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How an Advanced Civilization Could Stop Dark Energy From Preventing Their Future Exploration
For the sake of his study, which recently appeared online under the title "Life Versus Dark Energy: How An Advanced Civilization Could Resist the Accelerating Expansion of the Universe", Dr. Dan Hooper considered how civilizations might be able to reverse the process of cosmic expansion. In addition, he suggests ways in which humanity might looks[sic] for signs of such a civilization.
[...] This harvesting, according to Dr. Hooper, would consist of building unconventional Dyson Spheres that would use the energy they collected from stars to propel them towards the center of the species' civilization. High-mass stars are likely to evolve beyond the main sequence before reaching the destination of the central civilization and low-mass stars would not generate enough energy (and therefore acceleration) to avoid falling beyond the horizon.
For these reasons, Dr. Hooper concludes that stars with masses of between 0.2 and 1 Solar Masses will be the most attractive targets for harvesting. In other words, stars that are like our Sun (G-type, or yellow dwarf), orange dwarfs (K-type), and some M-type (red dwarf) stars would all be suitable for a Type III civilization's purposes.
[...] Based on the assumption that such a civilization could travel at 1 – 10% the speed of light, Dr. Hooper estimates that they would be able to harvest stars out to a co-moving radius of approximately 20 to 50 Megaparsecs (about 65.2 million to 163 million light-years). Depending on their age, 1 to 5 billion years, they would be able to harvest stars within a range of 1 to 4 Megaparsecs (3.3 million to 13 million light-years) or up to several tens of Megaparsecs.
In addition to providing a framework for how a sufficiently-advanced civilization could survive cosmic acceleration, Dr. Hooper's paper also provides new possibilities in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI). While his study primarily addresses the possibility that such a mega-civilization will emerge in the future (perhaps it will even be our own), he also acknowledges the possibility that one could already exist.
Kardashev scale. One parsec is equivalent to a distance of approximately 3.26156 light years. Corrections made above.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Friday June 22 2018, @04:05PM (11 children)
There is a fantastic quote from Fight Club that answers this.
People specifically, and living creatures generally, are entropy whores. We need energy to continue existing. Acquiring this energy is problematic on long timelines.
Today, and for the next billion years hopefully, we have a star to feed us. At our current exponential rate of technical progress we will begin harvesting large portions of that star's energy within a few millenia. Eventually we'll consume it all. That leaves us with a growth problem. We can either stop expanding and growing, or we have to find a new energy source. Assuming we solve the pesky mortality problem the easy solution is to plod over to Proxima centauri and do it again. That pattern, expanding from star to star, scales pretty well today.
The problem is the expansion of the universe. Everything in the universe is moving away from everything else. To picture this draw two points a few cm apart on a latex balloon. Then inflate the balloon. That's what the universe is doing. Unfortunately for our deep-future selves the rate of expansion increases as a function of distance. That means that there exists some distance beyond which you can never reach because the universe is expanding (at or greater than?) the speed of light between you. This probably has a cool name like expansion event horizon, but I think of it as the Nothing from the Neverending story. Without FTL travel, anything that passes into the nothing is gone forever.
The reason you have to lasso stars and drag them back closer to you is to keep them from being lost to the nothing. Presumably we're going to keep using energy, and stars are the primary source of energy in our universe.
"So why not use another source of energy?"
That's an excellent question, and one we'll spend eons trying to puzzle out. If we don't find another answer, we'll spend the last days of humanity huddled around the dying embers of brown dwarves trying to keep off the cold.
"What could be another source of energy in a post-stellar age?"
Stars die, leaving behind non-fusible elements like Iron. These elements can still be used to generate energy by dropping them from a great height, e.g. into a black hole. If you asked me to find a non-stellar energy source today with .99C travel in a Type 2 civilization, I'd look at accretion powered black hole pulsars and figure out how to harness the X-ray and Gamma ray energy. Moderating even a fraction of that output would allow creation of massive amounts of fissionable material. That fissionable kit will release helium from alpha decay, and a clever nubbin could save that and light another star with it.
"and then? When that runs out? When the black holes have eaten all there is to eat?"
Then we'll feed it another black hole, harvesting the gravitational waves.
"and then?"
We'll encapsulate black holes, gathering the tiny amount of hawking radiation. We'll cannibalize our worlds to drop every last bit of mass into our tiny gravitational furnace to keep going for a little while longer.
"and then?"
We'll die. Entropy is a bitch. The cosmic microwave background will continue to cool very slowly, and we won't be here to see it. I choose to believe, with no evidence only faith, that some other creature will come to exist in the the bleak cold universe that comes after us. There is a remarkable amount of physics between 0 and 1 K. It is my hope that the creatures that evolve in that degree will discover their universe and awe at the hot and dense conditions of our time, much the same way that we awe at recombination today.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DutchUncle on Friday June 22 2018, @05:08PM (1 child)
>>> If we don't find another answer, we'll spend the last days of humanity huddled around the dying embers of brown dwarves trying to keep off the cold.
Isaac Asimov, "The Last Question"
The stars and Galaxies died and snuffed out, and space grew black after ten trillion years of running down.
One by one Man fused with AC, each physical body losing its mental identity in a manner that was somehow not a loss but a gain.
.....
And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.
But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer -- by demonstration -- would take care of that, too.
For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.
The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.
And AC said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"
And there was light----
(Score: 2) by edIII on Friday June 22 2018, @06:46PM
One of my favorite short stories from Asimov. Thanks for mentioning it.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday June 22 2018, @07:54PM (2 children)
Of course just pointing out that Gen-X as a generation survived $$$/minute tiered long distance audio calls as kids and now stream movies over the internet, and that rate of bandwidth growth starting at mere bits/sec average ending in megs/sec average seems to imply that in just a couple more decades we'll each be using petabytes/second of internet bandwidth... yet in practice demand drops quickly after megs/sec bandwidths, we just can use it.
Another example is sugary high carb food where there was a lot of demand for sugar in the middle ages, but now we have to much people are getting fat and dead off it and the growth rate will not continue.
Or potable water, if you have none, the demand for quarts is staggering. Once you get cheap quarts, people start washing clothes and dishes using gallons of safe drinking water. Some people will use thousands of gallons of genuine pure safe drinking water for pools or ornamental gardens. But the demand drops to zero at a million gallons. I don't know what I'd do with a million gallons of drinkable fresh water per month. I'm not into waterfalls enough to make one of my own. I don't think I have enough sunlight to evaporate that much water on all of my land, I'd have to think about that. I could make ice to sell to eskimos.
Also history is a long story of groups of people getting too big, infighting, and separating. Now can we separate enough to be stable in space? Probably? Maybe not for technological reasons? The limit to human civilization might be too many people in the community...
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 22 2018, @09:40PM (1 child)
Cisco trend reports indicate that bandwidth consumption is still increasing by a lot, although it is slowing down. A more expensive kind of bandwidth is on the rise: mobile bandwidth. But eventually even that demand will stall out.
It's worth reviewing this executive summary:
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/visual-networking-index-vni/complete-white-paper-c11-481360.html [cisco.com]
(caveats [theregister.co.uk])
Another thing to consider is that new codecs lower bandwidth requirements for a given resolution of video streaming. H.265/HEVC yesterday, AV1 [wikipedia.org] tomorrow, and maybe an AV2 after that.
Even if you are playing some kind of next-gen immersive VRMMORPG, you want to have most of the assets stored locally due to latency. Where high bandwidth consumption will be unavoidable is live streaming 360-degree video. You could imagine seeing live streaming reaching something [soylentnews.org] like 34560×8640 @ 240 Hz, 12 bits per channel color (8640 is eight times 1080, and then I just quadrupled that for the horizontal).
But even then, there will come a point where no matter how close the display is to your face, adding more pixels doesn't matter.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Saturday June 23 2018, @05:42PM
I think you both might be forgetting the most powerful bandwidth consumer in the universe, the crappy web developer.
Case in point, https://www.css-security.com/ [css-security.com] 3 seconds and 3.36MB to convey 973 words/7k of content. :(
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday June 22 2018, @09:08PM (5 children)
I've heard that a bright idea of filling the universe by little copies of oneself is not taken lightly by the existing population. A pest extermination ship in the vicinity takes care of the infestation in most cases.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Saturday June 23 2018, @05:32PM (4 children)
> I've heard that a bright idea of filling the universe by little copies of oneself is not taken lightly by the existing population.
Sadly there is no evidence of life outside the confines of this blue dot. When that changes, and I believe it will, I will be giddy at the news. Until then, go forth and multiply. Until evidence points to the contrary we are not wrong in assuming that there is land and sky free for the taking.
> A pest extermination ship in the vicinity takes care of the infestation in most cases.
That is all the more reason for humanity not to stay in one place isn't it? Nature offers one sad reality for alpha predators. When you fill your niche and stop growing, when you plateau, you die. We have an evolutionary mandate to continue growing so our species isn't replaced by another that will.
(Score: 2) by legont on Monday July 02 2018, @03:14PM (3 children)
I tend to agree with what you just said, but I can't help noticing the very man's approach. Females typically respond to the progress by reducing birth rates unless pressed by antiabortion laws and customs.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday July 03 2018, @06:12AM (2 children)
It's evolution I'm worried about. We can cut the birth rate to control growth, that happens naturally as a result of education and prosperity. The trouble is evolution doesn't care about our well laid plans. If we cut our population growth rate to zero our replacement will breed with a fervor we biologically cannot match.
(Score: 2) by legont on Wednesday July 04 2018, @03:08PM (1 child)
Why don't we exterminate our "replacement" well before they have a chance? Seems like a more efficient solution. We do fight rats after all, let alone insects.
That was my original point - the galaxy folks probably divided the space long time ago and control pests wisely.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday July 05 2018, @03:42PM
> Why don't we exterminate our "replacement" well before they have a chance?
We'll certainly try. I'm sure the dinosaurs munched on more than a few little fuzzy crunchy mammals. Then a big space rock came and put a finger on the scale. We're a little more prepared for a giant space rock than the dinosaurs were, but not by much.