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?
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?
