Re: News: NASA discovers interstellar 'chocolate'


anon1@xxxxxxx wrote:
> > 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.

I could wish that http://www.iter.org/ looked less like one of the
better Creationist Photoshop designs, but they expect to have plasma at
Cadarache in France in...oh. 2016. That's a while yet.

Still, it'll happen before rearranging the solar system, unless the
experiment goes wrong on an unexpectedly large scale, in which case
it'll happen at roughly the same moment.

Solar energy, phooey. And doing business, you say? We'll freeze their
bank accounts.

Maybe I misunderstood you, but I thought you were presuming that the
advanced civilisation would dismantle all the planets to get materials
for more space installations - I believe that's the usual idea - and I
anticipate resistance from the planetary population. Of course in some
respects they are at a military disadvantage, but do you really expect
a genocidal war to be part of the story of how civilisation takes off
from its planet-bound origin?

Another important consideration, I think, is that the space environment
is very hostile to life. In particular, you don't have to spend very
long on, for instance, the International Space Station before the
functions of your gonads are compromised. I think that children born
and raised in space would be sterile at puberty, if they survived at
all. So you've got to invent a new way of making children. At the
same time you might as well just invent a new kind of life.

Of course for the purpose of this discussion, that just means that the
space blobs or robots or computer-controlled space stations make war on
the original species and exterminate them, but there is still a
civilisation in space that we can detect. However, it's a civilisation
implacably hostile to planetary life - so we probably don't want to
attract their attention.

Life, but not as we know it.

> > 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.

.

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