From: Robert Dober Date: 2009-04-23T02:31:13+09:00 Subject: Re: Goodbye Ruby - Hello Earth On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 6:59 PM, Eleanor McHugh wrote: > On 22 Apr 2009, at 15:06, Robert Dober wrote: >> >> On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 3:03 PM, Eleanor McHugh >> 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. I challenge this ;), a Dyson sphere might be the evolutionary response of spacebound nonconscient lifeforms. Now that would be a deception. BTW We are not OT here, the same lifeform has created a biological virtual machine for Ruby, completely by chance!!!! Can you believe it? Cheers Robert