The Shrine

Many of you are familiar with the Dyson sphere episode of Star Trek TNG. If not, it was an episode where the Enterprise discovered a gravitational anomaly, upon approaching they discovered it was a dyson sphere from some ancient civilization.



Picard notes “Dyson sphere. Named for 20th-century physicist Freeman Dyson, who postulated a sphere could be built around a star with inhabitants living on its interior wall.”

Data notes: “The diameter is 200 million kilometers across, roughly the size of Earth’s orbit, giving it the capacity of approximately 250 million M-class (earth-like) planets.”

Now that we have Star Trek out of the way, what’s the dilemma?

If you’ve ever played games like Stellaris, you will quickly find that building megastructures tends to allow a snowballing effect, the more you have, the more capacity you have to build them. If a civilization is capable of building one dyson sphere, there is clear benefit to doing so; and there is, additionally, more demand and capacity to build additional spheres. Like in Asimov’s story “The Last Question” the expanding civilizations will eventually hit points where new galaxies are being filled up in a matter of decades (keep in mind, in Asimov’s universe FTL is a thing - he avoids a scientific explanation for it by stating that only robots had the capacity to invent it; this occurred at the end of the 21st century; but by the Foundation era robots had vanished, but the particulars of FTL additionally are so rudimentary by that point that there’s no interest in discussing them). ANYWAY, I’ll get to the point now:

• The universe is 13.7 billion years old. Out planet only formed 4.5 billion years ago.
• We now know that planets with early earth like conditions exist, and there might be millions of them in our galaxy as most stars have planets of some sort.
• millions of Earthlike planets could have been older than ours by billions of years ago.
• If a spacefaring civilization is a probable course of events, then they should have been out there by billions of years ago.
• If Dyson spheres and other colossal megastructures are actually of benefit, then spacefaring civilizations should have already built them.
• If they built one, the universe should be filled with them, but it isn’t - we would be able to detect them (unlike the Star Trek episode; and also unlike the episode there would NOT be just one).

Two possibilities:
1. Dyson Sphere’s and other megastructures are never of value.
2. We are among the first spacefaring civilizations in the universe.

What’s more unsettling to you: the idea that there might be alien civilizations out there, or the idea that there might not be?

Maybe I'm not familiar with the "dilemma" as it appears to require three things to be true to be reasonable; 1. that greater than speed of light travel is possible (to justify the idea that spheres should populate a large enough portion of the universe and suggest a low probability of not detecting one); 2. that the enormous energy and material output required to construct one would in anyway be justifiable in a functional, non-immortal species. I'm sure a nerd has done the math here. 3. that we have the tools or understanding to detect and identify a sphere.

I'm not sure the two prongs of the dilemma are established...but if I had to guess, unless the universe was on the verge of collapsing and a Dysons sphere / closed system was the only method to save a civilization, then that's the only scenario one would be viable given the enormous output required. I almost KNOW for sure some nerd has done the math on this -- but if I try searching it out, I fear i'll get glassy eyed and pass out.

Stellaris enjoys infinite resource production. If it was limited...would you build a megastructure (maybe rings aside)?

The problem with Fermi Paradox and its variation, like this one, is that extrapolating on things you literally have no idea about is means your solution may have nothing to do with reality. It's like how people claim they know how a space elevator can be built and yet I don't think we even have anything that's like 1/10000th the scale of an actual one yet. You can't just take something we don't know how to build even a tiny portion of it and says we'll extrapolate the difficulty of doing something ten thousand times harder and it must not be that hard. There's just no scientific basis on that. The Fermi Paradox assumes that you're somehow able to estimate the likelihood of sentient life developing even though we have literally only one case of observing it. Having millions of planets with earth-like condition doesn't mean much if the chance of sentient life developing is 1 quadrillion to 1, and when you ask the guys why they think the chance of life developing is say 1 million to 1 instead of 1 quadrillion to 1 there's obviously no answer to that beyond a person happening to think that the first number sounds more right than the second number. Likewise a feat of engineering marvel might not be physically impossible but again it might take far more precision and expertise than what we can comprehend, which means it is indeed quite possible that no intelligent life end up accomplishing this.

I tend to agree most with the theory that the answer to the Fermi Paradox is we’re an early species; that life reaching our stage is incredibly rare. I won’t go into detail, because I know the “Rare Earth” hypothesis ranks near the top.

And I think you’re both correct that Dyson spheres may simply not be worth it; especially given all the wild real-estate throughout the universe.

I like the idea of matryoshka worlds (Solid Dyson spheres, or worldS NEAR a Dyson sphere/swarm or some kind of fusion reactor which have multiple layers). It is a great setting for a story to take place on.

Given random space debris can totally mess up any orbital structure, I'd imagine if you try to build a Dyson Sphere it'd quickly get destroyed by any random stuff orbiting the sun which goes considerably faster than orbit speed and you have a much bigger structure to collide into.

Don wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 19, 2019 8:53 pm

Given random space debris can totally mess up any orbital structure, I'd imagine if you try to build a Dyson Sphere it'd quickly get destroyed by any random stuff orbiting the sun which goes considerably faster than orbit speed and you have a much bigger structure to collide into.

You nerds are discussing the probability of Dyson Sphere's existing, and you don't think a civilization capable of building one has figured out how to defend against some 'space debris' by that point ? :p

Just think of what such a civilization must have created BEFORE even considering a Dyson Sphere.

My cryptic theory is that any civilization with the capability of constructing a Dyson Sphere has long evolved past the need for one.

To again use Star Trek TNG as a reference:




Plus, it'd be really really hard to do. Fuck that noise.

That would explain the Dyson dilemma, that once a civilization has attained the capacity to build one, the things would be completely unnecessary; like us building some kind of super-sized mechanical watermill when we have moved on to electricity; or using our extensive abilities to breed some kind of super-ox (100X stronger than a normal cart-pulling cow) when we have moved on to motor vehicles.

On the Fermi Paradox in general, it could be that any civilization that becomes sufficiently advanced will be undetectable by our current tools because they have transcended beyond what we would assign as technological advancement.

Going back to Star Trek, Errand of Mercy in the original series is a good take on this; at least from analogy featuring a smaller scale conflict.

The background: is the Federation and Klingon Empire have declared a sort of a cold war on each other, and a planet known as Organia sits in a strategically important location. Upon the planet is a seemingly primitive race, known as the Organians.

The setup: Klingons intend to establish a base of operations on the planet for strategic purposes. The Federation intends to establish a base of operation as well, with the permission of the populace. The base would be of great strategic value to the Federation, but the rhetoric used is that the Federation wants to establish the base for the purpose of defending the vulnerable Organians against the evil/aggressive Klingon Empire.

Rising action: Kirk and co, using the typical Federation "Let's pretend we're of the local population so as to not disturb their society" pretend to be Organians in order to warn the actual Organians about the danger of the Klingons. The Organians, so pacifist that they refuse to acknowledge the threat of the Klingons. The Enterprise crew then spends the majority of this act trying to prove how violent and dangerous the Klingons are.

Climax: The Klingons and Enterprise crew come to blows against each other only to learn that the Organians are actually VASTLY more advance and powerful than they appeared: and then they proceed to fuck them up.

Anyway, this band actually wrote and performed a power-pop song about the episode:


There is also a season 1 episode of Stargate SG-1 called "The Nox" which is a retelling of this story (replacing the Federation with the Tauri/Earth, and the Klingons with the Goa'uld, and the Organians with a race called the Nox). I realize the details of the plot are not very relevant to the point (I just really fucking like the story) but basically, the point is these ultra-powerful and advanced civilizations are undetectable by the main characters/antagonists - and similarly speaking, we may have looked right at a vast interstellar Empire many many times, and not recognized that there was anything there.

To get to the point of those episodes and what I'm talking about: We don't know what the path of advancement is because our point of view is limited. The answer to the Fermi Paradox might be that any civilization that advances far enough will discover a new path that won't be visible to our radio wave and spectral analysis-based technology (and any other methods we currently use to view the cosmos).


SG-1, in a way was the best example of a successor to the old-style science fiction story Star Trek of season 1 TOS and some of the TNG episodes.