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from the star-wars:-where-combatants-toss-stars-at-each-other dept.
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: 3, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Friday June 22 2018, @05:56PM (3 children)
Apparently you get a Ph.D in physics from University of Wisconsin, do postdoc work at the University of Oxford, publish over 200 papers on the intersection of cosmology and particle physics plus two books for non-scientists, and become the Senior Scientist and Head of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
Here is the paper, notably absent from TFA. Those squiggly bits in there are called math. They are the big difference between this and sci-fi.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.05203 [arxiv.org]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday June 22 2018, @06:41PM
And you start a paper with speculation about what might possibly happen to an advanced space-faring civ in 100 Billion years in a universe which is an order of magnitude younger than that. Throw in some dyson spheres, sprinkle some models ...
> Those squiggly bits in there are called math. They are the big difference between this and sci-fi.
I like my sci-fi to be based on logical setups (having some issues with Hollywood about that, recently). The fact that the math in his sci-fi universe work and can be used to infer other stuff, isn't unusual, and doesn't mean it's not all abstract experiment. He might as well be demonstrating how many stars could dance on the head of Ursa Major. What is the scientific value of this paper, and where is the three-titted whore of Stavomula Endor?
(Score: 3, Touché) by takyon on Friday June 22 2018, @07:13PM (1 child)
It was the first link in the blockquote.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Saturday June 23 2018, @05:35PM
Mea culpa.