Re: News: NASA discovers interstellar 'chocolate'

> You're assuming that massively modifying your star+planet system to
> harness more energy is a good idea. But I'm pretty sure that you won't
> get planning permission.

When it takes several minutes just to send a speed-of-light message,
making remote-control of military equipment impossible, and it takes
days to move physical objects such as troops or equipment to replace
those destroyed by the locals, and the locals have massive amounts of
solar energy available whereas your troops have very little, there's no
practical way to maintain military control over everyone. It's a fact
of evolution that there will be cheaters whenever cheating is
advantageous to the cheaters. It will be in the self-interest of the
solar-power-station companies to cooperate with each other to prevent
lots of accidental crashes, but not in their self-interest to cease
doing business just because the luddites say so.

> If you can generate fusion power, which appears to be not very far
> into our own future, ...

If and when that happens, feel free to re-open discussions.

> what does that kind of engineering even look like? Presumably
> you leave the star alone and build stuff around it. But in our
> telescope that just looks like a star with a few dust specks near to it.

Whenever there is a "commons", a free source of resources, where
individuals have capability to tap into it, they'll tap nearly every
bit they can get. Witness green plants on Earth in the tropical rain
forests where just about every bit of sunlight is intercepted.

I estimate something like half of all sunlight from the star will be
intercepted, after which it won't be cost effective to go after the
last little bit, because you'll be physically restrained from orbiting
closer to the star and thereby stealing light from already-existing
light collectors, but out beyond the bulk of the collectors the average
intensity you can collect will be less than half what the close-in
folks are getting.

The visual effect from far away will be a main-sequence star which
however generates less than half the correct amount of visual light and
near-infrared, but re-radiates all that energy as thermal infrared,
with a huge gap between those two bands. On first glance it will look
like a star which has left the main sequence in the sense of being a
red giant, yet the spectrum from the center is still an ordinary
main-sequence star (but at half amplitude) rather than a white dwarf
core (mostly blue and UV light) that would normally be there. That
extremely unusual spectral signature would show up in just about any
multi-spectral sky survey, if it were present in any of the stars
surveyed, quickly attracting attention of astrophysicists. Furthermore,
whatever the optimal heat-sink temperature was, nearly all the thermal
infrared would be blackbody radiation at that temperature, not over a
wide range of temperatures as would be the case with the extended
atmosphere of a red giant. So detailed spectral study would show two
clear blackbody spectra superimposed on each other, one from the
portion of the star that peeked through the holes between the
collectors, and one from the heat sinks. Furthermore, upon getting good
spatial resolution of the system, it'd be apparent that the heat sinks
were mostly in a compact region close to the star, not in a huge
diffuse cloud, and the main-sequence light was coming from exactly the
correct diameter for that particular color of star (which was supposed
to be giving off twice the observed amount of light), plus a ball of
glints reflection off equipment which were located in a ball of the
same diameter as the heat-sink radiation. Furthermore, both the
heat-sink energy and the glint reflections would be a thin spherical
shell around the star, not a solid ball centered on the star.

Probably there'd be a third type of EM faintly visible, whatever
wavelength of laser energy was used to beam from the near-star
collectors and converters out to individual usage stations, which would
*not* be in a spherical shell, but rather mostly in the plane of the
planets of the system, concentrated near the actual planets and the
various groups of asteroids or comets etc. where resources were being
used locally (thanks to energy beamed from near-star collectors). We'd
see both signal in the beam which missed the target, and signal that
reflected off the target. We'd also see a little bit of thermal
infrared waste heat form whatever was going on there, but that would be
at similar wavelengths to the heatsink radiation from the conversion
stations, so it'd be difficult to see. As to what fraction of these
usage points would be on the home planet, what fraction on other
planets and moons, and what fraction in deep space, I can't guess, it'd
depend on their particular culture.
..

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Dyson Sphere detection and future technology criteria
    ... re-radiate a lot of a star's energy at infrafred wavelengths. ... required and wasted for it to keep the star at it's center. ... the tensile strength of, say, neutronium? ... Black dwarf stars are not degenerate matter, ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: News: NASA discovers interstellar chocolate
    ... >> harness more energy is a good idea. ... advanced civilisation would dismantle all the planets to get materials ... >> telescope that just looks like a star with a few dust specks near to it. ... > light collectors, but out beyond the bulk of the collectors the average ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Distribution & Redistribution
    ... I think there might very well be planets ... diminishment of the light from the star when the planet occults the ... Except for a trip to Alpha Centuri, none of the people doing or paying ... That means solar energy, wind ...
    (sci.econ)
  • Re: When the sun becomes a white dwarf why will it take SO long to cool off?
    ... let's work out what determines the lifetime of a star: ... the lifetime is just the ratio of the internal energy in the ... it's the product of the surface area of the star ... and thus radiate more energy per square meter of surface area per ...
    (sci.astro.research)
  • Re: Is the speed of light really constant ?
    ... >> sphere than a smaller one. ... the fainter the star will ... >> but you'll still see it if you can gather enough energy. ... >> No matter how large you make the mirror, this longer wavelength will ...
    (sci.physics.relativity)
Loading