From: Eleanor McHugh <eleanor@...>
Date: 2009-04-23T01:59:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Goodbye Ruby - Hello Earth

On 22 Apr 2009, at 15:06, Robert Dober wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 3:03 PM, Eleanor McHugh
> <eleanor@games-with-brains.com> wrote:
>> On 18 Apr 2009, at 06:10, Phlip wrote:
>>>>
>>>> And besides, who are we kidding thinking that the planet needs us?
>>>> It's been around for a long time before we were here and can do
>>>> without us fine**x, where x is a Bignum.
>>>
>>> Who will move it to a safe orbit as the Sun goes off the Main  
>>> Sequence?
>>>
>>> Mother Nature works in mysterious ways. Including sometimes via  
>>> Epic Fail.
>>
>> If a billion years isn't long enough to Dyson sphere the Sun it's  
>> because
>> we're either a failed evolutionary experiment and no longer around  
>> (more
>> than likely) or our descendants have come up with a better option.
> This is a joke, right, well probably not.
> I always thought that a Dyson sphere was Gene Rodenberry's idea, but
> seems there has been some serious thoughts about it.

The clue is in the name: Dyson spheres were hypothesised by Freeman  
Dyson and I believe the general concept was first popularised by Larry  
Niven in his Ringworld novels. I was being somewhat flippant as I  
doubt humanity will be here in a billion years, but if we are it would  
speak poorly of us if we failed to advance our technology sufficiently  
to fully utilise the energy output by our nearest star. After all, it  
only took a billion years or thereabouts for the earliest multi- 
cellular life-forms to evolve into modern humans...

> BTW if there were any Dyson spheres out there, should we not be able
> to detect them already in a certain distance? I mean would that not
> cause some anomalies between emissions and gravitational behavior of
> the neighboring stars? Or is this shadowed by the gravitational
> overkill of the "central black hole"?

It might. However whether or not we will ever detect evidence of one  
is dependant on the probability of a particular chain of events:

1. life exists elsewhere in the universe;
2. that life has thrown up an active intelligence;
3. that intelligence is sufficiently social to survive for a  
significant geological timeframe;
4. the resulting society develops sufficiently advanced technology to  
reengineer the structure of their solar system;
5. having achieved that level of technology they then have the will to  
use it;
6. and all this has already happened.


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
http://slides.games-with-brains.net
----
raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason