I had the fortune of meeting professor Dyson at Harvard Square Cambridge. I was in my way to lectures on exoplanets by himself and Dr David Charbonneau. Prof Dyson was lost. I recognized him. Then we walked together and conversed as I took him to his lecture. He invited me to the front of the lecture hall to sit. It was fantastic. Afterward Charbonneau and I conversed for quite a while as well. Quite a day, interesting chats.
It was such a damned honor for him to be mentioned on an episode of Star Trek Next. Gen. Even if his idea was different than the one in the episode and even though someone else came up with the idea at an even earlier time its still damned awesome to be mentioned on that show. I want to meet LARRY NIVEN because I am also fascinated by RING WORLD. To be honest I think ring worlds are MORE realistic than Dyson's sphere. It would require less material, it would be possible to have day/night cycles (the inner ring) and you would not need the science fiction version of artificial gravity. The rotation would be centrifugal force which is just as good as gravity for people.
I've always wondered if it's because Dyson Spheres are *not* the ultimate power sources. I mean, it's huge and nonportable. Maybe it'll turn out that there is better more self-contained, portable sources of power.
The thing is that the power source already exists, with a gas tank that lasts billions of years. While a Dyson's sphere is unlikely, a swarm is very practical.
@@lennoxshepherd3905 As he said, you could refuel the sun and let it fuse heavy elements for you to get thousands of planets worth of resources. A swarm would be more practical to build, but the efficiency of a sphere.....
What effect would a Dyson swarm have on the outward pressure a star exerts on its surroundings? Is it like throwing pebbles into a river? Could blocking above a certain percentage of a star with a swarm have a negative impact on that outward pressure such that it would be undesirable for anyone to build a Dyson swarm above that percentage?
I’m sure they would be engineered to make use of nearly if 100 % of the energy. So the effect would be negligible as there is hardly any energy missfire to cause collateral etc.
@@MrPokerblot Our sun's solar wind pushing against the interstellar medium produces what we call the Heliosphere which may help protect our system from the nearby galactic environment. I believe the question is more about whether a dyson swarm would deteriorate the heliosphere and whether or not there's a point at which this has negative consequences.
@@anxez yes, I see the logic in what you say completely, beat in mind though I did say “nearly” and we are talking completely hypothetically and hypothetically speaking if we are talking about something that a thousand or more years in advance to oour own civilisation there is no way to know that power they have to harness energy.
@@Kenshkrix If a civilisation has the power and knowledge to extract energy from a star using a Dyson swarm. They sure as hell would know about how to also counter-engineer the means of dealing with this problem. One would assume 🤔…. Interesting thought though. Maybe this would be the points of location to build the swarm 🤔
Just finished listening to P.E. Rowe’s TH-cam short story about building a super telescope. It was fun experiencing your new video together this morning.
I start with considering that spacefaring Means orbital spin gravity GigaStructures. Multiplanetary is a red herring. We'll be multi-solar before we're multiplanetary in the sense of completely terraformed.This understanding helped focusing on sequentially learning how to build larger McNeil Cylinders. For sure Orbital Towers on Luna & Mars. Maybe Orbital Rings on Luna & Mars too. Settlements on both surfaces. Initial primary function is to locate, mine, refine resources to be lifted into orbit for use in construction on orbiting shipyards building fleets of orbiting spin gravity structures. The first gen spin gravity structures will be for the extended stays in orbit we need to learn how to live in space. We'll build fleets of them serviced with additional fleets of individual crewed rocket ships. Most spaceships would be manufactured in space & designed to never go to earth. We'd use a separate feet of reentry vehicles of various types. Use cargo Starships to ship up completed sections of spaceships to be assembled in space. We make the first few spin gravity orbital space stations, now, as we build the spacedocks. The Ships we use to go to Luna & Mars we assemble in space, Starship 2.0. They never pay a gravity tax. It'll take, with effort and planning, 20 years to create large fleets. To have a network of manufacturing orbiting spacedocks. Step by step get to a yearly construction run rate of smaller McNeil Cylinders in the 100s. These would be built so efficiently, so quickly, that we'll overbuild. We'll have ones that are sized to take generations to fill. We'll make them by the fleet. There're ways to build in McNeil Cylinders that give rise to a the ability to build, in what in earthly terms would seem like inhumane, density. They give access to continental sized habitats, placed in orbits, around our inner planets, various L-poins, in large void pockets in The Belt, and beyond. It'll take generations to fill up the ships we can make in the next 30 years. Maybe 100s. This, our first major excursion into Our Solar System, can take 1000 years and we'll number into astronomical digits. And we'll mask it all well too! The biggest threat we face from space aliens is from any generational fleets that happen by. Then it depends on their motivation. FTL civilizations, if there are any, must be able to create weapons that make ours seem silly. Completely at their mercy! As for Fermi. I'd say finding Sol & figuring out we're populated by intelligent beings, from another galaxy is small. Spotting our Phase 1 Spacefaring Culture using our level of sensors from within our galaxy isn't going to be a walk in the park either. Consider we're only just getting to be able to measure the most blunt of indicators as of yet. Fermi. My consideration of the dilemma went: Looking for radio waves? We've only been making ones able to leave the planet for less than 100 years. Given that it takes another 50 to figure out how to mask them, that's a 150 light years of an ever thinning, at 1/d2, radio waves- bubble. Given we've only been looking-listening for 100 years or so, there could be advanced spacefaring civilizations within that 150 lightyear bubble and we'd not know. There are some 15k Stars within that reach of us. Which is just a tiny bit of our galaxy here.
I think that most people don't realise that at the point in history that Fermi asked this question, a large number of people believed in an eternal universe, so Fermi's Paradox was much sharper and more problematic than is understood today. So with our updated models that we are just at the beginning of the history of the universe. So the absence of intelligence life at present is I don't think is as big a problem. Thanks for another thought-provoking video.
It is an enormous problem. We appear to be alone in the galaxy and perhaps alone in the universe. Why? Something is very flawed in our thinking about evolution, the cosmos, or both.
I don't know that 'beginning of history' is the correct term. Look at Hadrian epoch for Earth and before it, and the timeline of when bacterial life emerged. It was pretty fast seemingly, but the problem of a dataset of 1 is we don't know where we are compared to a mean in a larger set. Even [hypothetical] parallel universes (and Earths); how many took longer to start life, how many were faster, how many never had it take hold...or maybe even completely die off, only to start up again in 100mil years after the inhospitable environment stabilized. The issue for us is observational data: our observations inherently have a bias in time. That bias= the fact that something farther away is older, not how it is at present. Not that big an issue within maybe 10k-1mil ly; but going further beyond that and it hard to say that the situation is 'accurate'. REMEMBER: homo spp have only existed for approx 2mil years; biological humans for 200k or so. We've gotten were we are now in only 2mil years (as a genus) 200k (as a species). Same as the Earth developing life and observation bias when you have dataset of 1: even in parallel Earths could we have developed faster, slower. etc. 190k years of Homo sapiens history they were quite primitive minus some fire/stone tool use. No way to know when verbal language started (lost to time) but maybe we've been speaking for 20-30k years in complex language (so 20k pre Mesopotamia's oldest stuff), maybe 50k years in primitive verbal language forms. Just guesses, but I'd bet it was a while before written language took hold. Certainly it was AFTER the 2nd 'out of Africa' migration circa 120k bce, otherwise all the evidence wouldn't be pointing towards a area around the Russian steppe to India when you look at language evolution vs migrational/dna history. POINT: I'd sort of expect that there are a bit more optimal planets out there for life to develop...a bit less water (maybe 40-50% surface max), 75%-125% Earth Gravity, a little colder (colder > hotter) with temps maxing at 25-40c (50-70f) and maybe bottoming at -50 to -25c (-100 to -50f) regularly during winters outside tropical zones. Colder generally = slower metabolism == longer lifespans. While longer lived generations may initially mean slower evolution: I'd say it'd be important when complex, semi-intelligent life evolves. Lifespans regularly of 100-400yrs is preferrable from evolutionary standpoint to 15-75yrs on Earth (when looking at Chimps to elephants to humans to whales etc). It allows 'smarter' decision making, cause-effect pattern recognition needed to understand things like edible vs poison plants, good toolmaking vs not; ppl living longer to 'lead' building, research, experiments etc. I don't think a dyson sphere/swarm is going to be anything but a BWC structure...Why build 1 swarm when you can make 100s of millions of Oneils and other structures, full single-layer matrioska worlds around all your solar systems planets/moons (for extracting/using them), etc. IF you can build a dyson anything you can build actual planets; it means you can do whatever, and outside of digital civilization tendencies most would probably spread out at least a bit...maybe 100-1000 solar systems (which is microscopic compared to the 200bil in just our galaxy)
I think we keep thinking that our vision of what other civilizations look like isn't what we think. We put ourselves out there. We're looking for star trek types. We just don't know
I propose a hypothesis: Aliens never built a Dyson sphere because they couldn't agree on whether it'd count as fusion power or solar power and which grants would therefore apply
Government holding back infrastructure with bureaucracy is on-brand. Sounds very plausible indeed. I'm not even joking, people are just assuming we'll sort out those kinds of issues because "FUTURE!!!" but what if we never do? I mean, why would you work together with your whole species when you can instead go off into the middle of nowhere and have a high tech colony with billions of people just like you?
Can you imagine writing up an Environmental impact statement for a Dyson sphere around a star with an inhabited system? Actually, that might explain why we never see them... they lacked sufficient forest worlds to file the paperwork...
@@Enward834 They were called Vogons. I much preferred the ones from the TV series over the film. Even though its special effects were budget, it had a charm and atmosphere to it that I felt the film lacked. The radio series, books, TV series and films were all different. I have only heard some of the radio series, but should try to find it somewhere.
was viewing a james webb article about distant cradle of stars and one of the images of m74 shows an "empty" circle about 50 percent out from the center on the lower right hand side. It occurred to me that an expanding civilization that was creating dyson spheres would look like a hole in a galaxy, kind of like this one.
My theory is that there is one, their original, and we haven't seen it yet because there are 400 billion stars on this galaxy alone. They only built it because it's convenient to use it when you have it on your backyard. But after that, they didn't bother travelling ridiculous distances light years away for the other stars because they found how to create that energy themselves. The sun burns hydrogen and helium to create that energy, space between stars is composed of 70% hydrogen and 29% helium. So, if you know the formula, then you don't need to travel to get more. The ingredients are right outside your star and you will never ran out of those ingredients because the star is always moving. It's always about efficiency. We could mine for resources in Antartica or the depths of the ocean but we don't because it's not efficient. Travelling light years to get more energy isn't efficient either. People don't grasp how ridiculous that distance is. 4 years and a half just for light to reach? Just think about it. In one second, light travels the distance you would cover if you traveled around Earth 7.5 times. We wouldn't even be crowded here either. You can fit 32 earths in the distance between earth and the moon, and you can fit 43.000 moons between the sun and earth. From the sun to Neptune, you can fit 1.291.770 moons!! And that's only in a straight line, space is 3 dimensional. So, yeah, plenty of room. All colonies were made to supply the main settlement, and colonies can't be "light years away" for that reason. We will sends probes to study each star in the galaxy like we study now Antartica and the depths of the ocean, but we are not going there to mine Dysonpheres. It's just not efficient!
I am totally fascinated by almost inconceivably huge megastructures like RING WORLD (Larry Niven) and Dyson's Sphere and Alderson Disk. My absolute favorite Star Trek Next Gen. story RELICS had a DYSON'S SPHERE. Data said that it had approximately as much inhabitable living area as 250 million Class M Planets. I made some arbitrary assumptions: 1. I went with the 250 million even though it was probably an approximation, rare with that many zeroes to be exact. 2. I assumed that Data meant AVERAGE class M planet since they very in size. 3. I decided to count EARTH as the "average" class M planet since its all I have to go with. I am guessing that percentage wise Earth would only be a tiny bit bigger or smaller than average. 4. I decided to assume the same POPULATION DENSITY as Earth since its all I have to work with. 5. I assumed the people would be similar enough to Earth people to have the same basic needs for food, drink and other supplies. Then I did some FUN MATH. I calculated how much of certain supplies are needed on Earth each day then used my calculator to multiply that by 250 million. For example, I calculated that if there was a drink as popular to the inhabitants of that world as COKE COLA is on Earth that on an average day as much of that soda would need to be produced to satisfy that world's population would be greater than the amount of water in the GREAT LAKES bordering the state of Michigan. In only a few hours more coffee would need to be brewed world wide than could fill Lake Tahoe, which is the largest lake in 2 neighboring states as it crosses the state line between Nevada and California. Other bizarre things to think about are that an ocean the size of the pacific would be like a pond on that world and a city 100 times the size and population of New York City would be about as significant as the apartment complex I live in would seem on Earth. You might have a giant forest where the walk from one end to the other (a lot of trees) would be greater distance than the distance from Earth to moon.
"You might have a giant forest where the walk from one end to the other (a lot of trees) would be greater distance than the distance from Earth to moon." Having watched many Isaac Arthur videos, I, too, have considered what megastructures could be like, including such mind boggling concepts of forests, deserts and cities. However, I wonder whether, with so much space, especially with advanced transport and communications, if cities as we know them would just never be built? Also, they could have huge, very wide, very fast trains that never stop (apart for maintenance and, possibly, refueling), where one takes another train that gets up to speed in order to line up for boarding.
@@pineapplepenumbra I have another interesting statistic and the math was really easy to do. I read that the average person needs to drink half a gallon of water per day to be healthy. Our world has approx. 8 billion people so needs 4 billion gallons of drinking water per day. A world with a quarter billion times the population would need maybe 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of drinking water per day and about 365,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of drinking water per year. To say nothing of bathing or watering garden or cooking etc. in ONE YEAR they would need more water JUST FOR DRINKING, try to imagine this next time you drink a cup of water, than the total amount of water on Earth. All oceans, rivers, lakes ice caps etc. Imagine the oceans all being dried up just to produce drinking water (it would not work out that way obviously but that is what it averages out to). I liked your idea about giant trains. They also might have space ships that travel above the atmosphere but far enough from the sun in the center. Maybe if you needed to travel to a place several light minutes away they would just have teleport stations set up? You might be right about not needing big CITIES but damn, you could have a city comparable to Coruscant in Star Wars and in that world it would just be a dime a dozen type place. I wish there was more science fiction about Dyson's Spheres.
@@pineapplepenumbra I wish Isaac arthur would revisit his megastructure topic and talk about what life might be like in such a place. Years ago I made a vow never again to read a Star Trek novel because they are a huge disorganized mess of continuity (they actually contradict EACH OTHER, like the metaphor of too many cooks ruining the soup) and are not at all official canon. But I am considering reading the Star Trek Next Gen novel DYSON'S SPHERE where they go back to reexplore (I read the BACK COVER) and maybe even read the novelization of RELICS. I may need to make an EXCEPTION to my personal rule against reading Star Trek books.
@@Zurround "I wish there was more science fiction about Dyson's Spheres." I would like to write one, but can't think of an interesting plot where the location would be relevant. Some people like living in cities, so they may well still exist, but just with a lot more space for people*. Also, there might be different cities and regions where there are more of a different species of human, or even aliens of different types. * I was reading a Quora reply about how average ancient Romans lived, and someone said that they lived in Taipei, and it was going that way due to the ludicrously high rent/mortgage costs. Very few people had enough room even for a table, or full sized fridge, but just had mini fridges and a hotplate, so would go off to eat in public places, etc.
@@pineapplepenumbra Your comment about other SPECIES got me thinking. It has not YET happened on Earth (ever since the Neanderthals went extinct) but if you had a world that big the DNA would spread out so much that over time the people might evolve into different subspecies of human. If too much time went by 2 people who lived too far apart might not be able to have children together. I have heard that if we start colonizing other planets that it could cause speciation eventually. A strange thing to think about.
homestly, what would it take for us to make a genuinely liveable oneal cylinder? economically, politically (rip), resources, transportation, et cetera.
@@algorithmgeneratedanimegir1286 Sure, but that's a little vague. I see three funding possibilities: "Elysium" (haven for the rich, hardly the best choice but maybe a start), socialist-style government project (very unlikely), and housing for a lot of people already living in space.
Back of the napkin math says that if you want your Dyson swarm power stations 1000 km apart to avoid hindering each other with gravity and blocking each other's sunlight, it would take 1.8 billion Manhattan sized (10 by 2 miles) power plants powering a civilization around a sun-sized star, spread over 2000 circles, before the areas where all 2000 circles intersect (assuming you wouldn't invest in spreading those around), before it would cause a dip in visible light as big as an earth sized planet does (which we can't find easily in the data we have analyzed so far), with the extra thermal energy spread evenly and negligible to the star's own output. Plenty of space to hide for massive civilizations, and plenty of room for them to encounter drivers that would make adding more modules far less attractive than moving to other stars, where they again would be too faint to detect.
Applying the Copernican Principle, our technology (Kardachev Type 0.7) is average for a 13.8B year cosmogenesis. Therefore, it seems reasonable that distant galaxies may have Type 1 civilisations at the "present" proper time, mimicking our own development. However, we must realize that observing these distant galaxies also requires us viewing them in the distant past, well before the 13.8B-year epoch. Therefore it is unlikely we'll discover intelligent EM signatures from them, given their earlier perceived existence. It would take several more billion years from now for us to see a galaxy at its 13.8B-year epoch and observe Type 1 communication, much less Type 2 or 3.
Assuming we're not among the first intelligent life out there, looking for Dyson spheres is based on our ideas of maximum energy creation for an advanced civilization. But what if the true demand is raw materials, not energy or there are easier/cheaper ways of generating vast amounts of energy. In that case, I think the idea of Dyson Spheres is cool, but probably not practical for a sufficiently advanced civilization. Just a thought.
has anyone ever thought that maybe the reason why we don't see dyson spheres is bc its kinda overkill? like they probably only need a big enough device (like maybe a super high tech solar panel) to power their entire planet just enough for everyone to use and not have too much energy surplus
Neccesity is the mother of invention, knowlege the father. The Sentinalese are stoneage but have iron-tipped arrows. This argues happenstance is the attraction between the two
While some species and small pockets of humans may be content, humans overall are not that species. Humans have tried to explore or expand their territory every chance they get since the beginning of human history. Humans will never be content, they always want more, it's what has led to our worldwide success as a species
@@Cryptech1010 With a bit of luck we'll be off this rock soon. Once we are, nothing will stop us from becoming eternal. I really do not like having all of our eggs in one basket.
OK now that I fully understand what Isaac is saying I will be listening constantly. I admit I had trouble figuring out his way of talking, but his content outways any effort in the listening. Liked and subscribed 👍♥️
I think virtual worlds become so much more compelling & cost-effective/energy-efficient that civilizations haven't needed more than 15% of their stars' energy for their needs. That & spacefaring species are still very rare. There may be a max of 15% dip in one star's luminosity per 100,000 galaxies. Pretty darn hard to find & not likely to detect any signals from them or expect them to try to send any. The next 100 years are going to be a trip.
What about beaming your waste heat off in specific directions, using reflectors? Doesn't reduce the amount of waste heat, but does make it far less likely you'd be seen directly -- the same way we see far fewer blazars than quasars even though they're both the same thing, the only difference being that blazars are aimed directly at us. It's far less likely anyone would notice you, but if they do, they'll *really* notice.
@@electroflame6188 the motive is to reduce your likely hood of being seen. Stealth is a good defense. Even after they know you are there via gravity. A reflective shroud would limit their info during a strategic advance, and limit their ability to listen to your communications. Someone invading would definitely be listening to your broadcasts as they approach. To know your positioning, economy, tech, factions, beliefs,etc . Mainly you're doing it to deprive a potential enemy of as much information as possible it doesn't have to completely hide you to be an effective defense.
Once again, another great, informative, and thought provoking video. Thank you Isaac. My civilization is 100 thousand years old. We have built dozens of world spheres around stars and hundreds of ring worlds around some of the thousands of planets we've terraformed and settled over the past 15,000 years. At this point you would call our technology "Clark Tech". We are 55,000 light years away, on the other side of the galactic core. Could the above scenario be a reason for us not "seeing" anything yet?
No. Because 55,000 ly is close enough to have seen their dysons by now. It only takes 10,000 years to get a substantially complete dyson, starting with only Adam and Eve.
@@cosmictreason2242 light travels only so fast. My civilization is only 15000 years old. It would take 55000 years for the reflection of our structures to reach you. The civilization is 15000yrs old, not the spheres, they're probably less than a thousand years old. If we blew up a star 100 light years away you wouldn't know for 100 years. I build a megastructure in space you won't know I begun until long after I finished. It a rhetorical question to remind us if a civilization rose up we wouldn't know after the light from there reaches us.
@@theostickle2604 you said it was 100,000 years old but whatever. You're begging the question of why a civ would've arisen now rather than in the preceding ten billion years, when it didn't have the same conditions as us. That's a major statistical problem with the paradox that Isaac has addressed before
@@cosmictreason2242 yes, you are right. The civilization is 100,000 years old (so is ours). They've been colonizing and building mega structures over the past 15,000 years. They are 55,000 light years away. At that distance, if they cities like ours, 20,000 years older then ours, we wouldn't know. That light is still traveling toward us. We started building maga structures only 15,000 years age, those light frequencies are still traveling toward us. When Beetlejuice explodes we won't know about it for decades.
A while back - when you posted your voids thing, I had a question: This relates to the 5th part- Let's assume the Bootes Void is full of galaxies like normal space. I'm not arguing that, just assuming for the thought not the arguement. Let's say that region is full of "Black Galaxies" covered with Dyson Swarms and only they maybe didn't yet get to the 60-ish galaxies in it where there should be millions or at least thousands of them? Light passing through it IS dimmed I've read a few places... Q1 - How much energy could they get? Q2 - What could they do with that much energy?
I am thinking an ideal place to situate a Dyson Swarm is at the gravitational-lense volumes. There colonies can watch the rest of the universe, interact with transient dark objects, and eventually rub up against extra solar Oort Clouds and colonize them.
Honestly aliens are probably living in the centers of galaxies surrounded by black holes living forever by perpetually slowing down their perception of time. Those huge black holes in the centers of galaxy are just fuel tanks
With 99.8% of the total mass of the solar system locked up in the sun,with the .2% left is it possible to have enough mass to make a Dyson Swarm/ Sphere without farming other solar systems and farming the sun? Even if it was flattened to an atom thickness? Is there any math that you can suggest to figure this out?
At 5:09 this video shows what it calls black body emission curves of the sun and earth on the right side of the frame. Those are clearly not BB curves and look more like Gaussians. Apparently correct BB curves are shown on the left side of the frame, and the ones on the right are not BB curves.
Thats like ants looking for giant ant hills to confirm greater intelligence, not seeing them and deciding that means there is no further intelligence apart from ants.
The amount of time and raw materials required to make a Dyson Sphere basically rules out any realistic possibilities of them existing. The concept is nothing more than human sci-fi.
Nonsense. You can build a satellite and put it in orbit around sun. Now build a trillion. Takes less than 10,000 years. Once you get starlifting it'll go super fast
Alien civilization: We wanted to harvest energy from our sun, so we ordered a Dyson sphere. It didn't work, but now our planet is dust-free and there's a nice breeze blowing all the time. But what's that annoying noise?
I agree with the explanation that we're looking for life in a drop of water within an ocean. Our observable universe is preposterously large to us, but a grain of sand in an endless desert
Am I the only one who noticed the music cut off qhen Issac was talking about "life anywhere?" I'd find a timestamp but youtube/my phone are weird about that.
@@calvingreene90The chaos of having so very many satellites (that are also solar sails), orbiting fairly close to a star? Inevitable fluctuations in the brightness and solar wind of the star would be a massive nuisance. It should be possible to make satellites that can correct for all this automatically and keep themselves stable for a very long time. But at some point, they will need reaction mass, or radiation will break an essential electronic component, or they will get hit by a piece of debris, etc. Then it will need repair or it will eventually cause a Kessler syndrome - even if that takes millions of years, we are talking in millions and billions of years on this topic. And having an automated repair fleet means that fleet still has the same issues as the first, so it's really not a solution. You need living intelligence (in any form including true AGI) to manage something like that I think - which is also something that can fail given enough time. Basically it's the enormous length of the time scales we're facing, imo.
@@DaFinkingOrk And to top it all of, it really isn't the "ultimate power source." You could get all the power you need through a plethora of more time efficient means.
@@DaFinkingOrk Why would a large number of satelites automatically lead to an unsustainable chaos? You build as many satelites as you can safely control per orbit. Said orbit can be as far out as earth itself, and whenever youfill up one orbit, you go in or out a couple hundred thousand miles for the next orbit. We know that objects can remain in a stable orbit without needing propellant for very, very long times, just look at earht, pluto, the comets, the objects in the oort cloud, what have you. Even if you do need to maneuver somewhat, large "sails" would be a plus, not a detriment. One could imagine doing something similar to the ISS, using the extra surface to literally sail the solar winds for small adjustments. Even if you have to stack the rings out with light minutes distances between one another to keep them safe, doesn't really matter, does it? You just do this for long enough, you will collect all the energy of the star no matter how far out you are or how low the satelite density is. Micrometeorites does ot seem to be an unsolveable problem either, unless you are somehow opposed to giving your repairfleet a couple of anti-asteroid lasers. Which, granted, might be the sticking point. ^.^
What about K1.5? You know, an AI civilization where the AIs reside in the Oort cloud around their home star, making their Oort cloud radiate IR and dumping their waste into their star, like what seem to happen around Przybylski's Star?
What about massive photon-doubling (heat into dust-absorbing light) or photon-halving (heat into AM radio, or is that quartering?)? We know ways to convert light into more energy intense light. In each case, the goal wouldn't be direct masking, but taking advantage of the properties of the environment to provide the masking. Thus the evidence would then be warm dusty areas or warm spots in voids. Yes, these radiate heat, but that's "generate low frequency waste from upshifting most of the energy". If you start with heat frequencies that easily penetrate dust, will your waste necessarily be the same frequency that you are collecting to upshift or downshift? (Apparently photon doubling is second-harmonic generation, and used for green lasers. And photon halving is "half-harmonic generation", and has been proven for "infra-red combs".)
Thermal energy cant escape a blackhole right?what about reverse hawkins radiation? If hr is based on entanglement could it not be used in reverse to move thermal energy into a singularity?
A thing that has bugged me for a long time is the heat "problem." If heat is defined as energy that can't be used for powering something, then wouldn't being able to use energy we can't currently use be a way to prevent heat from escaping the system? One example of turning heat into energy is recent advancements in solar panel wavelength capture, since some panels can now use infrared radiation to generate power. Granted, this just pushes the heat down the line, but why is the assumption that eventually heat *must* be part of the equation?
The emission of waste heat is a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics. Every time you convert one form of energy into another, you lose some of it as heat, which in turn increases the entropy of the universe.
Maybe civilizations that build one dyson sphere dont build another because it would be dificult to keep an interstelar empire, the distance betwen stars is too big. Civilizations are likely rare to begin with, so if a dyson sphere exists, it likely is in another galaxy and we cant spot it.
If im not mistaken wouldnt a dyson sphere be a mega of mega super structures. Wouldnt a dyson sphere require the mass of an entire planet. And not a small one either.
I think future technology would make Dyson's less practical or not needed. I mean, we are still babies compared to the theorized C3 civo's. Maybe technology that allows tapping a stars power from within it like a weird wormhole tech or something, something dark side.
what if any civilization which overcomes gravity also overcomes causality, so any observations we make about ancient light, might not actually fit the original reality but then we're in the realm of magic.
What if civilizations eventually start reflecting all of their waste heat into stellar mass black holes? Not necessarily even as a matter of stealth but of trying to remain compact without cooking themselves?
If we could orbit the sun faster than orbital velocity; we would only need a part of a Dyson Sphere to orbit the enclosed sun at 99% of the speed of light....
I would think even an alien civilization big enough to observe would be one in a million as it seems most civilizations would be small and confined to their home world and limited near surface orbiters .
I think the resource outlay to harness the full power of a star by surrounding it in solar panels is a waste of time . If an alien race has the ability to do such a thing they’d have the ability to create fusion energy themselves and therefore wouldn’t need to build a Dyson sphere .
I assume that life that moves is less successful than life that doesn't, like fungi or plants. I also assume that we are in an age similar to the first few billion years on earth in the universe, pre-cambrian with our movement life being the most technologically advanced life that currently exists in our home galaxy. I assume this because I know ecosystems need a balance of cycles to propagate into more complex organisms to extract energy from its environment. So in my book life needs cycles of "non-extreme" variables that they can extract energy from without crowding up their environment with waste. Non-extreme not meaning crazy environments but meaning a stable cycle that doesn't change majorly in it's consistency over billions of years. With all this in mind a mark of life in the universe to me would be any system that remains undisturbed by extreme activity outside of their system, like meteor impacts, star deaths, rapid changes in radiation and atmospheric compositions. An example would be the gas giants, they have a consistent atmosphere, cycles of temperatures and cycles of seasons with consistent gravity, orbit, radiation exposure, and atmospheric composition. A fungi that grew up in that environment would eventually consume and convert the planet instead of building a Dyson sphere. I believe looking for a Dyson sphere isn't the way that life would be spreading across the universe, it would be fungal expansion. A good thing to start looking for instead of Dyson spheres for life is samples from astroid belts. If we find dormant micro organisms or evidence of micro organisms in the floating rock from planets we could identify good systems for life. We wouldn't find technologically advanced life in space because our kind of life isn't practical in most parts of the universe. We notice that our estimates of life like ours in the universe should be 1 in a couple of billion. While we know the galaxy is HUGE and there should be at least millions of civilizations according to these numbers with our estimations of stars that could support our life, it's simply not the case that we have many places we could call home for billions of years, or that a predatory farming species like ours would be able to sustain itself for more than a million years since we only have evidence for a tenth of that time with only minor ecosystem extinction events, compared to planetary extinction events like moons crashing into a planet or the orbit changing due to exterior gravity like black holes that our system could pass by. All in all the best place to look would be a star system out of the path of black holes at the edge of a galaxy with the least amount of rapid change over a billion years. Even rouge planets could host life with it's consistent gravity of it's planet and consistent temperature. Nothing would evolve eyes but anything that could convert the natural resources on the planet despite the cold temperatures of space would thrive without competition for millions of years until it consumed the planet, then it'd just be a giant converted mass of rust, while this slow process of converting mass to energy to waste would cause other mutations to deal with the waste and eventually you'd have a large fungal/bacterial mass floating through space eating each other until it forms its own consistency and ecosystem, eventually naturally forming into a giant intelligence of specialized organs spanning the width of the planet. So we should be looking for infrared signatures from things we think are dead but with a consistency that would last millions/billions of years. Cause humans and any life like us wouldn't last that long, and that's why we don't see aliens with space travel, because life in the universe is always facing constant adversity and hostility from outside their natural environment.
Would it be possible and pragmatic to transport solar ammounts of energy over interstellar distances, like some sort of interstellar dyson-powered power grid?
What if we have already discovered dicensed swarms And we don't even know it. For example, there are blotches of the sky (seen through telescopes like HobelI), which appear dark and even void of any light. What if those dark spots are Dyson swarms???
No, when you remove the heavier elements from the sun it's mass shrinks. You would have to constantly feed lighter elements in to maintain the reaction and you would run out eventually.
There's no scenario where this actually gets developed. If it were true, that would require a space travel economy & lots of development....and we'd see ships criss crissing our deep space pictures.
Technically, a Dyson Swarm wouldn't be capturing all of a star's energy - some of it would leak through the gaps. So a Dyson Swarm civilization would be Kardashev 1.8 or 1.9., not Kardashev 2.
I do not want a Dyson Sphere I want someting like the "Starforge" from Kotor. The Space Station do not run on solar pannel. They "pump" the solar energy like molten magma trough a long needle of Klark Tech magic.
We almost have cold fusion figured already; we certainly will in a thousand years if nothing goes wrong. A Dyson sphere is a very very expensive, difficult, and either distant (if built in another system) or disruptive (if built locally) way to collect fusion based energy.
Even with cold fusion, stars are still a resource to be used, either by collecting the energy radiated away, or by taking it apart, either of which would require a Dyson sphere or swarm, or some other megastructure that could be detected at a distance.
But do we realy want to find them? There are two options for why we seem to be alone. We are either "chosen ones". The first seeds of inteligent life in The universe (impossible) Or something very bad is There lurking in The shadows. It is impossible that all life simply blew itself apart. Some of it survived And is equally terryfied as we are.
I had the fortune of meeting professor Dyson at Harvard Square Cambridge. I was in my way to lectures on exoplanets by himself and Dr David Charbonneau. Prof Dyson was lost. I recognized him. Then we walked together and conversed as I took him to his lecture. He invited me to the front of the lecture hall to sit. It was fantastic. Afterward Charbonneau and I conversed for quite a while as well. Quite a day, interesting chats.
It was such a damned honor for him to be mentioned on an episode of Star Trek Next. Gen. Even if his idea was different than the one in the episode and even though someone else came up with the idea at an even earlier time its still damned awesome to be mentioned on that show.
I want to meet LARRY NIVEN because I am also fascinated by RING WORLD. To be honest I think ring worlds are MORE realistic than Dyson's sphere. It would require less material, it would be possible to have day/night cycles (the inner ring) and you would not need the science fiction version of artificial gravity. The rotation would be centrifugal force which is just as good as gravity for people.
I never had bedtime stories as a kid... As a 30 year old man you're my hero. Thanks for being you Isaac!
This isn't totally creepy or anything
@@pyropulseIXXI Yeah the phrasing is a little off :D
@@Rabbi_Weasel Not at all, I think it's sweet
As a 30 year old myself , I can confirm .
I’m 46 and feel the same
I've always wondered if it's because Dyson Spheres are *not* the ultimate power sources. I mean, it's huge and nonportable. Maybe it'll turn out that there is better more self-contained, portable sources of power.
The thing is that the power source already exists, with a gas tank that lasts billions of years.
While a Dyson's sphere is unlikely, a swarm is very practical.
would you even need them to be portable?
I agree. Concept of a Dyson sphere/swarm is like looking on pictures how people of Victorian era were imagining life in the year 2000.
@@lennoxshepherd3905
As he said, you could refuel the sun and let it fuse heavy elements for you to get thousands of planets worth of resources.
A swarm would be more practical to build, but the efficiency of a sphere.....
Vacuum state batteries...
20:47 i never thought of things like that, man this opens my eyes to slot of how the universe really is, a bunch of hot matter, mostly plasma
What effect would a Dyson swarm have on the outward pressure a star exerts on its surroundings? Is it like throwing pebbles into a river? Could blocking above a certain percentage of a star with a swarm have a negative impact on that outward pressure such that it would be undesirable for anyone to build a Dyson swarm above that percentage?
I’m sure they would be engineered to make use of nearly if 100 % of the energy. So the effect would be negligible as there is hardly any energy missfire to cause collateral etc.
@@MrPokerblot 100% efficient light power is more mystical than a greater power source existing honestly
@@MrPokerblot Our sun's solar wind pushing against the interstellar medium produces what we call the Heliosphere which may help protect our system from the nearby galactic environment.
I believe the question is more about whether a dyson swarm would deteriorate the heliosphere and whether or not there's a point at which this has negative consequences.
@@anxez yes, I see the logic in what you say completely, beat in mind though I did say “nearly” and we are talking completely hypothetically and hypothetically speaking if we are talking about something that a thousand or more years in advance to oour own civilisation there is no way to know that power they have to harness energy.
@@Kenshkrix If a civilisation has the power and knowledge to extract energy from a star using a Dyson swarm. They sure as hell would know about how to also counter-engineer the means of dealing with this problem. One would assume 🤔…. Interesting thought though. Maybe this would be the points of location to build the swarm 🤔
I’m always down for more Fermi paradox videos!
We were in Tel'Afar together, I was running that big satellite dish by the RTOC. Been watching you for awhile now, well done!
Good to remake your acquaintance :)
Just in time for bed! No better way to relax into sleep than with cool futurism :)
Just finished listening to P.E. Rowe’s TH-cam short story about building a super telescope. It was fun experiencing your new video together this morning.
I start with considering that spacefaring Means orbital spin gravity GigaStructures. Multiplanetary is a red herring. We'll be multi-solar before we're multiplanetary in the sense of completely terraformed.This understanding helped focusing on sequentially learning how to build larger McNeil Cylinders. For sure Orbital Towers on Luna & Mars. Maybe Orbital Rings on Luna & Mars too. Settlements on both surfaces. Initial primary function is to locate, mine, refine resources to be lifted into orbit for use in construction on orbiting shipyards building fleets of orbiting spin gravity structures.
The first gen spin gravity structures will be for the extended stays in orbit we need to learn how to live in space. We'll build fleets of them serviced with additional fleets of individual crewed rocket ships. Most spaceships would be manufactured in space & designed to never go to earth. We'd use a separate feet of reentry vehicles of various types. Use cargo Starships to ship up completed sections of spaceships to be assembled in space.
We make the first few spin gravity orbital space stations, now, as we build the spacedocks. The Ships we use to go to Luna & Mars we assemble in space, Starship 2.0. They never pay a gravity tax.
It'll take, with effort and planning, 20 years to create large fleets. To have a network of manufacturing orbiting spacedocks. Step by step get to a yearly construction run rate of smaller McNeil Cylinders in the 100s. These would be built so efficiently, so quickly, that we'll overbuild. We'll have ones that are sized to take generations to fill. We'll make them by the fleet.
There're ways to build in McNeil Cylinders that give rise to a the ability to build, in what in earthly terms would seem like inhumane, density. They give access to continental sized habitats, placed in orbits, around our inner planets, various L-poins, in large void pockets in The Belt, and beyond. It'll take generations to fill up the ships we can make in the next 30 years. Maybe 100s. This, our first major excursion into Our Solar System, can take 1000 years and we'll number into astronomical digits.
And we'll mask it all well too! The biggest threat we face from space aliens is from any generational fleets that happen by. Then it depends on their motivation. FTL civilizations, if there are any, must be able to create weapons that make ours seem silly. Completely at their mercy!
As for Fermi.
I'd say finding Sol & figuring out we're populated by intelligent beings, from another galaxy is small. Spotting our Phase 1 Spacefaring Culture using our level of sensors from within our galaxy isn't going to be a walk in the park either. Consider we're only just getting to be able to measure the most blunt of indicators as of yet.
Fermi. My consideration of the dilemma went: Looking for radio waves? We've only been making ones able to leave the planet for less than 100 years. Given that it takes another 50 to figure out how to mask them, that's a 150 light years of an ever thinning, at 1/d2, radio waves- bubble. Given we've only been looking-listening for 100 years or so, there could be advanced spacefaring civilizations within that 150 lightyear bubble and we'd not know. There are some 15k Stars within that reach of us. Which is just a tiny bit of our galaxy here.
I think that most people don't realise that at the point in history that Fermi asked this question, a large number of people believed in an eternal universe, so Fermi's Paradox was much sharper and more problematic than is understood today. So with our updated models that we are just at the beginning of the history of the universe. So the absence of intelligence life at present is I don't think is as big a problem. Thanks for another thought-provoking video.
It is an enormous problem. We appear to be alone in the galaxy and perhaps alone in the universe. Why? Something is very flawed in our thinking about evolution, the cosmos, or both.
I don't know that 'beginning of history' is the correct term.
Look at Hadrian epoch for Earth and before it, and the timeline of when bacterial life emerged. It was pretty fast seemingly, but the problem of a dataset of 1 is we don't know where we are compared to a mean in a larger set.
Even [hypothetical] parallel universes (and Earths); how many took longer to start life, how many were faster, how many never had it take hold...or maybe even completely die off, only to start up again in 100mil years after the inhospitable environment stabilized.
The issue for us is observational data: our observations inherently have a bias in time. That bias= the fact that something farther away is older, not how it is at present. Not that big an issue within maybe 10k-1mil ly; but going further beyond that and it hard to say that the situation is 'accurate'.
REMEMBER: homo spp have only existed for approx 2mil years; biological humans for 200k or so. We've gotten were we are now in only 2mil years (as a genus) 200k (as a species). Same as the Earth developing life and observation bias when you have dataset of 1: even in parallel Earths could we have developed faster, slower. etc.
190k years of Homo sapiens history they were quite primitive minus some fire/stone tool use. No way to know when verbal language started (lost to time) but maybe we've been speaking for 20-30k years in complex language (so 20k pre Mesopotamia's oldest stuff), maybe 50k years in primitive verbal language forms. Just guesses, but I'd bet it was a while before written language took hold. Certainly it was AFTER the 2nd 'out of Africa' migration circa 120k bce, otherwise all the evidence wouldn't be pointing towards a area around the Russian steppe to India when you look at language evolution vs migrational/dna history.
POINT: I'd sort of expect that there are a bit more optimal planets out there for life to develop...a bit less water (maybe 40-50% surface max), 75%-125% Earth Gravity, a little colder (colder > hotter) with temps maxing at 25-40c (50-70f) and maybe bottoming at -50 to -25c (-100 to -50f) regularly during winters outside tropical zones.
Colder generally = slower metabolism == longer lifespans. While longer lived generations may initially mean slower evolution: I'd say it'd be important when complex, semi-intelligent life evolves. Lifespans regularly of 100-400yrs is preferrable from evolutionary standpoint to 15-75yrs on Earth (when looking at Chimps to elephants to humans to whales etc). It allows 'smarter' decision making, cause-effect pattern recognition needed to understand things like edible vs poison plants, good toolmaking vs not; ppl living longer to 'lead' building, research, experiments etc.
I don't think a dyson sphere/swarm is going to be anything but a BWC structure...Why build 1 swarm when you can make 100s of millions of Oneils and other structures, full single-layer matrioska worlds around all your solar systems planets/moons (for extracting/using them), etc. IF you can build a dyson anything you can build actual planets; it means you can do whatever, and outside of digital civilization tendencies most would probably spread out at least a bit...maybe 100-1000 solar systems (which is microscopic compared to the 200bil in just our galaxy)
I think we keep thinking that our vision of what other civilizations look like isn't what we think. We put ourselves out there. We're looking for star trek types. We just don't know
We are late. Not early.
@@letoiiatryda Isaac already explained why Dark Forest is unrealistic tbh
Always enjoy your show, as you always seem to address all of my misconceptions on whatever subject you happen to be talking about.
Thanks Lonnie!
@@isaacarthurSFIA brilliant work you do Isaac - thank you
I propose a hypothesis: Aliens never built a Dyson sphere because they couldn't agree on whether it'd count as fusion power or solar power and which grants would therefore apply
Government holding back infrastructure with bureaucracy is on-brand. Sounds very plausible indeed. I'm not even joking, people are just assuming we'll sort out those kinds of issues because "FUTURE!!!" but what if we never do? I mean, why would you work together with your whole species when you can instead go off into the middle of nowhere and have a high tech colony with billions of people just like you?
Pretty funny lol. What were the burocratic alien from hitch hickers guide called? I picture that lol
Can you imagine writing up an Environmental impact statement for a Dyson sphere around a star with an inhabited system? Actually, that might explain why we never see them... they lacked sufficient forest worlds to file the paperwork...
@@Enward834 They were called Vogons.
I much preferred the ones from the TV series over the film. Even though its special effects were budget, it had a charm and atmosphere to it that I felt the film lacked.
The radio series, books, TV series and films were all different. I have only heard some of the radio series, but should try to find it somewhere.
was viewing a james webb article about distant cradle of stars and one of the images of m74 shows an "empty" circle about 50 percent out from the center on the lower right hand side. It occurred to me that an expanding civilization that was creating dyson spheres would look like a hole in a galaxy, kind of like this one.
My love language is Arthur Isaac telling me to grab a drink and a snack for long videos and he didn't say that today I'm so sad 😭
oh algorithm gods! hear your servants' plea and spread this video!
My theory is that there is one, their original, and we haven't seen it yet because there are 400 billion stars on this galaxy alone. They only built it because it's convenient to use it when you have it on your backyard. But after that, they didn't bother travelling ridiculous distances light years away for the other stars because they found how to create that energy themselves. The sun burns hydrogen and helium to create that energy, space between stars is composed of 70% hydrogen and 29% helium. So, if you know the formula, then you don't need to travel to get more. The ingredients are right outside your star and you will never ran out of those ingredients because the star is always moving.
It's always about efficiency. We could mine for resources in Antartica or the depths of the ocean but we don't because it's not efficient. Travelling light years to get more energy isn't efficient either. People don't grasp how ridiculous that distance is. 4 years and a half just for light to reach? Just think about it. In one second, light travels the distance you would cover if you traveled around Earth 7.5 times. We wouldn't even be crowded here either. You can fit 32 earths in the distance between earth and the moon, and you can fit 43.000 moons between the sun and earth. From the sun to Neptune, you can fit 1.291.770 moons!! And that's only in a straight line, space is 3 dimensional. So, yeah, plenty of room. All colonies were made to supply the main settlement, and colonies can't be "light years away" for that reason. We will sends probes to study each star in the galaxy like we study now Antartica and the depths of the ocean, but we are not going there to mine Dysonpheres. It's just not efficient!
Happy Arthursday, science enthusiasts.
I am totally fascinated by almost inconceivably huge megastructures like RING WORLD (Larry Niven) and Dyson's Sphere and Alderson Disk. My absolute favorite Star Trek Next Gen. story RELICS had a DYSON'S SPHERE.
Data said that it had approximately as much inhabitable living area as 250 million Class M Planets. I made some arbitrary assumptions:
1. I went with the 250 million even though it was probably an approximation, rare with that many zeroes to be exact.
2. I assumed that Data meant AVERAGE class M planet since they very in size.
3. I decided to count EARTH as the "average" class M planet since its all I have to go with. I am guessing that percentage wise Earth would only be a tiny bit bigger or smaller than average.
4. I decided to assume the same POPULATION DENSITY as Earth since its all I have to work with.
5. I assumed the people would be similar enough to Earth people to have the same basic needs for food, drink and other supplies.
Then I did some FUN MATH. I calculated how much of certain supplies are needed on Earth each day then used my calculator to multiply that by 250 million.
For example, I calculated that if there was a drink as popular to the inhabitants of that world as COKE COLA is on Earth that on an average day as much of that soda would need to be produced to satisfy that world's population would be greater than the amount of water in the GREAT LAKES bordering the state of Michigan.
In only a few hours more coffee would need to be brewed world wide than could fill Lake Tahoe, which is the largest lake in 2 neighboring states as it crosses the state line between Nevada and California.
Other bizarre things to think about are that an ocean the size of the pacific would be like a pond on that world and a city 100 times the size and population of New York City would be about as significant as the apartment complex I live in would seem on Earth.
You might have a giant forest where the walk from one end to the other (a lot of trees) would be greater distance than the distance from Earth to moon.
"You might have a giant forest where the walk from one end to the other (a lot of trees) would be greater distance than the distance from Earth to moon."
Having watched many Isaac Arthur videos, I, too, have considered what megastructures could be like, including such mind boggling concepts of forests, deserts and cities.
However, I wonder whether, with so much space, especially with advanced transport and communications, if cities as we know them would just never be built?
Also, they could have huge, very wide, very fast trains that never stop (apart for maintenance and, possibly, refueling), where one takes another train that gets up to speed in order to line up for boarding.
@@pineapplepenumbra I have another interesting statistic and the math was really easy to do. I read that the average person needs to drink half a gallon of water per day to be healthy. Our world has approx. 8 billion people so needs 4 billion gallons of drinking water per day. A world with a quarter billion times the population would need maybe 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of drinking water per day and about 365,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of drinking water per year. To say nothing of bathing or watering garden or cooking etc. in ONE YEAR they would need more water JUST FOR DRINKING, try to imagine this next time you drink a cup of water, than the total amount of water on Earth. All oceans, rivers, lakes ice caps etc. Imagine the oceans all being dried up just to produce drinking water (it would not work out that way obviously but that is what it averages out to).
I liked your idea about giant trains. They also might have space ships that travel above the atmosphere but far enough from the sun in the center. Maybe if you needed to travel to a place several light minutes away they would just have teleport stations set up?
You might be right about not needing big CITIES but damn, you could have a city comparable to Coruscant in Star Wars and in that world it would just be a dime a dozen type place. I wish there was more science fiction about Dyson's Spheres.
@@pineapplepenumbra I wish Isaac arthur would revisit his megastructure topic and talk about what life might be like in such a place. Years ago I made a vow never again to read a Star Trek novel because they are a huge disorganized mess of continuity (they actually contradict EACH OTHER, like the metaphor of too many cooks ruining the soup) and are not at all official canon. But I am considering reading the Star Trek Next Gen novel DYSON'S SPHERE where they go back to reexplore (I read the BACK COVER) and maybe even read the novelization of RELICS. I may need to make an EXCEPTION to my personal rule against reading Star Trek books.
@@Zurround "I wish there was more science fiction about Dyson's Spheres."
I would like to write one, but can't think of an interesting plot where the location would be relevant.
Some people like living in cities, so they may well still exist, but just with a lot more space for people*. Also, there might be different cities and regions where there are more of a different species of human, or even aliens of different types.
* I was reading a Quora reply about how average ancient Romans lived, and someone said that they lived in Taipei, and it was going that way due to the ludicrously high rent/mortgage costs. Very few people had enough room even for a table, or full sized fridge, but just had mini fridges and a hotplate, so would go off to eat in public places, etc.
@@pineapplepenumbra Your comment about other SPECIES got me thinking. It has not YET happened on Earth (ever since the Neanderthals went extinct) but if you had a world that big the DNA would spread out so much that over time the people might evolve into different subspecies of human. If too much time went by 2 people who lived too far apart might not be able to have children together. I have heard that if we start colonizing other planets that it could cause speciation eventually. A strange thing to think about.
homestly, what would it take for us to make a genuinely liveable oneal cylinder? economically, politically (rip), resources, transportation, et cetera.
A generation or so experience building smaller spinning space stations, plus a major economic incentive.
@@robertmiller9735 Land.
@@algorithmgeneratedanimegir1286 Sure, but that's a little vague. I see three funding possibilities: "Elysium" (haven for the rich, hardly the best choice but maybe a start), socialist-style government project (very unlikely), and housing for a lot of people already living in space.
Always excellent, and a reasonable conclusion: If the universe looks empty it's because it probably is... but that's not a reason to stop looking.
I really like you voice Arthur
The Heechee books by Poul Anderson and the Inhibitor books by Alaistair Reynolds have some fun takes on these ideas.
Back of the napkin math says that if you want your Dyson swarm power stations 1000 km apart to avoid hindering each other with gravity and blocking each other's sunlight, it would take 1.8 billion Manhattan sized (10 by 2 miles) power plants powering a civilization around a sun-sized star, spread over 2000 circles, before the areas where all 2000 circles intersect (assuming you wouldn't invest in spreading those around), before it would cause a dip in visible light as big as an earth sized planet does (which we can't find easily in the data we have analyzed so far), with the extra thermal energy spread evenly and negligible to the star's own output. Plenty of space to hide for massive civilizations, and plenty of room for them to encounter drivers that would make adding more modules far less attractive than moving to other stars, where they again would be too faint to detect.
A return to classic SFIA
I love paradox videos 🥴🤤
Applying the Copernican Principle, our technology (Kardachev Type 0.7) is average for a 13.8B year cosmogenesis. Therefore, it seems reasonable that distant galaxies may have Type 1 civilisations at the "present" proper time, mimicking our own development. However, we must realize that observing these distant galaxies also requires us viewing them in the distant past, well before the 13.8B-year epoch. Therefore it is unlikely we'll discover intelligent EM signatures from them, given their earlier perceived existence. It would take several more billion years from now for us to see a galaxy at its 13.8B-year epoch and observe Type 1 communication, much less Type 2 or 3.
When Isaac Arthur sais "Grab a drink and a snack". It is code language for grab a noteblock and a pen.😉
"there is no intelligence. None" it sounded personal
Assuming we're not among the first intelligent life out there, looking for Dyson spheres is based on our ideas of maximum energy creation for an advanced civilization. But what if the true demand is raw materials, not energy or there are easier/cheaper ways of generating vast amounts of energy.
In that case, I think the idea of Dyson Spheres is cool, but probably not practical for a sufficiently advanced civilization. Just a thought.
has anyone ever thought that maybe the reason why we don't see dyson spheres is bc its kinda overkill? like they probably only need a big enough device (like maybe a super high tech solar panel) to power their entire planet just enough for everyone to use and not have too much energy surplus
Its very low tech yes😂
Its very desperate
Can’t wait until we have to name a star Eru Illuvatar
Maybe it's just rare for intelligent species to reach for the stars, the people still in the rainforest seem pretty content.
Neccesity is the mother of invention, knowlege the father. The Sentinalese are stoneage but have iron-tipped arrows. This argues happenstance is the attraction between the two
While some species and small pockets of humans may be content, humans overall are not that species. Humans have tried to explore or expand their territory every chance they get since the beginning of human history. Humans will never be content, they always want more, it's what has led to our worldwide success as a species
@@Cryptech1010 With a bit of luck we'll be off this rock soon. Once we are, nothing will stop us from becoming eternal. I really do not like having all of our eggs in one basket.
Good point
@@Cryptech1010 awesome
OK now that I fully understand what Isaac is saying I will be listening constantly. I admit I had trouble figuring out his way of talking, but his content outways any effort in the listening. Liked and subscribed 👍♥️
I think virtual worlds become so much more compelling & cost-effective/energy-efficient that civilizations haven't needed more than 15% of their stars' energy for their needs. That & spacefaring species are still very rare. There may be a max of 15% dip in one star's luminosity per 100,000 galaxies. Pretty darn hard to find & not likely to detect any signals from them or expect them to try to send any.
The next 100 years are going to be a trip.
Finally the old Isaac Arthur worth watching.
I like how sound reasoning and loginc is trampled by - "electric engine is lame, gasoline engine go wruumm-wrummm and thats why it better!")))
What about beaming your waste heat off in specific directions, using reflectors? Doesn't reduce the amount of waste heat, but does make it far less likely you'd be seen directly -- the same way we see far fewer blazars than quasars even though they're both the same thing, the only difference being that blazars are aimed directly at us. It's far less likely anyone would notice you, but if they do, they'll *really* notice.
similar thought or transfer energy via quantum entaglement or something
Ok, but why would you bother doing that?
@@electroflame6188 - Good question. I was only thinking how it could be done, not why. Maybe they're shy?
@@electroflame6188 the motive is to reduce your likely hood of being seen. Stealth is a good defense. Even after they know you are there via gravity. A reflective shroud would limit their info during a strategic advance, and limit their ability to listen to your communications. Someone invading would definitely be listening to your broadcasts as they approach. To know your positioning, economy, tech, factions, beliefs,etc . Mainly you're doing it to deprive a potential enemy of as much information as possible it doesn't have to completely hide you to be an effective defense.
Once again, another great, informative, and thought provoking video. Thank you Isaac.
My civilization is 100 thousand years old. We have built dozens of world spheres around stars and hundreds of ring worlds around some of the thousands of planets we've terraformed and settled over the past 15,000 years. At this point you would call our technology "Clark Tech". We are 55,000 light years away, on the other side of the galactic core.
Could the above scenario be a reason for us not "seeing" anything yet?
No. Because 55,000 ly is close enough to have seen their dysons by now. It only takes 10,000 years to get a substantially complete dyson, starting with only Adam and Eve.
@@cosmictreason2242 light travels only so fast. My civilization is only 15000 years old. It would take 55000 years for the reflection of our structures to reach you. The civilization is 15000yrs old, not the spheres, they're probably less than a thousand years old. If we blew up a star 100 light years away you wouldn't know for 100 years. I build a megastructure in space you won't know I begun until long after I finished.
It a rhetorical question to remind us if a civilization rose up we wouldn't know after the light from there reaches us.
@@theostickle2604 you said it was 100,000 years old but whatever. You're begging the question of why a civ would've arisen now rather than in the preceding ten billion years, when it didn't have the same conditions as us. That's a major statistical problem with the paradox that Isaac has addressed before
@@cosmictreason2242 yes, you are right. The civilization is 100,000 years old (so is ours). They've been colonizing and building mega structures over the past 15,000 years. They are 55,000 light years away. At that distance, if they cities like ours, 20,000 years older then ours, we wouldn't know. That light is still traveling toward us. We started building maga structures only 15,000 years age, those light frequencies are still traveling toward us. When Beetlejuice explodes we won't know about it for decades.
@@theostickle2604 but positing that we haven't seen aliens because they arose at the same time as ours is arbitrary.
19:39 Yes. that's exactly what the Boötes Void is.
A while back - when you posted your voids thing, I had a question:
This relates to the 5th part-
Let's assume the Bootes Void is full of galaxies like normal space. I'm not arguing that, just assuming for the thought not the arguement.
Let's say that region is full of "Black Galaxies" covered with Dyson Swarms and only they maybe didn't yet get to the 60-ish galaxies in it where there should be millions or at least thousands of them? Light passing through it IS dimmed I've read a few places...
Q1 - How much energy could they get?
Q2 - What could they do with that much energy?
I am thinking an ideal place to situate a Dyson Swarm is at the gravitational-lense volumes. There colonies can watch the rest of the universe, interact with transient dark objects, and eventually rub up against extra solar Oort Clouds and colonize them.
Honestly aliens are probably living in the centers of galaxies surrounded by black holes living forever by perpetually slowing down their perception of time. Those huge black holes in the centers of galaxy are just fuel tanks
That would be amazing to see something crazy like that
With 99.8% of the total mass of the solar system locked up in the sun,with the .2% left is it possible to have enough mass to make a Dyson Swarm/ Sphere without farming other solar systems and farming the sun? Even if it was flattened to an atom thickness?
Is there any math that you can suggest to figure this out?
At 5:09 this video shows what it calls black body emission curves of the sun and earth on the right side of the frame. Those are clearly not BB curves and look more like Gaussians. Apparently correct BB curves are shown on the left side of the frame, and the ones on the right are not BB curves.
Thats like ants looking for giant ant hills to confirm greater intelligence, not seeing them and deciding that means there is no further intelligence apart from ants.
The amount of time and raw materials required to make a Dyson Sphere basically rules out any realistic possibilities of them existing. The concept is nothing more than human sci-fi.
Nonsense. You can build a satellite and put it in orbit around sun. Now build a trillion. Takes less than 10,000 years. Once you get starlifting it'll go super fast
Alien civilization: We wanted to harvest energy from our sun, so we ordered a Dyson sphere. It didn't work, but now our planet is dust-free and there's a nice breeze blowing all the time. But what's that annoying noise?
I agree with the explanation that we're looking for life in a drop of water within an ocean. Our observable universe is preposterously large to us, but a grain of sand in an endless desert
Am I the only one who noticed the music cut off qhen Issac was talking about "life anywhere?" I'd find a timestamp but youtube/my phone are weird about that.
About 31min in
I think there is another possibility of why no dyson spheres:
They may be impossible to maintain.
What would make maintenance impossible?
@@calvingreene90The chaos of having so very many satellites (that are also solar sails), orbiting fairly close to a star? Inevitable fluctuations in the brightness and solar wind of the star would be a massive nuisance. It should be possible to make satellites that can correct for all this automatically and keep themselves stable for a very long time. But at some point, they will need reaction mass, or radiation will break an essential electronic component, or they will get hit by a piece of debris, etc. Then it will need repair or it will eventually cause a Kessler syndrome - even if that takes millions of years, we are talking in millions and billions of years on this topic. And having an automated repair fleet means that fleet still has the same issues as the first, so it's really not a solution. You need living intelligence (in any form including true AGI) to manage something like that I think - which is also something that can fail given enough time.
Basically it's the enormous length of the time scales we're facing, imo.
@@DaFinkingOrk And to top it all of, it really isn't the "ultimate power source." You could get all the power you need through a plethora of more time efficient means.
@@DaFinkingOrk Why would a large number of satelites automatically lead to an unsustainable chaos? You build as many satelites as you can safely control per orbit. Said orbit can be as far out as earth itself, and whenever youfill up one orbit, you go in or out a couple hundred thousand miles for the next orbit.
We know that objects can remain in a stable orbit without needing propellant for very, very long times, just look at earht, pluto, the comets, the objects in the oort cloud, what have you.
Even if you do need to maneuver somewhat, large "sails" would be a plus, not a detriment. One could imagine doing something similar to the ISS, using the extra surface to literally sail the solar winds for small adjustments.
Even if you have to stack the rings out with light minutes distances between one another to keep them safe, doesn't really matter, does it? You just do this for long enough, you will collect all the energy of the star no matter how far out you are or how low the satelite density is.
Micrometeorites does ot seem to be an unsolveable problem either, unless you are somehow opposed to giving your repairfleet a couple of anti-asteroid lasers. Which, granted, might be the sticking point. ^.^
@@DaFinkingOrk
Solar sails operating near a star just hanging stationary on a stream of photons it's just so hard to keep track of.
Cool! Its going to be a good night. When I turn off the lights and lay down tonight I get to become a little bit smarter before I sleep. Thank you!
How would you feed a Kugelblitz blackhole when the event horizon is smaller than a proton?
What about K1.5? You know, an AI civilization where the AIs reside in the Oort cloud around their home star, making their Oort cloud radiate IR and dumping their waste into their star, like what seem to happen around Przybylski's Star?
Great vid
"i'm scott malkinson, i have diabetes"
What about massive photon-doubling (heat into dust-absorbing light) or photon-halving (heat into AM radio, or is that quartering?)? We know ways to convert light into more energy intense light. In each case, the goal wouldn't be direct masking, but taking advantage of the properties of the environment to provide the masking. Thus the evidence would then be warm dusty areas or warm spots in voids.
Yes, these radiate heat, but that's "generate low frequency waste from upshifting most of the energy". If you start with heat frequencies that easily penetrate dust, will your waste necessarily be the same frequency that you are collecting to upshift or downshift? (Apparently photon doubling is second-harmonic generation, and used for green lasers. And photon halving is "half-harmonic generation", and has been proven for "infra-red combs".)
You might be able to send all the waste heat in one direction where it will be millions of years before it reaches annother star.
Maybe a Dyson Swarm is a hindrance to navigation.
It's science night tonight!!!!!!!
Would it be meta to use teleporters to send out the excess heat into another solar system to hide your own solar system?
If you could do that you would've been able to travel here already. No need to hide
Thermal energy cant escape a blackhole right?what about reverse hawkins radiation?
If hr is based on entanglement could it not be used in reverse to move thermal energy into a singularity?
A thing that has bugged me for a long time is the heat "problem." If heat is defined as energy that can't be used for powering something, then wouldn't being able to use energy we can't currently use be a way to prevent heat from escaping the system?
One example of turning heat into energy is recent advancements in solar panel wavelength capture, since some panels can now use infrared radiation to generate power. Granted, this just pushes the heat down the line, but why is the assumption that eventually heat *must* be part of the equation?
The emission of waste heat is a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics. Every time you convert one form of energy into another, you lose some of it as heat, which in turn increases the entropy of the universe.
The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence… unless the existence of the thing is meant to be evident
Even if a society had little reason to expand, they'd have outliers who'd want to anyways and unlikely to have much reason to do so.
Maybe civilizations that build one dyson sphere dont build another because it would be dificult to keep an interstelar empire, the distance betwen stars is too big. Civilizations are likely rare to begin with, so if a dyson sphere exists, it likely is in another galaxy and we cant spot it.
It's not life. Its intelligent life and for intelligent life to exist at the same evolutionary point in a galaxy is a different question entirely.
If im not mistaken wouldnt a dyson sphere be a mega of mega super structures. Wouldnt a dyson sphere require the mass of an entire planet. And not a small one either.
How does a civilization handle the orbital destabilizations caused by creating a Dyson sphere?
Moving satelites takes energy. If its one thing a dyson sphere gives you in abundance, its energy...
and what if black holes are really dyson spheres?
I think future technology would make Dyson's less practical or not needed. I mean, we are still babies compared to the theorized C3 civo's. Maybe technology that allows tapping a stars power from within it like a weird wormhole tech or something, something dark side.
what if any civilization which overcomes gravity also overcomes causality, so any observations we make about ancient light, might not actually fit the original reality but then we're in the realm of magic.
However improbable it may seem, what if we are first? Or last?
What if civilizations eventually start reflecting all of their waste heat into stellar mass black holes? Not necessarily even as a matter of stealth but of trying to remain compact without cooking themselves?
So when are we going to build one of these things?
29:58 Am I the only one that started singing?
If we could orbit the sun faster than orbital velocity; we would only need a part of a Dyson Sphere to orbit the enclosed sun at 99% of the speed of light....
I would think even an alien civilization big enough to observe would be one in a million as it seems most civilizations would be small and confined to their home world and limited near surface orbiters .
There are billions of stars in the Milky Way which means we should have found at least a few by now because there would be thousands of them.
I think the resource outlay to harness the full power of a star by surrounding it in solar panels is a waste of time . If an alien race has the ability to do such a thing they’d have the ability to create fusion energy themselves and therefore wouldn’t need to build a Dyson sphere .
I assume that life that moves is less successful than life that doesn't, like fungi or plants. I also assume that we are in an age similar to the first few billion years on earth in the universe, pre-cambrian with our movement life being the most technologically advanced life that currently exists in our home galaxy. I assume this because I know ecosystems need a balance of cycles to propagate into more complex organisms to extract energy from its environment. So in my book life needs cycles of "non-extreme" variables that they can extract energy from without crowding up their environment with waste. Non-extreme not meaning crazy environments but meaning a stable cycle that doesn't change majorly in it's consistency over billions of years.
With all this in mind a mark of life in the universe to me would be any system that remains undisturbed by extreme activity outside of their system, like meteor impacts, star deaths, rapid changes in radiation and atmospheric compositions.
An example would be the gas giants, they have a consistent atmosphere, cycles of temperatures and cycles of seasons with consistent gravity, orbit, radiation exposure, and atmospheric composition. A fungi that grew up in that environment would eventually consume and convert the planet instead of building a Dyson sphere. I believe looking for a Dyson sphere isn't the way that life would be spreading across the universe, it would be fungal expansion. A good thing to start looking for instead of Dyson spheres for life is samples from astroid belts. If we find dormant micro organisms or evidence of micro organisms in the floating rock from planets we could identify good systems for life. We wouldn't find technologically advanced life in space because our kind of life isn't practical in most parts of the universe. We notice that our estimates of life like ours in the universe should be 1 in a couple of billion. While we know the galaxy is HUGE and there should be at least millions of civilizations according to these numbers with our estimations of stars that could support our life, it's simply not the case that we have many places we could call home for billions of years, or that a predatory farming species like ours would be able to sustain itself for more than a million years since we only have evidence for a tenth of that time with only minor ecosystem extinction events, compared to planetary extinction events like moons crashing into a planet or the orbit changing due to exterior gravity like black holes that our system could pass by. All in all the best place to look would be a star system out of the path of black holes at the edge of a galaxy with the least amount of rapid change over a billion years. Even rouge planets could host life with it's consistent gravity of it's planet and consistent temperature. Nothing would evolve eyes but anything that could convert the natural resources on the planet despite the cold temperatures of space would thrive without competition for millions of years until it consumed the planet, then it'd just be a giant converted mass of rust, while this slow process of converting mass to energy to waste would cause other mutations to deal with the waste and eventually you'd have a large fungal/bacterial mass floating through space eating each other until it forms its own consistency and ecosystem, eventually naturally forming into a giant intelligence of specialized organs spanning the width of the planet. So we should be looking for infrared signatures from things we think are dead but with a consistency that would last millions/billions of years. Cause humans and any life like us wouldn't last that long, and that's why we don't see aliens with space travel, because life in the universe is always facing constant adversity and hostility from outside their natural environment.
Please make an episode about Sagittarius A.
Would it be possible and pragmatic to transport solar ammounts of energy over interstellar distances, like some sort of interstellar dyson-powered power grid?
Realy I like this video so so much
We reside in an electromagnetic Universe. To believe Alien life is not on earth is absurd. Next you will tell us our sun is a nuclear reactor
25:17 'How' is hawking radiation converted into electricity? Is it just a photon?
Hawking radiation conforms to the black-body radiation of a black hole, so as a thermal radiation it should indeed be mostly made of photons.
So....what are the fewer things bigger than a dyson sphere? Edit: 4 You can build better fusion reactors than a star yourself.
Birche Planets & ringworlds under known physics come to mind
I would build one.
What if we have already discovered dicensed swarms And we don't even know it. For example, there are blotches of the sky (seen through telescopes like HobelI), which appear dark and even void of any light. What if those dark spots are Dyson swarms???
Dysons are visible in infrared at the same brightness as stars. This has not been observed
Query, could one use star lifting on a massive scale to ward of heat death? keep the stars alive into eternity.
No, when you remove the heavier elements from the sun it's mass shrinks. You would have to constantly feed lighter elements in to maintain the reaction and you would run out eventually.
@@hazel7296 of hydrogen? I mean yeah sure eventually but that eventually would be a LONG way away.
@@hazel7296 It actually does extend a stars life. Notice how red dwarfs, with less mass than Sol, will outlive it
There's no scenario where this actually gets developed. If it were true, that would require a space travel economy & lots of development....and we'd see ships criss crissing our deep space pictures.
It's very possible no one needs that amount of immovable power.
You don't NEED a lot of things in modern day but you still make use of them. There was no compelling reason for you not to
Technically, a Dyson Swarm wouldn't be capturing all of a star's energy - some of it would leak through the gaps. So a Dyson Swarm civilization would be Kardashev 1.8 or 1.9., not Kardashev 2.
Could you imagine the maintenance
How do you have all USA regional accents all at once?
31:50 could the radiations really not be colder than liquid water ? ... If they are a computer, then sure, right? Very cold, but even if not, right?
anything hotter than radiation received from rest of space should work, right?
Dyson spheres are a subset of potential advanced technology. They're not necessarily a mark of an Uber advanced civilisation. Assumptions, right?
I think a "Ringworld" is more likely....
I do not want a Dyson Sphere I want someting like the "Starforge" from Kotor.
The Space Station do not run on solar pannel.
They "pump" the solar energy like molten magma trough a long needle of Klark Tech magic.
We almost have cold fusion figured already; we certainly will in a thousand years if nothing goes wrong. A Dyson sphere is a very very expensive, difficult, and either distant (if built in another system) or disruptive (if built locally) way to collect fusion based energy.
Even with cold fusion, stars are still a resource to be used, either by collecting the energy radiated away, or by taking it apart, either of which would require a Dyson sphere or swarm, or some other megastructure that could be detected at a distance.
But do we realy want to find them?
There are two options for why we seem to be alone.
We are either "chosen ones". The first seeds of inteligent life in The universe (impossible)
Or something very bad is There lurking in The shadows. It is impossible that all life simply blew itself apart.
Some of it survived And is equally terryfied as we are.