed the
most promising 10% of the stars in a galaxy into dyson spheres that would still
be a huge number of such mega-energy-producing engines, generating
unconceivable amounts of power. Why would any civilization need more than ay 20
billion Dyson sphere in its domain? That would be 10% in a galaxy with 200
billion stars in it.
Even a single dyson sphere is a mind boggling amount of energy. 20 billionn
such spheres prinkled around the galaxy is 20 billion times more mind boggling.
I think it is fair to question the assumption that a civilization would even
want to blink out every star in the sky in order to maximize the usable energy
yield from those suns.
Purely riffing on a speculative vein here…
Chris
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