Got mine plugged in: gonna vacuum later
Okay, so the title is a bit off. They’re hunting for partial Dyson spheres using infrared and optical.
I was confused on how they would detect something completely blocking a sun from millions of light-years away.
Dyson swarms are more likely. We even have a tiny one with our satellites using solar power in a heliocentric orbit. (Dyson spheres are basically impossible.) But we could theoretically detect either in infrared since if it doesn’t give off waste heat, it’d all heat up and melt.
That being said, I’m personally of the opinion this is a waste of time. Not to get all Fermi Paradox but it’s pretty sci fi brained to think any other species out there is as dumb as we are. Space sucks. You die super fast there. Everything had to align just right for Earth to make a bunch of dumb fuck apes willing to strap themselves onto rockets, have a planet small enough that the rocket could even overcome gravity to enter orbit using chemical rockets, and a World War and Cold War to accelerate things.
Everything had to align just right for Earth to make a bunch of dumb fuck apes willing to strap themselves onto rockets, have a planet small enough that the rocket could even overcome gravity to enter orbit using chemical rockets, and a World War and Cold War to accelerate things.
Given the estimated number of planets in this galaxy alone, it’s particularly guaranteed that very similar events have occurred on multiple worlds. Unless you’re proposing that all theoretical alien races are Vulcan level logical then tensions and interstate conflicts will always exist that will advance technology. This is practically an inevitability unless the race question is a hive mind species.
I think my Fermi Paradox explanation is that space is really fucking big and hostile and protecting the planet you evolved on is the only real option.
Not to mention the problem of what life is even supposed to do beyond a certain point of development. The depressing fact is that there is a finite amount of knowledge to be gained, a finite amount of resources to harvest, a finite diversity of life to contend or thrive alongside with. Once a pocket of life in this massive universe begins to run out of things to do and stagnates, then what? What is there to think about; to feel; to experience?
There’s little point in exploring space if one know how this universe works. One knows the rules, knows all the ways it can play out, and there’s no surprise waiting on the other end of any venture one can imagine embarking on.
That’s my theory. The Great Filter is just depressive boredom. We don’t see other life because by the time a civilisation is able and ready to spend thousands of years travelling through deep space, they’ll have already lost any motivation they might have had to do so.
I suspect that there’s at best a very short window wherein a species is both knowledgeable enough to dream of space exploration and technologically capable of sending any significant amount of artificial constructions out there.
Not to mention that anything an alien species might send into interstellar space is unimaginably unlikely to be recorded exactly at precisely the moment they pass another lump of matter - especially if the window is as short as I fear.
This feels like trying to determine FTL travel is possible by looking for warp signatures. We don’t yet know megastructures are feasable.
Agree this sounds ridiculous, but isn’t this the basic point of science? Propose something is possible, then make predictions and see if you can prove or disprove. The Dyson Sphere idea itself is ridiculous, but to the extent you can detect large scale technology around a star, that would be fantastic. Even better, this is simply a query on existing data. Imagine if they detected intelligent life this way!
Kind of reminds me of the search for Dark Matter. That whole idea sounds so preposterous yet is the best fit for our current knowledge. But we can make predictions based on this. What could all this matter be to fit the theory while remaining undetected so far? Then you can build particle detectors to find them and particle accelerators to explore conditions for causing them. Eventually we should be able to either detect that matter or to rule out enough possibilities for another theory to better fit our knowledge
A Ringworld would be more likely than a Dyson sphere, the mass requirements are so much lower.
RTFA they are looking for swarms, rings, and other subtypes of Dyson Spheres.
I read the fucking article. What makes you fucking think I didn’t?
The fact that you just reiterated one of its points.
Huh. So commenting on the content of the article means it wasn’t read? That’s a really odd position to take.
Easy there cowboy
