I took a break and went looking for some light entertainment, which is reliably discovered in the fringes of arXiv. Here we go: Ground to Dust: Collisional Cascades and the Fate of Kardashev II Megaswarms.
Extraterrestrial intelligences are speculated to surround stars with structures to collect their energy or to signal distant observers. If they exist, these most likely are megaswarms, vast constellations of satellites (elements) in orbit around the hosts. Although long-lived megaswarms are extremely powerful technosignatures, they are liable to be subject to collisional cascades once guidance systems start failing. The collisional time is roughly an orbital period divided by the covering fraction of the swarm. Structuring the swarm orbits does not prolong the initial collisional time as long as there is enough randomness to ensure collisions, although it can reduce collision velocities. I further show that once the collisional cascade begins, it can develop extremely rapidly for hypervelocity collisions. Companion stars or planets in the stellar system induce perturbations through the Lidov-Kozai effect among others, which can result in orbits crossing within some millions of years. Radiative perturbations, including the Yarkovsky effect, also can destabilize swarms. Most megaswarms are thus likely to be short-lived on cosmic timescales without active upkeep. I discuss possible mitigation strategies and implications for megastructure searches.
Has anybody seen a Kardeshev II civilization? Spotted any megaswarms through your telescopes? It must be fun to write papers about speculated phenomena, as if they exist.
There’s a fair bit of math in that paper, and I can see where it might be applicable to, for instance, the fate of Saturn’s rings, but I think I’ll wait on developing mitigation strategies until we actually have a Kardashev type II civilization, if such a thing is even possible. It’s a bit like guessing how a god would deal with a few billion angels suddenly showing up at the gates, and getting it published as a science paper.
I dunno, seems like harmless fun to me.
Highly speculative, highly imaginative, very science fiction-y and yet who knows? If w edon’t think of it and look for it and wodner, where will be?
A lot of crazy exreme ideas and speculations have sometimes come true. The univers e as haldane (?) once noted is not merely starnegr than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine.
I for one, love this kind of stuff that is I admit on the most vsionary wild and wonderful limits of science.
Also “made up” I mean to wodner of X could be the case kidna is that iguess but also not just that. Its askinga question abse don extrapolation and thought and curuiosity and imagination and wodnering. Is that bad?
What good are these megaswarms?
Real Kardashev Type II civilizations build Ringworlds or Dyson spheres.
Anyone who has read Ann Leckie, Larry Niven, or Iain M. Banks knows this.
^ I mean to wonder if X could be the case kinda is that but also NOT just that.
starnegr – Stranger than my mistyped spelling of stranger even..
Biology -evolution – produces some weird and wonderful & bizarre living things. Can w eimagien them and if we can’t does it stopthem existing anyhow. They thought theplatypus wa s ahoax and famously black swans were ocne unthinkable. Saw a pair of Cygnus atratus* in the very drought shrunken Playford lake the other day.
I don’t really get people’s problems with these imaginative speculative, yes far-fetched but not mathemaically or logically impossible ideas being considered and imagined and wondered about and investigated.
No, we haven’t seen a Kardeshev II civilization yet – this is one suggestion of a possible way we might find some evdienc e that shows they do exist IF they do. Problem here being ____?
.* See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan
@2. “The universe as Haldane (?) once noted is not merely stranger than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine.”
Confirmed altho’ somewhat paraphrased :
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21835-the-universe-is-not-only-queerer-than-we-suppose-but
Sometimes my google-fu & memory actually works.
To me, it’s a bit like a bunch of 14th century Aztec priests sitting around the temple discussing what strange alien peoples might someday replace them. They don’t have a clue and their every guess will definitely be totally wrong, and nothing they say can prepare them for the reality ahead of them.
So, sounds like this is modelling an extreme version of a Kessler Cascade.
That’s actually a thing we do have to worry about; there’s enough junk and scrap up in Low Earth Orbit that it can damage functioning satellites and create more scrap in the process, and in a worst case some parts of LEO could end up being unusable for years. There has already been work on missions to sweep out some of the junk up there, but those tend to get bogged down because several countries have satellites up there that look like junk but aren’t because they aren’t supposed to be up there spying or whatever else they’re doing.
(At my previous job we actually did some work using a radio telescope as essentially a giant radar dish to try to image things in orbit and get a better idea of how dense the debris was at various altitudes. Had to get all sorts of permissions to do it to guarantee no planes were going to be in the area at the time, as well as dealing with the same issues of lots of people not wanting anybody else to see what they had up there.)
Modeling a Kessler Cascade seems like a useful thing. I do object to dressing up a real issue with imaginary alien window dressing.
Unfortunately, the most we’ll ever experience is a Kardashian Civilization.
I believe what we currently have is a Kardashian type I civilization.
The only megaswarms around here seem to feed on mealworms.
Graphic brought to you by ifunny dot co.
@9, 10
@7, 8
I just did the Kessler Cascade in under 12 parsecs.
The basic premise of this speculation is that advanced alien civilizations need vast amounts of energy that are unimaginable to us. I have no objection to that possibility. But, is capturing the total energy output of a star the best way to meet their needs? We’re still trying to riddle out what dark energy is. All we can say is that it exists, but we can’t say what it is. Perhaps, the next Einstein or even AI, will determine what it is, where it comes from and even how to tap into it as a usable energy source. Since we’ve seen absolutely no evidence for a Type II civilization, much less a Type III, I’m going to go with something like dark energy extraction. Or even manipulating gravity or gravity waves, another thing we still don’t fully understand.
Great. Unemployed American academics will be drafted to work the dark energy mines of Pluto in the future. It’s not as if we’ll be laboring in universities anymore.
Probably part of the ongoing concern futurists have with the Fermi Paradox. It’s the fact that they haven’t spotted any alien civilizations that bugs them. I wouldn’t be too surprised if “Collisional Cascades” showed up as the topic of an Isaac Arthur video in a while. Granted, I enjoy his videos…I just don’t share his optimism about our sick, sad world.
The author seems to have demonstrated that a ‘Dyson Swarm’ is not as practical as previously assumed, providing a partial explanation for why we haven’t seen any (in addition to the likelihood that no one has ever tried to build a Dyson Swarm). It may also be that past a certain point the energy needs of an advanced civilization decrease from the energy needs of its ancestral civilization, if so this would provide another reason for not seeing a Dyson Swarm. So, not seeing a Dyson Swarm pretty much doesn’t mean anything beyond that we have reason to believe we haven’t seen a Dyson Swarm.
Nah nah me like. Of course this kind of subject is thinner-than vacuum speculation, but…
– I did wonder about the feasibility of Dyson swarms, seeing that all those tightly adjacent orbits look like a disaster waiting to happen.
– solid Dyson spheres are out, being unstable and ending up crashing onto their star, ditto ringworlds (even Niven figured that one out himself). But I did love “Look to Windward”.
– To resume: no megastructures to be seen anywhere, no aliens calling, Fermi very upset. What if the one to be right is Cixin Liu, with his darker-than-Vantablack sense of humour? His Dark Forest hypotesis is the most nightmarish answer to the paradox I ever found.
I’ll take some silly fun about non-existent artificial structures over that particular vision of the cosmos any day. Piss off, Trisolarians.
@ outis, #19: Actually some MIT students figured that out. They went to an event where Larry Niven was speaking and chanted, “The ringworld is unstable…the ringworld is unstable…” Luckily Larry Niven had a sense of humor about it and was inspired to write a sequel.
Unless you’re coming up with something that’s eventually going to be added into Stellaris or whatever space civ game comes along, I have trouble taking the subject seriously. Though I don’t have a problem with people pointing out, “Hey, this is a fundamental complication that throws the notion into question.”
Would it really be so much better to use 100% of the energy of one star than 1% of the energy of a hundred stars anyway? Because as slow as interstellar travel is, the second seems a lot easier.
But aren’t Kardashev civilisations not just like string theory? We’re basically saying: here’s what we know, and here are a ton of “what if” speculative theories about the stuff we don’t know, perhaps it’s interesting science, or interesting math with no practical application, or perhaps it’s all bullshit! And who knows, once the data gets here perhaps one of those million theories gives us the next step.
It’s fun to think about (and that’s a motivating factor for a lot of people!) and I’m against dismissing blue sky research just because it’s not immediately practical.
That said, this sounds like a fun kind of assignment I’d give a student in orbital mechanics. (Or perhaps a student chose this on their own.) If you want to test if a student knows his maths, it doesn’t matter if it’s a swarm of robots or a swarm of sand particles. Are we sure this is serious funded research, or just some hobby project that turned out well enough to make it to Arxiv?
Wait till you find out about string theory. “Speculated phenomena” is all they’ve got too – there has never been an observed effect that was explained, much less proved, by string theory.
@profpedant:
As for energy needs decreasing… well, we’ve already seen related examples here. People talking about SETI have been noting for years that we put out a whole lot less radio energy into the surrounding cosmos than we used to, partly just because every watt of power put into broadcast going straight up is a watt of power not usable for sending to people who will actually listen to it, and partly because modern communications is using a lot more short-range and high-frequency transmissions that can’t escape the atmosphere and would look entirely like noise to anybody who didn’t synchronize to the transmission sequence anyway.
@outis:
The webcomic Schlock Mercenary spent the last several story arcs running with the Fermi paradox, in what turned out to be at least partly a ‘Dark Forest’ take even though humanity had actually run into several other aliens by that point… because none of the ones we met had actually been around all that much longer than we had.
“It’s a bit like guessing how a god would deal with a few billion angels suddenly showing up at the gates, and getting it published as a science paper.”
The Catholic Church solved that problem ages ago. He would sit them on the head of a pin.
garydargan, nope.
cf. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_many_angels_can_dance_on_the_head_of_a_pin%3F)
“The phrase was originally used in a theological context by 17th-century Protestants to mock medieval scholastics such as Duns Scotus[2] and Thomas Aquinas.[3] Whether medieval scholastics really discussed the topic is, however, a matter of debate. The suggestion is possibly an early modern invention that was intended to discredit scholastic philosophy.[4]”
The Dark Forest hypothesis makes a lot more sense when you consider (as I do) Predator to be a visionary work of sf about one of the more plausible scenarios for human/ET contact and not just a gloriously silly and over the top specimen of prime 80s action cheese (which it also kind of is, but still!)
I’m definitely out of the loop. I’m was only familiar with Ringworlds and Dyson spheres for technologically advanced alien civilizations. And they barely qualify for Type II.
mcfrank0, there’s much more. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain
(And EE ‘Doc’ Smith had the Sunbeam in the Lensman series, back in the 1930s)
Nobody’s even seen a Kardashev type Ⅰ civilization, let alone type Ⅱ.
@6 . PZ Myers :
Their guesses might be wrong but the mindset of asking questions, wondering and imagining and then seeking evidence and possible answers rather than merely following their religion thinking that was all they needed to know and do would be a much better approach. They’d stop being priests and become, if not quite scientists, then at least philosophers.
I’m not an expert on Mesoamerican ancient history so I could be wrong and I’m just speculating here and imagining an alternative history based on my perhaps mistaken ideas of things. However, imagine if Aztecs had been more cautious about the Conquistadors? Had investigated them, maybe had fled or fought earlier instead of apparently welcoming Cortes as a god or emissary of a god as the story I knew as a kid – probly inaccurately – goes.
Disease would still have been a factor, technology and horses would still have been factors but if they’d been more cautious, more aware of who the Conquistadors were and what they wanted and acted accordingly? If the Aztecs had worked with their indigenous neighbours and investigated what was happening in the Caribbean following the first contact with Columbus and known much more about the Conquistadors and their technology and nature maybe they could have resisted a lot better, prepared their people a lot better. To be aware and forewarned is be forearmed as the adage goes.
Imagine if Aztecs had built ships and explored and found out about Europe first maybe when Europe was in an earlier stage pre-guns. Could they have colonised Europe? The Islamic world did for a while in
Spainthe Iberian Peninsula with Al-Andalus* so maybe?(FWIW, I’ve got somewhere on one of my bookshelves – but not yet read – an SF novel somewhere discussing just that parallel cosmos scenario.)
Certainly things would have been different and the Aztec empire might’ve survived better or the people at least might have been able to survive and resist better and endure more rather than having the horrors and destruction of the Aztecs that we have in our timeline’s history.
If I recall right, PZ, you’ve said in the past that you don’t like alternative history which I admit I find intriguing and fascinating but anyhow.
Now okay, the tech levels here between Aztecs and Conquistadors are obvs more comparable than us and aliens likely would be. These hypothetical scenarios are different in scale and potential consequences and more. But the principle that its better if we try to imagine and investigate and consider even very far-fetched and remote possibilities rather than, well, NOT doing that?
Well, I think there’s at least some value and making people think and wonder and question and speculate is better than not doing so. If nothing else we get good stories and interest and amusement and something to build on and learn from because of it. It may or may not lead somewhere much more consequential. At best it might potentially save our civilisation and species to investigate and discover and be prepared in ways that, well, comparably the Aztecs were not.
.* See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Andalus
@ ^ FWIW :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hern%C3%A1n_Cort%C3%A9s#March_on_Tenochtitl%C3%A1n
It is, ofc, a much more complicated story than I understood as a kid esp from the docos at the end of a favourite cartoon on TV – The Mysterious Cities of Gold – and reading Ladybird & other children’s history books.
It’s the fact that they haven’t spotted any alien civilizations that bugs them.
Then they’re pretty stupid. We’ve been looking using grown-up tools for a whopping 60 years or so and are able to barely look for signs of life within 100ly – a weeny teeny eenie meeny region of space in an iota of an eyeblink of a mayfly’s time.
Even if one plugs in optimistic values into Drake’s Equation, we’re generating a fudged up probability that there may be technological life in the universe, while we’re only able to, let’s say, hear from civilizations within 100ly. Their sterilization-drones could have been launched 5000 years ago and they won’t arrive in time to drop a rock on us and save us from another Trump term.
It’s weird to me because futurists tend to be some of the smartest dipshits that ever chose to overlook an obvious assumption: assume Einstein was right. We can imagine sci fi hyperdrive systems until we die of global overheating, but we and the alien civilizations are so far apart we’re trapped like bugs in amber and won’t even last long enough to hear eachothers’ dying screams.
mathman85, I asked the bubbly bot:
so, four orders of magnitude before we get to K1.
cf. https://kardashev.fandom.com/wiki/Carl_Sagan
making us 0.72 on the scale.
His formula:
@ ^ Marcus Ranum : We’ve discovered five thousand plus exoplanets around other stars and know of not a single one that’s just like Earth with most of these worlds orbiting red dwarf stars which have huge question marks over their ability to host actually habitable planets due to their extreme flares which could well blast away the atmospheres of any close in planets. We’ve found a lot of systems have Hot Jupiters and eccentric orbiting worlds that make stable ecosystems probly impossible and despite the hype about some worlds there’s a lot of questions about whether any planet we’ve found so far – out of those five thousand plus detected – can remotely be considered really “earth-like” in anything other than mass or orbit.
Disease would still have been a factor, technology and horses would still have been factors but if they’d been more cautious, more aware of who the Conquistadors were and what they wanted and acted accordingly?
Technology and horses were a factor but they would not have been decisive. Picture 150,000 Aztecs launching a surprise attack against a few hundred conquistadors. Those are ant-hive versus a handful of wasps odds.
It seems, from all I’ve read, as if the Aztecs did not respond in a politically effective manner. They were not coordinated and seem to have forgotten that they were an imperial power by conquest. They weren’t wimps – they were just horribly badly led (thought experiment: how many Roman legionnaires would it take to wipe out 200 conquistadors? The answer is: none. It’s a trick question – even an aggressive Roman wouldn’t just charge them, they’d circumvallate them like Caesar did at Alésia, and slaughter them like baby seals when they were thirsty and hungry and tired) The Aztec warriors sound to me like they were pretty horrific badasses. They lost because the luck of the draw was they were ruled by someone who had the political/military skills of Pete Hegseth. Maybe a milli-Crassus or 5 milli-Crassuses.
SteveoR:
five thousand plus
Yeah, that’s like a millionth of a rounding error. To get a properly populated Drake Equation futurists are plugging “300 billion stars, with an average of …” any time you’re plugging a few billion into an estimate I think it’s playing with high explosive exponents.
Like I said, I’m willing to assume the eradication-drones launched 5000 or 10000 years ago and just haven’t quite announced their arrival yet. I’ve seen optimistic estimates for sublight travel to nearby real estate with numbers like 10000 years or 50000. They haven’t turned around to do their braking burn, yet, but once they do they’ll be in Saturn orbit and chucking rocks in another 15000 years. Humanity’ll be dead by then so the surviving cockroaches will be angry and surprised.
@36. Red dwarf planetary systems .. have huge question marks over their ability to host actually habitable planets due to their extreme flares which could well blast away the atmospheres of any close in planets.
In fact, we’ve know this sometimes happens because we’ve made observations and found that (at least!) several earth-sized / earth-mass exoplanets that we thought might have atmospheres do NOT have atmospheres and are airless like giant versions of Mercury or, perhaps, at least partly if not entirely lava planets rather than being even Cytherean in nature. (Like Venus.) Notably the innermost planet or two around Trappist-1 as well as at least one other earlier example, the designation of which now escapes my memory :
Source : https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/exoplanet-trappist-1b-has-no-atmosphere/
Red dwarfs are the most common type making up about two-thirds of all suns and seem to be the most likely to host smaller exoplanets that are about Earth’s size and mass. Thus if we disqualify them as being unable to host habitable worlds, which is looking increasingly like a reasonable thing to do, there’s going to be a LOT less potential planets like ours out there.
However, that said, I don’t think the verdict on whether all red dwarf planets are airless and uninhabitable – at least by life like ours is completely definitive or final yet and there are possibilities that planets a bit further out or younger or with slightly more mass or stronger magnetic fields etc.. might still be able to retain their atmospheres and be habitable. So the question is still a bit open – albeit it isn’t looking promising from what we’ve seen so far.
StevoR, in the spirit of K, when you write “We’ve discovered five thousand plus exoplanets around other stars and know of not a single one that’s just like Earth with most of these worlds orbiting red dwarf stars which have huge question marks over their ability to host actually habitable planets due to their extreme flares which could well blast away the atmospheres of any close in planets.”
I think of an actually advanced civ — the Culture.
Planets are kinda limited (and some get kicked out of the club! Ahem), but living space can be constructed or repurposed.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Living_space
“Airspheres
Orbitals
Planets
Rings
Rocks
Shellworlds
Ships
Spheres”
I think it’s in the Pandora’s Star books where there are standard sci-fi novel dimensional portals, and energy capture becomes a “simple” matter of portaling some solar corona carefully into a really really tough heat exchanger/generator. No need for a Dyson sphere. Though I imagine waste heat would be a big problem with that approach. If I am recalling correctly the Pandora’s Star books also feature a sort of Dyson Sphere. Fun space opera.
PS – a portal into a solar corona without a capture system is a “bomb” or “death beam” or other nasty-ass wossname.
I’d say it’s a bit more like early(ish) sci-fi writers imagining advanced alien civilisations with really good steam engines or valve radios, or even Asimov’s ideas about analogue computers the size of cities – take the latest technology and then project it linearly out, with no recognition either that things have intrinsic limits (see also Moore’s Law projected to infinity) or that other, completely different technologies might be invented in the future.
Marcus Ranum@37,
The Conquistadores in Mexico would have been defeated without local allies such as the Totonacs and Tlaxcalans.
The Romans wouldn’t have been at much of a technological disadvantage against early16th century Spanish troops, because early 16th century guns were pretty ineffective, due to poor accuracy and long reloading time. Cortes’s army apparently only had 13 of them. And in fact it’s likely the Roman Empire at its height would have made short work of any 16th century European state – assuming they had some resistance to smallpox. I’m currently reading Escape From Rome by Walter Scheidel, who points out that due to socio-cultural factors, the Romans achieved a level of mass mobilization which no subsequent European state managed until revolutionary France at the very end of the 18th century. The Romans’ main problem would have been dealing with fortifications designed to withstand 16th century cannons – they would have had to resort to long sieges.
Why do we assume it will be, at whatever Kardashev level, a civilisation?
(Maybe this is just because I struggle to transcend our all-too human perspective.)
[ahem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tercio#Tercios_and_the_Spanish_Empire ]
John Morales@47,
Your point?
John Morales, #27
The “angels on the head of a pin” question is, as you say, an Early Modern phrasing coming out of a very anti-Scholastic intellectual mindset (which reached its apogee with writers like Rabelais, on a wave of Renaissance-Enlightenment Mediaeval-bashing), but abstract thinkers of the Central Middle Ages (c.11th-14th Centuries) did indeed speculate fuslomely about the nature of angels, how one might classify them within Aristotelian physics, and the nature of space, time and existence more generally. An angel was an active causal agent lacking a body, which was a problem for Aristotle’s physics as that system required physical contact for one object to influence another. How could a disembodied creature achieve any influence on the world at all? Was “action at a distance” possible in some way? Could several angels occupy the same physical space, or was it better to think of them as entirely without correspondence to physical dimension, more as immanent properties of the entire universe?
It was all part of an attempt to interrogate, challenge and revise the dominant scientific paradigm of the day by introducing edge cases and exceptions that brought the core axioms into doubt. It was about taking the claims of religious doctrine seriously, and seeing whether physics needed to be adjusted to get a more complete picture. Not unlike what was happening when Einstein used quantum and relativistic phenomena to modify Newtonian physics.
KG, my point is that you imagine a few centuries’ worth of military progress means nothing much.
(Nothing to do with you Poms habitually dissing the Dons, nosiree!)
@36,
“We’ve discovered five thousand plus exoplanets around other stars and know of not a single one that’s just like Earth”
This always bugs me. Why on earth should life out there in the universe need earth-like conditions? Maybe breathing sulphur is all the rage on some world in the Magellan Cloud? Maybe there are lifeforms who look like the Hulk who thrive in 20G gravity and can metabolise rocks? If you wait for humanoids from space to invent radios and send you messages and their favourite music, you might be waiting a long time.
To show that it does mean very much, if indeed it does, you have to specify how and why, which you have not even attempted. I noted one particular in which it did (cannons, and the fortifications built to withstand them), and in another in which it probably did not (small arms). The latter might have had some value as a scare tactic, but little more. 16th century swords and personal armour were better than their Roman counterparts, but not radically so. And importantly, Roman armies of the peak period (say, 2nd century BCE to 2nd century CE) were well-trained, being made up of professionals who signed up for long periods, and crucially, much larger than 16th century armies. Read Scheidel’s book and get back to me.
@David. I wasn’t even responding to you yet you came back to defend Trump because you felt personally attacked. You just showed my point correct. I almost thought you were a scorned liberal but thanks for proving you’re a typical Trump supporter. For evidence you literally use YouTube videos. That’s all you have. There’s a huge array of academic papers and books showing that Trump is a terrible politician that I can cite but you would do he same thing you accuse others of doing and stick your head in the sand. Trump clearly had bigger gaffes yet that didn’t matter. I fail to see why cherry-picked gaffes affected one candidate that greatly, it’s almost like people cared more about the economy than anything else (how’s that economy thing going?) Also why can’t you admit that Trump lost 2020? You’re showing your hypocrisy by accepting one result but not the other just because of your political views and fealty to Trump. Also, at least Harris isn’t demanding to audit the election and cry “rigged” when she lost, something Trump and his supporters aren’t willing to do. Also, thanks to Trump, everything is going to be even expensive. So much for the economy, huh? Doesn’t matter much now all of a sudden. But I’m curious, how did you find this blog? Trump supporters tend to just watch Fox News to stay on their echo chamber (you’re proving it by your lack of evidence for anything) so we rarely see your type here.
Oh, and John, get back to me about that “Invincible Armada” while you’re at it ;-)
Seriously, I know that the Armada was defeated by the weather and Philip II’s idiotic attempts to micromanage it rather than by Drake (the well-known and respected pirate); and I know about the failure of the counter-Armada. But those terrible Tercios abjectly failed to suppress the Dutch revolt, which suggests they perhaps weren’t quite all they were cracked up to be.
Ignore my comment. Wrong thread lol
kitcarm@53,
I think you must have posted in the wrong thread.
I can almost smell the weed from here.
(Personally, I think the “megaswarm” idea is nonsense: a civilization wouldn’t need all that to collect energy from their sun; just a lot of solar panels serving each particular colony, installation, city, mine, factory, or other concentration of people or machines.)
But hey, it looks like harmless speculation, and kind of interesting, as long as they’re not saying we have to make more (White) babies, and/or let rich techbros didge all their tax obligations, so they can make up a long-termist plan to “mitigate” the “megaswarm” “problem.”
…and/or let rich techbros DODGE all their tax obligations… *
…or maybe DOGE all their tax obligations?
@52 KG: I do wonder how much those legionnaires enjoyed their enlistment, but they were indeed redoutable. And consider that in order to defend against the Gauls in early republican times, small city state Rome managed to field one hundred thousand soldiers – I imagine that was absolutely everyone able to carry arms, no exceptions. Quite a feat of military mobilizing.
As for the Tercio Viejo, I quite like the Capitan Alatriste novels. Will Perez-Reverte (or his daughter) ever write the final chapter?
@KG@45:
That reminds me of some research I did for a fantasy story I was writing. Imperial Rome at its height had just over a million inhabitants, which is well into the range where your limiting factor is the infrastructure needed to get supplies in and waste out of the city.
The first European city to reach a population of million people after the fall of Rome was London… during the early Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. Because it basically took up to that point before anybody really built sufficient infrastructure to support having all those people in one place.
A lot of the stuff that Rome did would indeed take a millennium and a half to re-acquire. Republican Rome had a political system that was remarkably stable until Caesar pulled off his coup (including a Senate which to all appearances had the primary purpose of giving rich families who thought they should be ruling things a place to argue with each other and keep them from messing with too much of the actual day-to-day running of things). It just also wasn’t sustainable once it got too big to reliably run; that’s how Caesar managed to get troops that were more loyal to him than they were to Rome, because they’d been out in the fields for over a year with him by that point whereas in a smaller Republic no unit ever actually stayed together longer than the period between spring planting and fall harvest, and thus would never have time to become primarily loyal to their specific commander. Republican Rome didn’t have a standing army specifically to reduce the possibility of a coup.
I do wonder how much those legionnaires enjoyed their enlistment, but they were indeed redoutable.
There are extant letters, which are a pretty typical mix of “this sucks” and “doing great, got promoted” even “send sesame cake.” I haven’t looked at any of that stuff since I was a kid. There are also chronicles of the crusades that have similar things, “first time on a ship! hurled my chow!”
My dad did a couple books with a colleague about day to day medieval life and used to read letters at the dinner table. Mostly I remember there was a lotta lotta drinking. (Beer, unlike river or well water, has only approved unicellular life in it, the alcohol and Co2 taking care of the rest)
The one I remember the best was an account of a party a medieval French knight had. There was drinking, then a boar hunt. Our hero got gored in the knee and the boar flipped his kneecap back over, so his friends finished the boar then held him down while saying variations of “walk it off, bro” and pushed everything back into place, wrapped it in some cloth, and said he’d live if it didn’t get infected. He lived. It was memorable because it was a great lesson to me about stoicism: you gotta be tough when you have no choice otherwise.
The basic premise of this speculation is that advanced alien civilizations need vast amounts of energy that are unimaginable to us.
And I, for one, think this is an unfounded assumption. We really have no clue what another civilization would look like even when they were at our level, let alone when they advance one or two levels past us. We have to figure out what people in an advanced civilization would DO before making any guesses about how much energy they’d need for it.
Also, there’s the numbers question. An advanced spacefaring civilization might have a population in the trillions — or they might top out at less than 10 billion, simply because they don’t feel any pressing need to make that many more babies; or for some other reason that’s totally different from human experience.
Eh, all in all, the paper’s harmless, and the purpose behind it is actually a good one: there are people out there already using valuable telescope time on some of the most hard-to-book instruments on the planet, looking for this nonsense. Well, if they’re gonna collect all this data looking, then there’s no reason not to try to make sure we game out just what they should be looking for.
Maybe we can prevent some false positives and another 2-3 rounds of media stupidity over ‘OMG SCIENTISTS SAY THEIR RESULT MAY BE NOTHING BUT WE’RE GONNA HYPE IT ANYWAY TO SELL EYEBALL TIME!!!’
I can say that thinking about these things (which we possibly want to build at some point) should be extremely productive.
For instance, it is apparent to me that if we are to build our own mega-structures (or other “technosignatures”), in order for them not to be destroyed, they should probably have the characteristics that made it possible for life to exist for billions of years: High independence, diverse energy sources, diverse “niches” etc. etc.
I very much enjoy reading your blog, but frankly, sometimes it seems to me that you’re complaining a bit too much. In particular, I have to say that I don’t believe, for instance, that Richard Dawkins is a racist, and if you want some really good science fiction, you should try Herbert W. Franke, in particular “The Mind Net” (unfortunately, it seems as though the Steel Desert is not translated yet).
Don’t look at the UFO oriented sections of Reddit, they’ll drive you nuts. They’re a mix of the paranoid, the naive, the credulous, the silly, and frankly the dated. For example George Adamski’s old friends the Nordic aliens have been relabelled as The Tall Whites. So much of the thinking by the hardcore UFO fans still seems based on old sci fi, with the supposed aliens coming in forms that are easy to represent with makeup and/or a rubber suit. Even dear old Jacques Vallee is still around. Still, many are disillusioned with the regular promises of Disclosure(tm) that never seem to lead to anything.
I imagine solar will be a major power source for things we put in space in the inner solar system, such as space factories, tourist facilities whatever. Also industrial mass shunts setting up radiation shields and so on. They would mainly be on the same plane as the earth.
If we make a few billion such things they may appear as a faint whisp of a ring around the sun.
cartomancer, seeing this most recent comment made me realise I’d like to acknowledge your comment about the festive angels.
I very much appreciate it when you indulge your expertise. I like erudition.
jenorafeuer@61,
There was actually a lot of instability in the century before Caesar’s coup: the attempts of the Gracchi brothers to reduce economic inequality by debt cancellation and land redistribution (they both got murdered by agents of the rich), the “Social War” in which the Italian allies rebelled – and got Roman citizenship, the contest between Marius and Sulla, Spartacus’s slave rebellion, the “Cataline conspiracy”, culminating in the rivalry between Caesar and Pompey – but yes, I’d agree the basic problem – which neither the Republic nor the Principate ever solved – was, once the Empire grew past a certain size, armies serving long enough away from Italy to become loyal to their commanders (who exerted pressure for them to get better pay and retirement packages). rather than the state. Would you agree, cartomancer?