Me, watching this video in 2020, hearing about how you can "fly" a star with a dyson swarm, "THAT'S WHY WE CAN'T SEE THEM, THEY ARE ALL FLYING TOWARDS US!!!"
Speaking only for myself here, I think it's pretty shitty that people would take the time to leave demeaning comments regarding your speech. I had no problem with it and I think the content is brilliant. Remember, those who can, do, those who can't bitch like little whiny girls. You've got a subscriber.
+Bam Chug Yeah it gets on my nerves, and these days I just delete them, something I normally reserve only for spam and the very worst invective. But every cloud has its silver lining and it encourages me to spend a lot more time recording clean audio in the newer videos.
Yeah, I completely agree, no issues with understanding at all. It also strikes me as very odd that people who are supposedly interested in life beyond our world, different existences in the universe and related concepts, would be so focused on such minor differences in individuals within our own species that it prevents them from engaging in a meaningful and productive way.
Thankfully I didn't see any and it didn't even cross my mind until reading your comment. But the content spoke for itself, chances are they are too dumb to comprehend the video so it made them angry.. poor guys
No need to let it bother you dude. It says a lot more about where their heads are at if that's the first thing you are thinking after watching such a thought provoking video!
Thanks! and welcome to the channel, hopefully you'll enjoy the newer videos even more, this one is video #2 I made and I generally consider it very sup-par :)
Isaac Arthur, hello and thank you as always for sharing. Love your channel! I have seen so many of your videos. All great! Must have seen over 200 by now! Keep’ em coming! My 12 year old boy is also into a few of your playlists as well. Thanks again!
The Dyson Dilemma "...asks why we can *even see any stars at all* . Why aren't they all Dyson Swarms by now?" I am quite familiar with the Fermi Paradox, but this is the first time I have ever heard of the Dyson Dilemma. Thanks for the idea of the Dyson Swarm which is _way_ more reasonable than a Dyson Sphere which I always found a bit hard to take seriously. Isaac you do an excellent job of explaining all kinds of awesome ideas! Thanks for all your hard work!
+Juan Borjas Thanks, it's actually a bit worse. My full name is Isaac Albert Arthur and I was dual named for Asimov and Newton, middle for Einstein. My surname was acquired normally though. ;)
+Isaac Arthur maybe the technology curve is a trap. technology that scale one could assume the bubble bursts. one possible way would be messing around trying to draw a solar flare like a lightning strike. would we start to try to harvest plasma from the sun? in doing so triggering a extinction event? any large scale structures will need to be magnetically shielded. at this scale one could even conceive we would make super powerful magnetic fields on the inner orbit. incoming solar flare and cycle the field up. acting as a plow shear effect. anyhow.. maybe playing magnetic tag with our sun could show this would be a lost cause at scales proposed?
+Collin MacInnis It's possible but I don't think that works, for instance a rotating habitat, by basically being a big spinning metal cylinder, can be very easily configured to have a very impressive magnetic field.
+Isaac Arthur percentage of avaliable power dedicated per structure verses mitigating the problem close to its source. breaking up a CME or focusing it.. cost at source verses the energy needed by the whole to insure protection at major events? this concept may even play into the star harvesting concept... the source material for that please?
I'm here after hearing you be recommended by Kyle Hill. This is the first video I've watched by you and now I am going to slowly make my way through your entire channel. This is going to take a long time but I've always been interested in science. 1 down, many more to go.
Had to pause the video and just contemplate and marvel at your observation that we have our own Dyson Swarm around the Earth. I hadn't looked at it that way before (despite frequently joking that an alien species could probably detect our satellites and debris from light years away and want nothing to do with anyone who messes up their neighbourhood like that) and it's awe-inspiring and mind-blowing. I guess I was too busy pigeon-holing a Dyson Swarm as something vast around a star than as any swarm of artificial orbiting bodies. Thank you. You've given me my awe moment for the week!
An extremely interesting concept! Thanks for sharing your knowledge on these concepts. I also appreciate your non-controversial approach with introducing each topic and possible counter theories.
"Unless the people living in simulated paradises or narcotic hazes are expansionist themselves" One of my favorite books, The Voice of Cepheus by K.P. Appleby, addresses this issue very well. The entities in the virtual reality were even more competitive and spread by contacting immature civilizations and convincing them to create interfaces which the aliens could use to expand their memory space. The specifically targetted their transmissions to find civilizations at just the right level to have the technology, but have no defense. It's a good book.
I found your videos today (had to go to work) but since I got home I have been watching them non stop for at least 2 and a half hours. I have learned so much, thank you. I have never heard the Fermi Paradox explained so well. These videos are just fantastic.
Thanks Luminya, I remember you mentioning you'd found the channel this morning (in my timezone anyway), glad you're enjoying them. I'm always amazed anyone can actually chain watch these things without a pot of coffee and a bottle of aspiring though :)
Been listening to you for years and I'm coming back to listen to some of the old ones. You mentioned recently that you thought maybe you needed some philosophy study. I think it may be helpful and I would enjoy listening to your thoughts on philosophical matters. Great channel.
Thank you so much for uploading this. I'm a sociologist professionally but these kinds of subjects fascinate me and recently I have been into the Fermi paradox as well as the dyson sphere/ matryoshka brain stuff. Listening to and discussing these things gives me so much pleasure and enjoyment. Also for the people commenting on the speech, I really didn't think it was a big deal at all. Like until I scrolled down to see some of these comments it wasn't even something I thought more than a few seconds about. I think if this stuff truly fascinates you as it does me, a slight speech impediment should really be a non-factor.
+drey1407 The sociological angle is pretty relevant to the later phase of filters, like going beyond simple tribes and oral history, and that is usually considered one of the most probable filters. Glad the speech impediment didn't bug you much, I frequently consider grabbing someone else to read these to avoid the problem entirely but its not terribly practical just yet.
Thank you for this wonderful explanation. I really enjoyed following your rationale, and am sending the link to others who, like me, have only a basic understanding of science but are nevertheless fascinated by the future of technology, its implications for the universe and the question of other intelligent forms of life.
here is a mind game. what if they use cloack.. no seriously.. wouldn't it be hilarious if every civilization tends to make one cloaked Dyson sphere and doe not go further out of fear of being noticed by an even more advanced civilization. and all the unaccounted dark matter is simply billions of civilisations hiding from eatch other and wondering why the fuck they cant account for the extra mass ;) man that would really fit well in the hitch hikers guide to the galaxy;)
+zool201975 Hilarious but unlikely, eventually someone would break the silence, that specific point gets addressed in the companion video, category 2D as I recall. But yeah I could definitely see Douglas Adams writing that scenario up :) ruclips.net/video/Z4snQS1QGD4/видео.html
+Isaac Arthur I had a similar theory - that dark matter might be a bunch of complete Dyson spheres - while listening to another of your videos. You make a pretty good point about IR light, though I would argue there are certainly ways to convert IR into something we aren't looking for that's more useful to the sphere-building civilization.
+zool201975 What's so creepy is that KIC 8462852 would have been cloaked too, but it maybe have gone through a extension even, and without maintenance there's just the hunk of debris leftover.
+David Welch KIC 8462852 or WTF 001 as its getting nicknamed is probably not a Dyson, either under construction or decay, the media's hyping it up a bit. Dyson's don't fluctuate in brightness, since that would imply it didn't have radial symmetry and while there are a lot ways to build up a swarm they'd pretty much all call for radial symmetry to be loosely maintained during the process. You might expect that symmetry to break down if left to decay but even that's a bit of stretch. Plus, this is a F3V star after all, with a lifetime of only 3 billion years and change, stars in this range have some serious problems being likely homeworlds of ETIs.
If Dyson swarm inhabitants used a black hole (possibly artificially created), with a mass about that of the Sun, as a waste heat dump, they'd be able to extract more work from the heat than if they simply allowed it to radiate off into space. It'd be like using a heat engine with a cold reservoir at a negligible temperature above absolute zero instead of the 2.725 Kelvins of the cosmic background radiation. As a side-effect, they would not be visible in the infrared without breaking the laws of thermodynamics. Perhaps we should be looking for sub-CMBR temperature zones in space? P.S. - "The Killing Star" has been my absolute favorite novel since I read it when I was young. I strongly recommend it for anyone who likes more science than fiction in their science fiction.
boots4yew Yes I'm always a bit surprised how rarely it makes it onto any of Top X lists of sci-fi novels. Of course Pellegrino has a fairly checkered past so that might factor into it. Anyway, yeah certainly if you've got a way to make and tap black holes via Hawking Radiation or Penrose Mechanism or something better they ought to be more efficient power sources per unit mass then even a
Isaac Arthur I don't know anything about Pelligrino's past, but I'll look into when I get a chance. Thanks for the info. I completely agree that using sub-Solar mass black holes would be an excellent matter to energy conversion method via Hawking Radiation especially for low energy output masses like red dwarfs or non-radiative sources. My suggestion of artificially creating a black hole to be used as a heat sink was not for small ones though since, as you point out, they are highly radiative. My limited understanding of black hole thermodynamics leads me to (perhaps naively) guess that Solar-mass, or larger, black holes would absorb infrared photons and their absorbed energy would add to the mass of the black hole. According to Hawking's theory, as the mass increases, the amount of Hawking radiation decreases, I think. So a solar-scale heat engine would have a cold temperature reservoir that continues to stay cold until the far distant future after the black hole has had time to dissipate. Controlling heat flow as phonons on nano-structured surfaces has already been demonstrated. So, I am thinking that this sort of process, coupled with near-field interaction (like in this publication pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/nl901208v), could be used to carry waste heat across an event horizon of a Solar-mass black hole at a higher heat transfer co-efficient than is possible by direct black-body radiation. Then there'd be a lower amount of waste heat escaping the system since less heat would be going into black-body radiation from the cooling surfaces. Consequently, the Carnot efficiency of a heat engine would go up. Given the energy scale involved, even a small efficiency difference might be motivation enough to go to the extreme of using a black hole. I recently saw a study done where astronomers were trying to find evidence of galaxy-spanning Dyson-swarm civilizations by looking for unusually high infrared to optical ratios of EM emission. They couldn't definitely find any, although I'm sure there is still a lot of searching left to be done. I'd like to put forward the idea that perhaps, given the potential ability of K2 civilizations to use black holes to "hide" their waste heat as a natural by-product of getting higher heat engine efficiencies, the search might be more successful if they look for, as you pointed out, expanding dark wave sans IR emission. By the way, please keep up the great work! Your video was thought provoking and informative. I'm looking forward to watching the rest of them.
boots4yew Very glad you enjoyed it. Yes, a larger black hole ought to absorb more background radiation then it's Hawking Radiation, I'd have to run the numbers to see where the break off is but I think it's decently below minor planet mass let alone naturally occurring stellar remnants. If we can find a way to dump heat more efficiently then blackbody at large scales that has a very big and obvious impact on things like the Dyson Dilemma since even without the black holes as sinks you might be able to get a lot your heat emitting out a decidedly directed way or get to boost up efficiency. As to Carnot efficiency re: Black holes, there was a good paper on that a couple years back you might enjoy: www-e.uni-magdeburg.de/mertens/teaching/seminar/themen/AJP000066.pdf That's generally on the post-stellar, black hole shepherding lines of thinking so its generally doing that way way post-biological route of squeezing out a few milliwatts for billions of trillions of years rather than any fast approach but the core concepts still fit. I think the key with bigger holes used as waste heat sinks is that their diameters scale up linear to mass. So with big ones, sort of like the Birch Galactic Core megashell I mentioned way at the end of the Megastructures vid, you'd at the very least be able to get half your blackbody waste energy dumped down into the black hole below. Potentially more if you're screwing with the surface geometry of the components so they have more surface area on the down side. Radiating fins inside IR-reflective parabolic dishes aimed down at the black hole and so on. But you're absolutely right, there's probably a lot of tricks one can play with black holes and energy production/efficiency/disposal and black hole hunting is definitely an ideal component of a SETI search.
Isaac Arthur I am a mechanical engineering phd grad student in Korea but my undergrad was in physics, so I maintain a keen interest in subjects like this. School life has kept me very busy recently, but given some very interesting developments in astrophysics these days, I think there might be some grounds for us to work on a collaborative paper on this subject. If you'd like to discuss it more, I'd be very open to it. I can't seem to PM you through this RUclips channel, but if you have the time, you can contact me at boutilier.rm@gmail.com.
I have came across your channel and have started watching your content, I am really enjoying how you explain every detail. Very easy to follow and to understand. Starting to watch your newer content now!! Thank you for giving me something to enjoy again. :)
I would love to hear your thoughts on the relevance of technologies that can alter the wavelength of light on the subject of infrared light emitted by a dyson structure. specifically, whether or not our assumed ability to detect a dyson structure should be re-thought due to the existence of devices such as what can be found if you search "Second-harmonic generation using -quasi-phasematching in a GaAs whispering-gallery-mode microcavity". This device alone could not accomplish the stated goal but serves as a proof of concept and a reference point as to the level of control over light that a vastly more advanced civilization might have. I wonder if its possible to alter the outputted light in such a manner as to make the system appear like an uninteresting, diffuse cloud of hot gas to a distant observer.
enjoyed discussion very much...sets all our minds flying.... my #1...who r u if ur potential enemies can find u #2...imagine black holes as dyson spheres feeding adjoining brane/universe #3...as humans are limited to one direction of time, shared by entrophy, we simply cannot see what is really in universe... (dark matter might be the future which humans cannot see, as a resource yet unused by II Law TD...which is here in it's entirety but we only see along the time line)
There is of course the Dark Forest theory brought up by Cixin Liu in his Rememberance of Earth's Past series of novels. For those unfamiliar with the work, here's a quote from Wikipedia that explains it better than I can remember it: [These are] Ye Wenjie's two axioms of cosmic civilization: 1. Each civilization's goal is survival, and 2. Resources are finite. Like hunters in a "dark forest", a civilization can never be certain of an alien civilization's true intentions. The extreme distance between stars creates an insurmountable "chain of suspicion" where any two civilizations cannot communicate well enough to relieve mistrust, making conflict inevitable. Therefore, it is in every civilization's best interest to preemptively strike and destroy any developing civilization before it can become a threat, but without revealing their own location, thus explaining the Fermi Paradox.
Great video, Isaac. You summed up all the important aspects of the Fermi Paradox nicely. Here are my thoughts: Expansion of alien species is really the core of the Fermi Paradox. But why is there a drive to expand in the first place? In most cases it is simply a necessity. Reasons are: 1. Inside pressure due to dwindling resources. 2. Forward planning, because the amount of usable energy in the universe is limited. 3. Fear of being destroyed by an outside force. (1) is difficult to avoid, because you would need very strict rules in order to enforce a certain behavior. Someone or some group would overstep the boundaries, which is followed by punishment and social destabilization. (2) To our current knowledge this would force a civilization to expand in any case. (3) depends on the knowledge you have of the universe. If you can reasonably rule out an outside threat, this might not be an issue. I guess (1) and (2) have to be explained in order to solve the Fermi Paradox. I now assume that there is an abundance of intelligent life out there, based on the idea that we are a quite average phenomenon in the universe. Is there a reason why basically all species seize expanding at a certain point? In my opinion technological singularity is a likely outcome for any species (I will elaborate if necessary). The ability to expand, sustain, innovate or defend can be summed up in two words: processing power. A species will find itself driven to a state that is basically the most efficient computer imaginable. If you are able to optimize matter and energy to the highest degree, expansion is not an option anymore. Expansion will only delay communication between two points. There is an optimal amount of matter and energy in order to achieve maximum computation. This might explain why expansion in order to increase processing capacity stops at one point. However, the need to gather more and more energy is still there.
Nik G That's a good point and the proccesing lag issue is a real one. BUT, the thing is, re: singularity expansion, that communication lag ought to generally trend linear to radius while processing power would either be rising with either the square or cube of radius. The only time a linear constraint to processing power would kick in is when the singularity starts becoming astrophysically literal. Our entire galaxy crammed together would still only have an event horizon of a fifth of an AU, whereas you could do that Swarm of red dwarves out to 100 ly I mention, but since event horizons expand linear to mass you can only make that swarm so big before it would be inside its own even horizon and that's gonna be in the 1000 galaxy/1000 light year size range. As best as I can tell that's the only upper limit where adding more to that computer isn't going to be more beneficial than the cost in extra light lag.
Kudos, I have not thought of that. I'm still not sure if this linear vs cubic argument holds water. But I guess this line of thought is not new to you, so you have probably done your calculations. Have you taken time dilation into account? This is another factor. When the mass of your computing entity becomes too big, this effect would reduce the number of calculations you can do in a given time. So there might be another sweet spot with high density and small size. If I remember correctly, you have not proposed a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox. What is your opinion on this matter?
Nik G Well you're definitely getting into galactic mass computers before time dilation is likely to be an issue. I do cover this a bit tangentially in the Megastructures video when talking about statites and at the end when talking about Paul Birch's idea for an Earth like shell habitat built around a galactic central black hole. That's a series of concentric spheres where the lower levels do have significant time dilation though as I recall its only about an order of magnitude. The thing is, when talking about MAtrioshka Brains and the like using stars as engine we're generally envisioning statites (giant solar sails) floating above the energy source. By and large that's at distance where the gravity is a great deal weaker than Earth normal and I'm not sure how big something would have to be for those be under that kind of gravity and under significant time dilation too but we're talking at least galactic mass levels. Time dilation near event horizons gets weaker and weaker the bigger the event horizon.
Isaac Arthur It depends of course on the density of your object. Consider black holes. While they are massive, they don't have to be nearly as massive as galaxies. Even black-hole-like objects with very little mass can be imagined. Time dilation is caused by gravity. This in turn can (at least theoretically) approach infinity if the density is high enough. The mentioned entity could have a density much higher than anything we can create today, but smaller than a black hole.
Nik G Black hole radius is linear to mass, it's gravity is still inverse square, that's why the really big ones have lower time dilation and shredding forces near them. But I take you're talking about what often gets called 'computronium', some very dense, potentially neutron star dense, matter that is just raw computing power basically. In a situation like that, yes, you probably would be limited to a maximum of a couple solar masses before expansion would collapse you into a black hole and that massive density thing would probably make it superior to a far more massive but more spread out computer. Short form: I really can't say, we don't have any real model for super-dense computers that would clearly operate at the totally atomic scale or subatomic scale but if they are possible they'd probably be preferable. The caveat there though is that you might have splinter groups tired of sharing (if it isn't a single mind) leave and since it runs on degenerate matter basically it wouldn't really have any compelling reason to get into a resources fist fight with neighbors once ti has its 1-2 solar masses.
Hey Isaac! Have you ever thought of writing a non-fiction book about the Fermi Paradox? Personally, I would find it easier to get a full understanding of the many possible solutions if it was in a book divided into sections (as you do with your videos) where I could flip back and forth.
For those of you wondering, this was Barry Kripke's project that had Sheldon Cooper's panties in a bunch. =P I found this video rather interesting and entertaining. It may not have been intentional, but your narrative makes learning about this stuff a bit more fun.
I think if any of the assumptions are incorrect, it's probably the assumption that a given culture would expand in numbers when they have the resources to do so. Take for instance the birth rate of most of the developed countries on Earth is usually below the replacement rate (less than two children born per couple) according to the CIA's World Fact Book Website (Total Fertility Rate). The US is currently at 1.87 children per couple, European Union = 1.44, Russia = 1.61, etc. As more countries become developed, I expect that trend to continue. On a different note, I absolutely LOVE this channel. I try to watch one episode a day and I'm starting to get a little sad that I'm almost done with all the episodes! These videos do a great job of renewing my hope for humanity's potential future and show us that there's more to that future than just what's immediately visible in the news. If this were Amazon, I'd given this channel 5 Starlifted Stars. ;-) Great job Isaac. THANK YOU!!!
That's an interesting point. I think basic biology may be at play too. When I was a kid I ran population experiments with my fish aquarium using freshwater guppies. At first I just started out with a male and a female and they started out with numerous offspring (I forget how many), but with each successive generation, even when increasing food inputs so that every guppy continued to get the same average amount of food, I noticed that the births per pairing continued to go down as the tank filled up with guppies (I prevented cannibalism as well). While totally unscientific (lack of controls, repeatability, etc). I can't help but wonder if there's some type of biologic mechanism (vs. sociological) at play that keeps birth rates down when a species starts to feel overcrowded, regardless of the level of resources.
Such an existing population control mechanism wouldnt apply to the Fermi paradox. The point about building orbiting habitats and colonizing other stars is that the available space keeps increasing. The thing that keeps the population size stable must be something relatively new. But alas it might just be that highly advanced and old intelligent life is very very rare. Or we might just be early to the party: www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2016-17 One problem I have with the Fermi paradox is that if aliens had colonized our planet billions of years ago then we wouldnt be here to wonder their absence. And if FTL travel is impossible then there is a limit to the stars the aliens would be able to reach. Who knows maybe the edge of their stars was visible from Earth but the expansion of the universe has carried it beyond the visible universe before we started looking. Or we havent looked in the right place hard enough.
it's not impractical, just seems like if I what to drink a milkshake instead of waiting for the milk to evaporate and collecting the vapor is could just use a straw. so instead of building million of solar panels why not build a pipeline to suck up the plasma. I just have a hard time picturing any advanced civilization with the energy requirements of a star to be using solar panels. but that aside I do have other problem with the idea. 1.) if u build a swarm to close u risk blocking the sun energy from reaching to planet resulting in the environmental problem and the further away u build the swarm the resources and labor required would increase exponentially. 2) what about logistics, maintenance, and manufacturing does the civilization have enough resources, labor, and energy to maintain, replace as well as build fast enough to keep up with growing energy needs and will each node return on energy investments within it operational lifecycle. 3) is it practical to build or does a civilization concluded that their rate of advancement they would be able to create better means of generating or extracting energy. before they Dyson swarm can return on its investments. so How is energy from the swarm being collected? (I presume some sort of laser or microwave network).
1. No, it's quite easy to arrange not to block the light hitting a planet, we've discussed that in other videos (you are watching the second video I ever did out of like 60, including a redo of this video). 2. Railroad as are also a pain to build and maintain, so is a power grid, so are solar panels, the things sheer immensity is off set by it supporting way more people. You might need trillions of people to maintain sucha things (or not, we usually assume automation has gotten pretty good before you build one) but if you're population is pretty big, like a million trillion, its not that huge a deal. The US has more road workers maintaining our highway than most ancient historical empires had people. 3) If they do, as the video discusses, find a better source of power, it will in most cases amount to the same thing. The video isn't about dyson spheres, its about interstellar civilizations being prone to make use of stuff that isn't otherwise being used, and that being noticeable far away.
My perspective is that because of Moore's law, Alien technology would become smaller and smaller, thus requiring less energy. It may be that it's easier to make things more efficient on the home planet rather than building a Dyson sphere. Also, with quantum computing, it may be that it's not necessary to keep expanding the size of the computer itself. Another point is: In most first world countries the population is falling, not rising.
How about the fact that we become advanced and expand our civilization... each component of a dyson swarm can be a station allowing millions of people to live on it... with that then we have a living space eventually of 4(pi)r^2 lets say we build the dyson at 1 au (distance between earth and our parent star) 4(pi) 0.5 au ^ 2 = 3.1415926536 square au or square 292,029,281.238394 miles of living potential living space.. if we had the swarm at 1 square au we have 12.5663706144 square au or 1,168,117,124.953578 square miles of living space and at 2 au ... 50.2654824576 square au or 4,672,468,499.814311 square miles of living space. we would be able to expand our civilizations population and provide the food and energy, allow for sections .. to be for research for different fields... our exponential growth of medicine, technology, advancement in general would be even faster... MUCH MUCH FASTER and allow based on the current amount of people on earth with 196.9 million square miles of surface area... at 4,672,468,499.814311 square miles of living space lets say... the comfortable saturation amount of people to live on earth is 20 billion. Then the population of human beings would be 474,603,199,574 or 474.6 billion people ..... for maximum total saturation or living humans around the star. and we can expand to other planets very very fast and we would reach another planet before we meet this saturation of 474.6 billion people
The thing I wonder about with the Fermi Paradox is if we are placing too much focus on intelligence and not considering culture enough. What is the likelihood that a culture develops that favours organised cooperation, hard work and long-term planning over immediate needs and individualism? When our own history is discussed, the combination of cold winters and protestantism if often mentioned as a driving force behind the increase in organised technological development in the west. Would this have happened in all other configurations? It must be hard to estimate what the chance is of not only a species capable of advanced technology to develop, but also a culture that encourages industrialisation, globalisation and the associated technological progress. We have had several candidate political ideologies that do not prefer this focus. It reminds me of the idea that since we have physical constants that are perfectly tuned for a universe existing where life is possible, our point of view could not be any other. Similarly; our precise history as a species, and as far as we know, ONLY our exact history leads to the situation were we are asking this question. Perhaps not many other sequences of cultural events lead to the idea that one should cooperate to reach beyond the planet?
+Hallvard Kristiansen You pretty much nailed it on the head Hallvard, and I talk about this a bit in the companion videos. Obviously developing a brain all by itself is a pretty long process and not necessarily a certain route, lots of indicators are the human brain is a bit of a freak anomaly. But even if you get one, there could be tons of tiny variables that stop technology from ever getting rolling even if you have a brain that can handle it. Something as seemingly irrelevant as the critter being the largest land animal around - which really wouldn't be that weird a scenario - might keep them from ever using dray animals, and its hard to imagine the kind of impact that could have on them. They might regard labor saving devices as utterly dehumanizing and be unswayed by logic otherwise in the same way we tend to regard cannibalism, most of us not being inclined to bring knife and fork to a funeral no matter how much someone says its an empty shell that's just going to go to waste. There's a lot of factors in between developing a large brain and developing a rocket, and we probably shouldn't be assuming the former almost inevitably leads to the latter.
The basic fault in above reasoning is assumption that civilization with unlimited resurcess supply will be constantly interested in organic population growth. We have already first signs on Earth that some may choose for quality intsead of quantity and the real question / dilemma is : If there is any theoretical limit how perfect/ complicated / smart single living entity could be ? Then whole sphere above could be inhabited by single being. We are in difficult position to judge what vast superior being may want/ desire even if could achieve every possible outcome. It will be like asking our earth worm what this farmer is doing on his fields and how spend free time of chewing dirt.
Completely agree. This is all based on current human trends which we cannot project on to an unknown advanced entity/entities. If anything I'd think they'd go smaller & compact. Prob parked & hidden on some icy stable body. Instead of space conquest they/it lives in a rich endless comfortable virtual reality, safer than actual reality. But at this point we can only speculate & prob wrong in all our speculations as we can only imagine things based on our extremely limited experience, & knowledge.
Peter Bilski Expansion would still be necessary, if the being wants to survive. Usable energy in this universe is finite, as far as we know. Thus it has to gather and store energy just to postpone its demise. If it does not want to expand, this will just leave more room for others.
Hey man, great videos! They are very informative and summarize very clearly and concisely what the Fermi paradox and Dyson spheres are all about. So well done! My only comment is on point 1) and that maybe this point does not hold over time. Point 1) is essentially an evolutionary pressure, and will hold true if Darwinian evolution persists, but as civilizations become more technologically advanced, they may by default (deliberate or otherwise) start to remove themselves more and more from the pressures of evolution. Darwinian evolution is a painful and uncomfortable process, and humans (and essentially all animals and possibly aliens) naturally tend to seek pain avoidance. For instance, our own civilization has gone to great lengths to try and remove ourselves from the uncomfortable pressures of evolution as best we can, and we have done this over a very short period of time. It seems that point 1) needs to hold over a fairly significant period of time that the technological civilization exists, in order for it to put enough pressure on it to expand, but if technological civilizations can remove themselves rapidly from the evolutionary processes, then the pressure from point 1) becomes less significant and this otherwise key evolutionary driver that would lead expansion may weaken or eventually not even persist at all. As you said, it only takes one civ to keep this evolution pressure there, but they would almost have to make a conscious effort to do so. As well, if by keeping this evolutionary pressure there causes deliberate detriment to the individual organism in the immediate moment, then they may be much less inclined to do so, and it could theoretically be a natural outcome to almost always get rid of it (ie another filter). Anyway just my two cents, like you I will put myself in category 1B) in your other vid for now, and reserve the right to change my mind whenever new ideas/evidence come to bear lol. What are your thoughts?
Ian White Thanks! As to evolutionary pressures decreasing, we'd really try to have to imagine a culture which existed with zero competition, expansion, or aggression drives and there's something of a catch-22 there because for a culture like that to come into existence and be the entire culture left they'd have to have been very, very aggressive, competitive, and expansionist. It's really hard to construct a hypothetical culture that doesn't have any of those drives and yet is actually able to even come into existence or if it did, enforce its own rules on any rebellious members.
Isaac Arthur I know, and I agree, but that's the thing with the paradox, because if these conditions hold, alien civilizations should be there; but instead they are nowhere to be found (which is an unsettling feeling for some weird reason) So, if we go back and look at our conditions, it is easier to think that aliens will be able to exempt themselves first from laws/theories of biology and evolution, then physical laws/theories, such as relativity. And they probably will try and exempt themselves (as this leads to greater control of environment, immortality etc), given the chance, humans would exempt themselves from physical laws, such as faster than speed of light travel and thermodynamics. But anyway, I was going to ask, if 1B holds in your other video, this would seem to imply that the great filter is now behind us, as technological civs are rare, so, if this is the case, then what was the filter? Was it intelligence, tool making, language, agriculture, industrialization? Because whilst no other animal has broken through any of those ceilings, humans have appeared to do so, and have broken through by a huge margin. If those ceilings are so hard to break through, why have we broken through so exceptionally (it's not like we just squeaked through into agriculture and stayed there for 500K years). And then also, does this mean that humanity will inevitably be the first to reach out beyond our solar system and create things like dyson spheres and be the ones to solve the paradox?
Ian White The paradox is pretty eerie, it's not hard to see why a lot of writers, arguably even back to HP Lovecraft, have taken the absence of life vs sheer size/age of the Universe conundrum and written it up as horror stories. As to a Great Filter, I generally subscribe to their being a lot of Major Filters, physical and biological, along the way that just keep slashing the odds down. I tend to figure it was our brain architecture combined with slow maturation, being omnivorous, and tribal setup. As to us being the first, my guess is yes, volume and stars, once you get into the millions of light years, starts rising again as the cube of distance so evne though we're looking back in time, if I'm looking at a spherical shells a ten million light years thick the volume at 100 Million Lyr for that shell is just an eighth of stuff of one at 200 MLyr and a thousandth of billion lights. I could believe intelligent life gets more common with time but not enough to justify saying that if we can't see any dyson'd up galaxies out to a billion lights now that there's going to be a plethora of it within a 100 MLyr where the light just hasn't got to us yet. Here's nothing to indicate that extra 900 million years would have made intelligent life a thousand times more common. Out past a couple billion light years though the light is getting old enough that the Universe might have been just too young and the Observable universe is only a few orders of magnitude bigger than that bubble so going from one in quintillion worlds spawning civilizations to one in a sextillion isn't all that much bigger of a leap.
By the way Arthur. I love your channel and it really gets me a thinking. ( no I wanted it said that way ). Also I am a lake Erie resident also. Great to have fresh water to swim in as opposed to salt water. Living on the northern coast has its privileges does it not. Keep posting more so I can be more informed about the universe and where we are in it. Gratefully. Mr. B
Watched a TedX video recently that suggested that not only are technological civilizations incredibly rare, but technological intelligence is extremely rare to be almost impossible-- that only a particular series of very improbable events gave rise to human evolution, making it extremely rare in the universe.
+brian rob Glad you enjoyed it Brian, but there's a new version of the video out I wish you'd watched instead, I tend to consider this vid sufficiently low quality that I almost deleted it: ruclips.net/video/QfuK8la0y6s/видео.html
i am sure that our understanding of laws of physics will dramatically change in next 1000 years, just like it did in the past 1000 years. who knows what possibilities would better understanding of physics laws allows us to do. maybe some of the possibilities would be to willingly completely remove ourselves from the equation and transcend. i consider somewhat arrogant position that current understanding of physic is at its pinnacle and that current generation is know it all. i still greatly appreciate the video
Ah, and if I had acted like an intelligent being and read your whole posts here - I would have seen that! :-) So, now I am going to listen to the new one!
+internot Thanks, though this being one of my original vids I always want to redo it to look better and maybe be a bit less sprawling and meandering in the narrative :) It continually surprises me this remains leaps and bounds my most viewed video, albeit it's had more time to collect views.
I recently heard of a possible problem concerning satellites. When there are many satellites, destruction of one can send out thousands of potential particles that collide with other satellites, thereby resulting in a destructive chain reaction around the earth. Could this also happen with a Dyson Cloud?
You know, there is a region in space where there aren't as many stars compared to the adjacent areas, and I believe there is a slight IR radiation. It has been theorized that there is a point of neighboring touch between our "univorse" and a parallel one
About the visibility of the dyson swarm/matrioshka brain, it actually can be invisible, circumventing the need to radiate heat in all directions by refracting infrared light as a narrow beam to a specific direction in some far off galaxy in order for a probable ulra-advanced hostile civilisation in that far off galaxy that detects it for them to be difficult to interact with it.
Interesting video. I think the best explanation is that the appearance of intelligent species is extremely unlikely. It could be that life is unlikely, or that multicellular life is unlikely, or that intelligent life is unlikely, or that technological life is unlikely, etc. I believe it is probably all of the above. My take on this is that fine-tuning of the universe seems to indicate that there is either a creator (God or simulation) or a multiverse. The fine-tuning is so incredibly precise that it cannot be waved away as the result of luck. If we live in a multiverse, the extreme fine-tuning suggests that there are a *huge* number of universes, and the vast majority of them don't support intelligent life. It is likely that among the universes that do support intelligent life, a huge majority only *barely* supports it, and they only contain one intelligent species. Obviously the ones that strongly support it may contain many intelligent species, but if these universes are sufficiently rare, it is quite possible that it is much more likely for an intelligent species to belong to one of the many universes that support only one intelligent species rather than one that supports a lot. If think that this makes a strong case for the fact that we are alone. The bad news is that it also suggests that we live in the least hostile part of the universe and that we will find other parts of the universe to be less hospitable. On the other hand, it makes our existence in this universe much more important: we are not just one among billions of civilizations, we are *the* civilization, the one that will take over the galaxy and beyond.
That's a pretty common take on the fine-tuning issue, the logic is fairly solid but the issue with assuming a creator, divine or digital, is that we have to look at the entire thing from the perspective of motives and optimization. For instance, if we assumed specifically that the Universe was designed to only permit one intelligent species to arise you would have to explain why so much of the universe is out of reach, as the super-majority of even those parts we can see will flee over the cosmological event horizon long before we could reach them. It seems non-optimal, on the surface anyway.
Just one thing to say, I don't think your idea of a 'least hostile part' of the universe is correct. The universe is petty big and rather old and is going to get a hell of a lot older. This spec of time that we have evolved during was not, not long ago and will not in the relatively short time be a hospitable place. So your idea that life is more likely to be limited to one per universe is not right. I know we have only found it on earth so far but we find it absolutely everywhere and the rest of the universe is made of the same stuff going through pretty much the same thing as us. Ok two things, Also saying that we are more likely to be in a universe that only produced I life form is 'bad math' in my opinion. In the multiverse theory you have infinities of infinities, so we are just as likely to find your self with others than not.
Dan Pope Thanks for your answer. I'm not sure I understand your first point: if there was no one before us and no one after us, then our universe will have contained just one intelligent species. At no point was there more than one. As for your second argument that the whole universe is made of the same stuff, it is very appealing, I agree. However let me answer with an analogy: imagine a world with 10,000 islands, each covered with a large forest. You live on one of those islands and unfortunately the forest is on fire. The fire spreads everywhere on your island. You reason: "look, there's fire everywhere here, and since we know that all other islands are made of the same stuff, there must be lots of islands on fire". But what if it's incredibly hard to light a fire on this planet? Maybe there's one chance in a million that a fire will start on any given island. In that case your island is the only one on fire. To me, Life spreads like fire so seeing it everywhere around us does not prove that it can appear easily, it only shows that once it has started it spreads easily. Wdyt?
Aurélien Geron The first part was me replying to your idea that we might find other parts of the universe more hostile to life. Our part of space, not so long ago was very hostile to life and will return to that state pretty soon. We have only been around for a very short space of time and by the time we can travel between stars we will have the ability to avoid or alter parts of space that would harm us. Yes the universe is very hostile to life but not at every place at the same time and with long enough periods in between for life to reach a stage where it can save it's self. I like your fire analogy but i do not believe life is 'hard' to get started. life emerged many many times and was probably wiped out in a few spots too. The idea that life evolved once and we are all descended from it is an old one. Life started in many different forms individually using the same ingredients and chemical processes and as survival of the fittest started and they began to eat each other genetic material was swapped narrowing the tree of life until we reached to point of complex multicellular specialized organisms at which point we began to diverge again. I like the multiverse theory as it makes it easier to believe at we had a chance to exist and gets rid of the 'fine tuned for life' problem but in the end it doesn't really matter as the other universes can not effect us nor us them. Like your island that is on fire, it doesn't make the dammed bit of difference to one island if another is on fire but it makes one hell of a difference to the one that burning. The way I look at it is our universe is abundant with the ingredients for life, it's start many times as soon as it could on this planet, as little as 400my after the forming of our sun, using chemical processes that are the same through out the universe. I would be more inclined to believe in a god if we were the only planet with life on, I'd call bull shit on that.
for building a Dyson Swarm: if you have large surface objects (like a sollar array) that has little mass, you may end up having to power them otherwise they will be pushed out of their orbits by solar wind..
Ioan-Paul Pirau True but not a real obstacle. If they're thin enough to be significantly pushed by the solar wind you just modify their orbit. This is how a 'statite' works, a static satellite that can hover over a star rather than orbit. And there'ss room in between, for one that's too heavy to be a statite but still seriously impacted by solar wind, to permit slower orbit like a L1 Lagrange point is.
Isaac Arthur Agree, but then you will not be able to put too many objects in orbit due to the high risk of collision between objects (the same issue is raised today for the over-population with "space junk" of eart's orbit.. aka Kessler syndrome). I'm not sure if that thinning out of the layer of objects will not negate the goal of the Dyson swarm (since it's not so dense to capture a significant part of the sun's radiation). Just thinking out loud here..
Ioan-Paul Pirau The collision concern isn't all that great, you have to keep in mind just how big one of these things is in volume and subsequently how incredibly vaporous they are in density. Our satellites mostly take up a fairly narrow window with all sorts of orbits that crisscross every couple of hours. These would generally crisscross twice a year but you're talking about tens of millions of kilometers of 'depth' in terms of the radius of the shell they occupy. If you compose it of many concentric rings of orbiting bodies, cocked at angles to each other, those rings can be thousands of kilometers apart and still allow for thousands of rings. Plus you've got all that energy to use to correct orbits with or vaporize ones that blow up or go screwy from accidental or intentional damage. Collision will always be a concern, but it's a pretty manageable one.
The Kardashev Scale is old, inflexible and obsolete. I use the newer, much more flexible Makarios Scale, which has ten+ levels, and refers to materials and technology, as well as energy use. You can find this, and its definitions on the blog: www.emunahechad.blogspot.com And there is a lot more intriguing stuff there, too. Subscribe and share!
You say dyson spheres don't exist around us because we can see the stars. But then you say dyson spheres would only block visible light, so... we would still see the stars even with dyson spheres. Which is it? How can you tell the difference between a cool temperature star and a dyson star? How can you tell the difference between a red shifted star and a dyson star? And why can a dyson sphere only capture visible light for energy? Why can't you capture all or most of the energy?
I think the Fermi paradox is a perfect example of using our own, not very spiritual, yardstick and applying it to the rest of the universe. The paradox relies on civilisations being wild consumers like ourselves. If civilisations are perfectly content in their learning, happiness, and love for their environment, total domination of stars or galaxies wouldn't enter the equation
Your adrevenue is growing? Thank me... I'm always watching your latest video at night ... woke up today after autoplaying ten hours of your content, no ad scipping but now I want to buy shit, I don't need :)
We’re really fixed on the Dyson swarm idea and how that must be prevalent throughout the universe because it’s a most efficient end for an advanced civilization up the Kardashev scale, but that’s all still rooted in our way of looking at things. It’s hard to unite around the persistent need to grasp and possess an object of power. With us that always leads to politics and the struggle for control. Maybe a super advanced civilization would consider that the baser outlook. You can’t keep a society going like that for long before there’s endless infighting. All the intelligent civilizations that destroy themselves in the long run must have that mindset. That’s why we see no widespread evidence of Dyson spheres. And you could argue that a super advanced civilization can still go the Dyson route entirely out of practical necessity, just to power and maintain itself, but they probably have a better way of living with energy.
Rather than surrounding the sun, would it perhaps make more sense to place floating fusion generators in gas giants? Gas giants are basically small suns that haven't ignited. You can burn the energy at your leisure in a controlled fashion, rather than uncontrolled, like the sun. So the fuel will last many, many, times longer. If I recall our entire energy requirements are presently only in the kilos of hydrogen/year kind of range. This would last virtually indefinitely from a gas giant
possible hypothesis: most species are tend to spend a large portion of their time in existence squabbling with themselves over resources rather than working together to advance the whole
The rebuttal to that would probably be that you just sent me a message on a computer, rather than us squatting around a fire talking while waiting for a deer to finish cooking.
using humanity as a baseline, it took 20,000 years to get to this point. The majority of us are relatively poor of resources and information. A human beings' number one predator is another human being. And populations humans are more likely to be wiped out by war or terrorism than a natural extinction level event.
Brilliant video, great facts and covered all the bases. I believe all 3 conditions are not true though. 1) I find it unlikely a civilization would choose to increase in numbers even if they could comfortably do so. There is no advantage to having more organisms than the carrying capacity of an environment so eventually it would become unproductive to keep expanding in population since resources are finite. 2) there are likely MANY sources of energy superior to the photons given off by stars. (Sound waves, dark energy, synthetic nuclear fusion, Higgs Field, extradimensional energies, or something we can't even fathom are all possible sources of energy). 3)Worm holes
1) *when, bullshit, and it only takes one. 2) its not just photons. its every element. and they are 99% of the mass (needed for stuff) 3) you can't believe in a bunch of satellites bc you believe the universe has a hole in it?
One other option needs to be explored IMO. What of societies that learn how to upload conscience into a virtual existence? A virtual immortal existence replaces the need to propagate. As long as you have available computing resources to have every individual living in a total paradise in virtual reality, no expansion is needed. You would trade in your physical life for an eternal virtual life.
i can think of a reason why you would "hide" a dyson swarm, only it would not be so much hiding as just a side effect. if you are a long term thinking civilization who wants to live as long as possible then one of the things you are likely going to do is shrink down the size of any star you swarm up, this will make that star live longer and also dim it, you might then fpcus on a way to collect and concentrate your waste heat using IR mirrors or something since every watt you can store now is a watt of power you can run on when your star finally burns out.it would still have all those other effects gravity, blocking light, and all that stuff but the star itself might become to dim to really notice against the background.
Reminds me of a theory I came across in a scifi novel: A civilization's lifespan was either 50 years after the discovery of nuclear weapons or indefinite.
Hi, I have a thought about the dyson dilema. Its an argument against it happening. A race won't necessarily 'dyson up' if the resources are available because every stage or artificial habitat requires capital resources to initiate. Energy and mass are not the only factors - ultimately the main requirement is cold hard cash. Governments and other organisations may lack the political motivation to expend such resources to build something that wont immediately provide a political gain, or a benefit for the population of that nation. Governments rarely work to expand the population - otherwise why not build large desalination plants and begin colonizing the great desserts? In order for the dyson swarm to continue even after being initiated, there must be immediate gain, or else some form of self sustaining progress - such as an expansion tax for all habitats and a legal framework which makes breakaways difficult. Races won't dyson up because there wont be an immediate benefit or else the investment resources always get sucked into other less grand projects such as transport, education or healthcare.
Something I disagree with this video about is that he claims cultures with the resources will always expand but if that's the case why are birth rates dropping in rich nations and why do so many rich humans have such few children?
Do neutron stars have any particular use for a type II? Or are they just too dangerous?. By the way, "Evacuate Earth" was an interesting Discovery Channel "what if?" piece involving the topics of neutron star + O'Neil cylinder + anti-matter + nuclear pulse detonation propulsion.
+Joseph Rajewski Oh sure, I mean beyond being handy clocks early on, you can Dyson one up, you just wouldn't be using anything classically photo-voltaic to do it since neutron stars emit down in the nanometer, soft x-ray range. Tapping that spectrum of energy efficiently is actually a really big deal in fusion research and several groups are working on tricks for doing it better but we already have pretty solid methods, even ignoring the old fashion one of just heating up slurry of water and something X-ray absorptive to turn a turbine. You could also weaponize one, a X-Ray based Dyson-Nicoll beam would be pretty nasty, but I've never considered the Dyson-Nicoll beam concept terribly strategically logical. Same for transmutation, the working theory is Gold and a few other heavy elements are produced principally by Neutron Star on Neutron Star collisions but that's always struck me as a bit inefficient to do deliberately, if you've got tons of power, tons of hydrogen and helium, and little metals, you can just run a massive supercollider to get your metals instead of relying on supernovae.
+Isaac Arthur Good points. I was thinking it could make a terrifying Doomsday weapon, given it's small size and destructive pull. Didn't think of the focused beam scenario, like a pulsar. Will you be covering spacecraft design, mainly propulsion systems, in future videos? Thanks again!
+Joseph Rajewski Kind of depends, in theory my next video is supposed to be Rogue Planets followed by Interstellar Colonization but its been a busy month and I keep getting distracted or feeling like I need to short ones on a few unrelated topics. The Interstellar Colonization video will spend some time talking about ships but I don't know how much yet, and that will be mostly about propulsion regardless.
+Rl Badger Thank you, though this particular video is in a loose tie for what I consider my worst creations... also ironically still the most popular one. Hard to believe its been nearly a year since I made this thing.
There's a problem with a supercomputer so large that the speed of light becomes an internal communications problem. Any AI in it would develop multiple identity crises, as regions that are below the size scale that the speed of light doesn't present a problem develop allegiance to some local processing center and begin to view other parts of the whole supercomputer as rivals for resources.
Enter quantom computing! To me, it seem more and more likely that quantom computing will be the futer of computers nt and will probably be tthe driver that leads us into a sort of aingularity. Not only can information travel instantaneous based on emtanglement, but the sheer number of combininations possible would be a leapfrog in socientif
I'm probably not the first to bring this up and I'm sure you're fully aware of this, but space itself can travel faster than light. It would be more accurate to say that nothing material can travel faster than light unless that material object is located in a pocket space that travels faster than light. (NASA FTL research for example.)
+timelike01 Surprisingly no, nobody has brought that up before in the comments on this video, but yes you're right, there's a number of things that can move faster than light itself, like a shadow, or a laser pointer's actual dot reflecting off an object, or the expansion of space itself between galaxies. Or, in theory anyway, as you mention, a small pocket of space which was contracting or expanding at superluminal speeds. Truth be told though, there's not much chance of that actually allowing a causality violation and that's about the only way you can have useful FTL.
+Isaac Arthur I think you mean there's no way of FTL travel being developed anytime soon. It might be achieved after a few centuries of research, but it's not going to happen within the current human lifespan.
+timelike01 I wish that's what I meant. No, I genuinely don't expect us to ever lick FTL or Entropy. I would be very glad to be proven wrong but I don't see it in the cards. Too many of the FTL cheats that are proposed rely on handwaves involving things like exotic matter or the ability to directly manipulate space-time when we don't even know where to begin. That really could change, we've only been at this science game for a few centuries and we've billions of years to improve in, but right now FTL is as far outside our reach as the last digit of Pi.
I somewhat disagree. Because I'll only accept the claim that FTL travel is impossible only after one or more (preferably more) spacecraft designed for FTL travel have been built and tested and FAIL to exceed the speed of light. After all, experimentation is part of the scientific method.
Forgive me for going UFO hunter but I would like to consider the possibility that Dyson swarms do exist and aren't recognized as such. Here is the premise: Alien civilizations like to build their Dyson swarms really close to the star or other high energy source, exactly why is not important. They also care about hiding. While they can't make their heat exhaust go away they can make it look like something else: like turning a small hot star into a large cool star, or making an illusion of a nebula. Am I completely off base here?
Daniel Hall Not really off base, you could spread your Dyson out to mimic a red giant. It would work but you've got two problems. First the components would be as hot as a red giant and its hard to make living space at 2500 Kelvin. If you can work at those temps somehow you might as well build in the star itself. Second, those observing you are going to wonder why the star appears to be way older than its co-moving neighbors. In a non-science analogy everything you do to hide a Dyson just shifts the anomaly rather than removing it. A year or so back I chatted with some other physics types about all the ways we could maybe hide one and every suggestion just popped up another anomaly. Tech civs probably tend toward curiosity and evolution encourages healthy paranoia, so you'd have to assume if you give an observer any anomaly they are going to stare at it till they decipher it. It also raises the "Who are we hiding from?" problem. A K2 civ is only going to be worried about other K2 civs, but the observational assets of a K2 civ are obscenely huge. We have about 10,000 professional astronomers on Earth, a K2 civ with a billion times our area and pop employing the same percentage of its population for that would have around 10 Trillion astronomers, enough to assign more than a dozen to every single star in the galaxy full time and each team with a scope at least of Hubble sensitivity. They've also probably got a lot of extra-solar resources to give them a different viewing angle. I wouldn't give good odds on hiding a Dyson around a star even from a dozen modern astronomers with modern equipment tasked to look at that star, let alone whatever sort of juiced-up options in terms of better equipment and better brains are probably available to a K2 civ. So if they're hiding for fear of attack it starts making a lot more sense for them to devote their resources to expanding and arming instead.
What if Humans are the first intelligent life in the universe? Would that mean humans would be the Aliens other life forms would talk about, take pictures of human flying saucers with bad quality cameras and so on?
Isaac Arthur How likley is the possibility we simply assume: not seeing visible light but, infrared from a galaxy that it was just so far away all the visible light had red shifted? Therefore would we just make a mistake on how far away the galaxy is rather than assume it had been "Dyson" consumed by a K3 civilization?
+Isaac Arthur i enjoyed it a lot! in light of youtube's behaving like a grandma showing old pictures to your girlfriend... care to recommend a personal favorite?
+sazibeg For me my favorite is always the newest one, but the second to last made, Interstellar Colonization, is pretty connected to Dyson Dilemma so it might be a good choice. ruclips.net/video/3y3MmmfZmP8/видео.html
*Raises hand!* Can I put in a request? Isaac, could you do a video on what an alien civilization would require to exist in terms of body mechanics, intelligence, and culture? For example, would it be necessary or just more likely that they would be super predators? Would they need to be abstract thinkers, even philosophical? That sort of thing.
+MultiKm1 Sorry for the delayed answer, missed this one. This is hard one for me because I'm in the Fermi Paradox camp that thinks there are a lot of hurdles from abiogenesis to technology but that a big one, probably the biggest one, is exactly what you're describing there, the complexity involved in finding the goldilocks spot that pushes a decently large brain into sapience and there's tons of little variables that were they just a bit different (diet, maturation rate of brain, social structure, long term memory, food density, etc) might impede that ever developing and staying around. Brains are very expensive. The tricky parts are 1) I'm biased, and may unfairly represent it and 2) It's not my field, I'm physics, not bio, anthro, neuro, medicine, psych, etc and I'm just not sure I have a grasp of those fields detailed enough to give a fair analysis in depth. But we will doubtless talk about it more, I think we did in some of the other videos in brief dives.
FTL in this sense per either wormholes or the Alculberri Warp drive (both requiring a source of negative mass-energy...which now seems at least plausible) does seem to be at least plausible without actually violating physical law. This exacerbates the Fermi Paradox as you note, but it would solve the Dyson Dilemna.
+ian Chapman It's really hard to say, I talked about FTL and its implications in this regard more in the newer version of this video I released last week and the subscribers talked me into doing an entire series on FTL concepts about a month back that's got those two options slated as the next two episodes. Most of the negative mass/energy FTL concepts have a hint of promise to them, and negative energy at least is quite probably real, but I remain reluctantly pessimistic about the subject. Anyway there should have been an annotation at the beginning directing you to that, though I gather a lot of mobile devices are bad at showing those: ruclips.net/video/QfuK8la0y6s/видео.html
Biggest objection I have for dyson's sphere is the amount of resources needed to create one. Every civilization is limited to resources their planet houses. I don't think we can just assume that most civilizations are capable or willing to cannibalize their home planet for Dyson's sphere. If the Dyson's sphere project fails the civilization might end up destroying itself.
siprus Well it isn't the resources of the planet but the system that matter for making a dyson and an incomplete one is perfectly useful too. The swarms are generally thought to be composed either of statites or many tilted rings of satellites each like a Klemperer Rosette. A thing to keep in mind though is that while there's not enough mass in our system for a terribly 'thick' swarm there is way more than enough for an englobement meant to just absorb solar energy and there's nothing really stopping someone from using a Dyson as a heavy elements factory. Transmutation of lighter elements into heavier ones, fusion, isn't something we've been able to do for an energy profit yet, but the reverse, dumping wads of energy into cramming lighter elements into heavy ones, is a lot easier. So you ought to be able to use the energy from a star via a thin dyson to lift mass off that star and turn it into building material, and as the star shrinks it's lifetime extends and its power output goes down, requiring a smaller dyson. So this enough matter in our solar system and probably most others to wrap a star in solar collectors many times over again and still do a lot of natural world-mimicking rotating habs, and you should be able to use your extra energy to make more raw material even if it's very energy inefficient, and its entirely possible and even probable we'd be able to get a lot more efficient at the process.
if a synthetic intelligence were to be attempting to expand processing power and had found sentient life it would not lose a possible source of processing energy. a computer would not lose a possible asset. it would instead attempt an "update" upon such a species to transform into a usable processor and take control. my movie reference; humans would not go extinct like "the terminator". we would be controlled like "the host". the only difference, the motives.
Me, watching this video in 2020, hearing about how you can "fly" a star with a dyson swarm, "THAT'S WHY WE CAN'T SEE THEM, THEY ARE ALL FLYING TOWARDS US!!!"
That insertion burn is gonna be SICK...!
Speaking only for myself here, I think it's pretty shitty that people would take the time to leave demeaning comments regarding your speech. I had no problem with it and I think the content is brilliant. Remember, those who can, do, those who can't bitch like little whiny girls.
You've got a subscriber.
+Bam Chug Yeah it gets on my nerves, and these days I just delete them, something I normally reserve only for spam and the very worst invective. But every cloud has its silver lining and it encourages me to spend a lot more time recording clean audio in the newer videos.
Yeah, I completely agree, no issues with understanding at all. It also strikes me as very odd that people who are supposedly interested in life beyond our world, different existences in the universe and related concepts, would be so focused on such minor differences in individuals within our own species that it prevents them from engaging in a meaningful and productive way.
Thankfully I didn't see any and it didn't even cross my mind until reading your comment. But the content spoke for itself, chances are they are too dumb to comprehend the video so it made them angry.. poor guys
No need to let it bother you dude. It says a lot more about where their heads are at if that's the first thing you are thinking after watching such a thought provoking video!
Dude, this channel is mindblowing, I love how in depth you are!
Thanks! and welcome to the channel, hopefully you'll enjoy the newer videos even more, this one is video #2 I made and I generally consider it very sup-par :)
I agree. Thank you Isaac
Isaac Arthur, hello and thank you as always for sharing. Love your channel!
I have seen so many of your videos. All great! Must have seen over 200 by now! Keep’ em coming! My 12 year old boy is also into a few of your playlists as well. Thanks again!
The Dyson Dilemma "...asks why we can *even see any stars at all* . Why aren't they all Dyson Swarms by now?"
I am quite familiar with the Fermi Paradox, but this is the first time I have ever heard of the Dyson Dilemma. Thanks for the idea of the Dyson Swarm which is _way_ more reasonable than a Dyson Sphere which I always found a bit hard to take seriously. Isaac you do an excellent job of explaining all kinds of awesome ideas! Thanks for all your hard work!
You have one of the coolest names, Isaac like Isaac Asimov and Arthur like Arthur C. Clarke
+Juan Borjas Thanks, it's actually a bit worse. My full name is Isaac Albert Arthur and I was dual named for Asimov and Newton, middle for Einstein. My surname was acquired normally though. ;)
+Isaac Arthur haha that's totally awesome
@Juan Borjas I had caught the first one, but not the second. Thanks!
Asimov's Lawbringers
Isaac, how comes your parents affinity to scientists and authors? Do you have a family tradition in that field?
You need more subscribers. Your content is brilliant.
+Iam Cleaver Thanks!
+Isaac Arthur
You need to read "new cosmogony" it's in this book:
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0810117339/brsamizdatexpresA/
+Isaac Arthur maybe the technology curve is a trap. technology that scale one could assume the bubble bursts. one possible way would be messing around trying to draw a solar flare like a lightning strike. would we start to try to harvest plasma from the sun? in doing so triggering a extinction event?
any large scale structures will need to be magnetically shielded. at this scale one could even conceive we would make super powerful magnetic fields on the inner orbit. incoming solar flare and cycle the field up. acting as a plow shear effect. anyhow.. maybe playing magnetic tag with our sun could show this would be a lost cause at scales proposed?
+Collin MacInnis It's possible but I don't think that works, for instance a rotating habitat, by basically being a big spinning metal cylinder, can be very easily configured to have a very impressive magnetic field.
+Isaac Arthur percentage of avaliable power dedicated per structure verses mitigating the problem close to its source. breaking up a CME or focusing it..
cost at source verses the energy needed by the whole to insure protection at major events?
this concept may even play into the star harvesting concept... the source material for that please?
I'm here after hearing you be recommended by Kyle Hill. This is the first video I've watched by you and now I am going to slowly make my way through your entire channel. This is going to take a long time but I've always been interested in science. 1 down, many more to go.
Had to pause the video and just contemplate and marvel at your observation that we have our own Dyson Swarm around the Earth. I hadn't looked at it that way before (despite frequently joking that an alien species could probably detect our satellites and debris from light years away and want nothing to do with anyone who messes up their neighbourhood like that) and it's awe-inspiring and mind-blowing.
I guess I was too busy pigeon-holing a Dyson Swarm as something vast around a star than as any swarm of artificial orbiting bodies.
Thank you. You've given me my awe moment for the week!
An extremely interesting concept! Thanks for sharing your knowledge on these concepts. I also appreciate your non-controversial approach with introducing each topic and possible counter theories.
Wow youtube recommended this throw back. Its crazy to see where you are now mate, you deserve it and keep up the good work.
That was informative. Thanks.
Calling it a dyson cloud makes a lot more sense.
mgregggphone I think you mean Cwowd.
Dyson Swarm *
Great vid Isaac. I love the Matrioshka brain concept. You raise some very compelling points. Keep it up!
Jack Dyason Subbed btw
"Unless the people living in simulated paradises or narcotic hazes are expansionist themselves"
One of my favorite books, The Voice of Cepheus by K.P. Appleby, addresses this issue very well. The entities in the virtual reality were even more competitive and spread by contacting immature civilizations and convincing them to create interfaces which the aliens could use to expand their memory space. The specifically targetted their transmissions to find civilizations at just the right level to have the technology, but have no defense. It's a good book.
I found your videos today (had to go to work) but since I got home I have been watching them non stop for at least 2 and a half hours. I have learned so much, thank you. I have never heard the Fermi Paradox explained so well. These videos are just fantastic.
Thanks Luminya, I remember you mentioning you'd found the channel this morning (in my timezone anyway), glad you're enjoying them. I'm always amazed anyone can actually chain watch these things without a pot of coffee and a bottle of aspiring though :)
2x speed with subtitles!
Been listening to you for years and I'm coming back to listen to some of the old ones. You mentioned recently that you thought maybe you needed some philosophy study. I think it may be helpful and I would enjoy listening to your thoughts on philosophical matters. Great channel.
I love this channel and I love the community. I'm happy to get lots of great sci-fi content that keeps the physics and math real.
Thank you so much for uploading this. I'm a sociologist professionally but these kinds of subjects fascinate me and recently I have been into the Fermi paradox as well as the dyson sphere/ matryoshka brain stuff. Listening to and discussing these things gives me so much pleasure and enjoyment.
Also for the people commenting on the speech, I really didn't think it was a big deal at all. Like until I scrolled down to see some of these comments it wasn't even something I thought more than a few seconds about. I think if this stuff truly fascinates you as it does me, a slight speech impediment should really be a non-factor.
+drey1407 The sociological angle is pretty relevant to the later phase of filters, like going beyond simple tribes and oral history, and that is usually considered one of the most probable filters. Glad the speech impediment didn't bug you much, I frequently consider grabbing someone else to read these to avoid the problem entirely but its not terribly practical just yet.
+Isaac Arthur your content is amazing and ur speech is rather endearing. Your message comes through loud and clear sir
I like the paraphrasing “things are bad, they will get worse before they get better, and who said anything about getting better?”
Very imformative. Thanks Kripky.
ha. as soon as this guy started talking I thought of that guy
lol, oh yeah, I couldn't put my finger on where I've heard that voice before.... one virtual high five for you kind sir....
Omg I just bursted out laughing dude, that was so spot-on!!
But... Is it really him?
Nope i just googled it
Keep up the great work, awesome video. Looking forward to the rest of your content.
Thank you for this wonderful explanation. I really enjoyed following your rationale, and am sending the link to others who, like me, have only a basic understanding of science but are nevertheless fascinated by the future of technology, its implications for the universe and the question of other intelligent forms of life.
MusicaBasket Glad you enjoyed it!
here is a mind game.
what if they use cloack..
no seriously.. wouldn't it be hilarious if every civilization tends to make one cloaked Dyson sphere and doe not go further out of fear of being noticed by an even more advanced civilization. and all the unaccounted dark matter is simply billions of civilisations hiding from eatch other and wondering why the fuck they cant account for the extra mass ;)
man that would really fit well in the hitch hikers guide to the galaxy;)
+zool201975 Hilarious but unlikely, eventually someone would break the silence, that specific point gets addressed in the companion video, category 2D as I recall. But yeah I could definitely see Douglas Adams writing that scenario up :)
ruclips.net/video/Z4snQS1QGD4/видео.html
+Isaac Arthur I had a similar theory - that dark matter might be a bunch of complete Dyson spheres - while listening to another of your videos. You make a pretty good point about IR light, though I would argue there are certainly ways to convert IR into something we aren't looking for that's more useful to the sphere-building civilization.
+zool201975 What's so creepy is that KIC 8462852 would have been cloaked too, but it maybe have gone through a extension even, and without maintenance there's just the hunk of debris leftover.
+David Welch KIC 8462852 or WTF 001 as its getting nicknamed is probably not a Dyson, either under construction or decay, the media's hyping it up a bit. Dyson's don't fluctuate in brightness, since that would imply it didn't have radial symmetry and while there are a lot ways to build up a swarm they'd pretty much all call for radial symmetry to be loosely maintained during the process. You might expect that symmetry to break down if left to decay but even that's a bit of stretch. Plus, this is a F3V star after all, with a lifetime of only 3 billion years and change, stars in this range have some serious problems being likely homeworlds of ETIs.
+zool201975 I don't see why not. I mean, we are nowhere near a Dyson Sphere but somewhat already near cloaking.
*Happy Happy joy joy*
*I love your content so much.*
*I'm rewatching all your videos again and again .*
If Dyson swarm inhabitants used a black hole (possibly artificially created), with a mass about that of the Sun, as a waste heat dump, they'd be able to extract more work from the heat than if they simply allowed it to radiate off into space. It'd be like using a heat engine with a cold reservoir at a negligible temperature above absolute zero instead of the 2.725 Kelvins of the cosmic background radiation. As a side-effect, they would not be visible in the infrared without breaking the laws of thermodynamics. Perhaps we should be looking for sub-CMBR temperature zones in space? P.S. - "The Killing Star" has been my absolute favorite novel since I read it when I was young. I strongly recommend it for anyone who likes more science than fiction in their science fiction.
boots4yew Yes I'm always a bit surprised how rarely it makes it onto any of Top X lists of sci-fi novels. Of course Pellegrino has a fairly checkered past so that might factor into it.
Anyway, yeah certainly if you've got a way to make and tap black holes via Hawking Radiation or Penrose Mechanism or something better they ought to be more efficient power sources per unit mass then even a
Isaac Arthur I don't know anything about Pelligrino's past, but I'll look into when I get a chance. Thanks for the info.
I completely agree that using sub-Solar mass black holes would be an excellent matter to energy conversion method via Hawking Radiation especially for low energy output masses like red dwarfs or non-radiative sources. My suggestion of artificially creating a black hole to be used as a heat sink was not for small ones though since, as you point out, they are highly radiative.
My limited understanding of black hole thermodynamics leads me to (perhaps naively) guess that Solar-mass, or larger, black holes would absorb infrared photons and their absorbed energy would add to the mass of the black hole. According to Hawking's theory, as the mass increases, the amount of Hawking radiation decreases, I think. So a solar-scale heat engine would have a cold temperature reservoir that continues to stay cold until the far distant future after the black hole has had time to dissipate.
Controlling heat flow as phonons on nano-structured surfaces has already been demonstrated. So, I am thinking that this sort of process, coupled with near-field interaction (like in this publication pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/nl901208v), could be used to carry waste heat across an event horizon of a Solar-mass black hole at a higher heat transfer co-efficient than is possible by direct black-body radiation. Then there'd be a lower amount of waste heat escaping the system since less heat would be going into black-body radiation from the cooling surfaces. Consequently, the Carnot efficiency of a heat engine would go up. Given the energy scale involved, even a small efficiency difference might be motivation enough to go to the extreme of using a black hole.
I recently saw a study done where astronomers were trying to find evidence of galaxy-spanning Dyson-swarm civilizations by looking for unusually high infrared to optical ratios of EM emission. They couldn't definitely find any, although I'm sure there is still a lot of searching left to be done. I'd like to put forward the idea that perhaps, given the potential ability of K2 civilizations to use black holes to "hide" their waste heat as a natural by-product of getting higher heat engine efficiencies, the search might be more successful if they look for, as you pointed out, expanding dark wave sans IR emission.
By the way, please keep up the great work! Your video was thought provoking and informative. I'm looking forward to watching the rest of them.
boots4yew Very glad you enjoyed it.
Yes, a larger black hole ought to absorb more background radiation then it's Hawking Radiation, I'd have to run the numbers to see where the break off is but I think it's decently below minor planet mass let alone naturally occurring stellar remnants. If we can find a way to dump heat more efficiently then blackbody at large scales that has a very big and obvious impact on things like the Dyson Dilemma since even without the black holes as sinks you might be able to get a lot your heat emitting out a decidedly directed way or get to boost up efficiency.
As to Carnot efficiency re: Black holes, there was a good paper on that a couple years back you might enjoy: www-e.uni-magdeburg.de/mertens/teaching/seminar/themen/AJP000066.pdf
That's generally on the post-stellar, black hole shepherding lines of thinking so its generally doing that way way post-biological route of squeezing out a few milliwatts for billions of trillions of years rather than any fast approach but the core concepts still fit.
I think the key with bigger holes used as waste heat sinks is that their diameters scale up linear to mass. So with big ones, sort of like the Birch Galactic Core megashell I mentioned way at the end of the Megastructures vid, you'd at the very least be able to get half your blackbody waste energy dumped down into the black hole below. Potentially more if you're screwing with the surface geometry of the components so they have more surface area on the down side. Radiating fins inside IR-reflective parabolic dishes aimed down at the black hole and so on. But you're absolutely right, there's probably a lot of tricks one can play with black holes and energy production/efficiency/disposal and black hole hunting is definitely an ideal component of a SETI search.
Isaac Arthur I am a mechanical engineering phd grad student in Korea but my undergrad was in physics, so I maintain a keen interest in subjects like this. School life has kept me very busy recently, but given some very interesting developments in astrophysics these days, I think there might be some grounds for us to work on a collaborative paper on this subject. If you'd like to discuss it more, I'd be very open to it. I can't seem to PM you through this RUclips channel, but if you have the time, you can contact me at boutilier.rm@gmail.com.
boots4yew I'll message you my email, not actually sure how to check mine here.
This is very interesting, thanks for sharing. I've subscribed and am looking forward to see more.
I have came across your channel and have started watching your content, I am really enjoying how you explain every detail. Very easy to follow and to understand. Starting to watch your newer content now!! Thank you for giving me something to enjoy again. :)
Finally, legitimate content on exploration and colonization. Cheers mate!
Wow! Fantastic. Thank you.
I'm starting from these earliest videos - and taking notes!
Over 100k views! You're a RUclips superstar Isaac, don't let it go to your head!
I would love to hear your thoughts on the relevance of technologies that can alter the wavelength of light on the subject of infrared light emitted by a dyson structure. specifically, whether or not our assumed ability to detect a dyson structure should be re-thought due to the existence of devices such as what can be found if you search "Second-harmonic generation using -quasi-phasematching in a GaAs whispering-gallery-mode microcavity". This device alone could not accomplish the stated goal but serves as a proof of concept and a reference point as to the level of control over light that a vastly more advanced civilization might have. I wonder if its possible to alter the outputted light in such a manner as to make the system appear like an uninteresting, diffuse cloud of hot gas to a distant observer.
enjoyed discussion very much...sets all our minds flying....
my #1...who r u if ur potential enemies can find u
#2...imagine black holes as dyson spheres feeding adjoining brane/universe
#3...as humans are limited to one direction of time, shared by entrophy, we simply cannot see what is really in universe...
(dark matter might be the future which humans cannot see, as a resource yet unused by II Law TD...which is here in it's entirety but we only see along the time line)
So glad I found your channel. Your content is awesome.
Your videos are superb! Please keep making them!
There is of course the Dark Forest theory brought up by Cixin Liu in his Rememberance of Earth's Past series of novels. For those unfamiliar with the work, here's a quote from Wikipedia that explains it better than I can remember it:
[These are] Ye Wenjie's two axioms of cosmic civilization: 1. Each civilization's goal is survival, and 2. Resources are finite. Like hunters in a "dark forest", a civilization can never be certain of an alien civilization's true intentions. The extreme distance between stars creates an insurmountable "chain of suspicion" where any two civilizations cannot communicate well enough to relieve mistrust, making conflict inevitable. Therefore,
it is in every civilization's best interest to preemptively strike and destroy any developing civilization before it can become a threat, but without revealing their own location, thus explaining the Fermi Paradox.
Why did it take so long for this channel to be recommended to me? What a gem.
Great video, Isaac. You summed up all the important aspects of the Fermi Paradox nicely.
Here are my thoughts: Expansion of alien species is really the core of the Fermi Paradox. But why is there a drive to expand in the first place? In most cases it is simply a necessity. Reasons are:
1. Inside pressure due to dwindling resources.
2. Forward planning, because the amount of usable energy in the universe is limited.
3. Fear of being destroyed by an outside force.
(1) is difficult to avoid, because you would need very strict rules in order to enforce a certain behavior. Someone or some group would overstep the boundaries, which is followed by punishment and social destabilization.
(2) To our current knowledge this would force a civilization to expand in any case.
(3) depends on the knowledge you have of the universe. If you can reasonably rule out an outside threat, this might not be an issue.
I guess (1) and (2) have to be explained in order to solve the Fermi Paradox. I now assume that there is an abundance of intelligent life out there, based on the idea that we are a quite average phenomenon in the universe. Is there a reason why basically all species seize expanding at a certain point?
In my opinion technological singularity is a likely outcome for any species (I will elaborate if necessary). The ability to expand, sustain, innovate or defend can be summed up in two words: processing power. A species will find itself driven to a state that is basically the most efficient computer imaginable. If you are able to optimize matter and energy to the highest degree, expansion is not an option anymore. Expansion will only delay communication between two points. There is an optimal amount of matter and energy in order to achieve maximum computation.
This might explain why expansion in order to increase processing capacity stops at one point. However, the need to gather more and more energy is still there.
Nik G That's a good point and the proccesing lag issue is a real one. BUT, the thing is, re: singularity expansion, that communication lag ought to generally trend linear to radius while processing power would either be rising with either the square or cube of radius. The only time a linear constraint to processing power would kick in is when the singularity starts becoming astrophysically literal. Our entire galaxy crammed together would still only have an event horizon of a fifth of an AU, whereas you could do that Swarm of red dwarves out to 100 ly I mention, but since event horizons expand linear to mass you can only make that swarm so big before it would be inside its own even horizon and that's gonna be in the 1000 galaxy/1000 light year size range. As best as I can tell that's the only upper limit where adding more to that computer isn't going to be more beneficial than the cost in extra light lag.
Kudos, I have not thought of that. I'm still not sure if this linear vs cubic argument holds water. But I guess this line of thought is not new to you, so you have probably done your calculations.
Have you taken time dilation into account? This is another factor. When the mass of your computing entity becomes too big, this effect would reduce the number of calculations you can do in a given time. So there might be another sweet spot with high density and small size.
If I remember correctly, you have not proposed a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox. What is your opinion on this matter?
Nik G Well you're definitely getting into galactic mass computers before time dilation is likely to be an issue. I do cover this a bit tangentially in the Megastructures video when talking about statites and at the end when talking about Paul Birch's idea for an Earth like shell habitat built around a galactic central black hole. That's a series of concentric spheres where the lower levels do have significant time dilation though as I recall its only about an order of magnitude. The thing is, when talking about MAtrioshka Brains and the like using stars as engine we're generally envisioning statites (giant solar sails) floating above the energy source. By and large that's at distance where the gravity is a great deal weaker than Earth normal and I'm not sure how big something would have to be for those be under that kind of gravity and under significant time dilation too but we're talking at least galactic mass levels. Time dilation near event horizons gets weaker and weaker the bigger the event horizon.
Isaac Arthur
It depends of course on the density of your object. Consider black holes. While they are massive, they don't have to be nearly as massive as galaxies. Even black-hole-like objects with very little mass can be imagined. Time dilation is caused by gravity. This in turn can (at least theoretically) approach infinity if the density is high enough. The mentioned entity could have a density much higher than anything we can create today, but smaller than a black hole.
Nik G Black hole radius is linear to mass, it's gravity is still inverse square, that's why the really big ones have lower time dilation and shredding forces near them. But I take you're talking about what often gets called 'computronium', some very dense, potentially neutron star dense, matter that is just raw computing power basically. In a situation like that, yes, you probably would be limited to a maximum of a couple solar masses before expansion would collapse you into a black hole and that massive density thing would probably make it superior to a far more massive but more spread out computer. Short form: I really can't say, we don't have any real model for super-dense computers that would clearly operate at the totally atomic scale or subatomic scale but if they are possible they'd probably be preferable. The caveat there though is that you might have splinter groups tired of sharing (if it isn't a single mind) leave and since it runs on degenerate matter basically it wouldn't really have any compelling reason to get into a resources fist fight with neighbors once ti has its 1-2 solar masses.
Just discovered this channel. Let the binge-watching begin...
This was fun to watch. Thanks. Keep them coming!
just subscribed, my second video, enjoyed it a lot. The best thing is there is so many more to watch :D
Hey Isaac! Have you ever thought of writing a non-fiction book about the Fermi Paradox? Personally, I would find it easier to get a full understanding of the many possible solutions if it was in a book divided into sections (as you do with your videos) where I could flip back and forth.
For those of you wondering, this was Barry Kripke's project that had Sheldon Cooper's panties in a bunch. =P
I found this video rather interesting and entertaining. It may not have been intentional, but your narrative makes learning about this stuff a bit more fun.
I think if any of the assumptions are incorrect, it's probably the assumption that a given culture would expand in numbers when they have the resources to do so. Take for instance the birth rate of most of the developed countries on Earth is usually below the replacement rate (less than two children born per couple) according to the CIA's World Fact Book Website (Total Fertility Rate). The US is currently at 1.87 children per couple, European Union = 1.44, Russia = 1.61, etc. As more countries become developed, I expect that trend to continue. On a different note, I absolutely LOVE this channel. I try to watch one episode a day and I'm starting to get a little sad that I'm almost done with all the episodes! These videos do a great job of renewing my hope for humanity's potential future and show us that there's more to that future than just what's immediately visible in the news. If this were Amazon, I'd given this channel 5 Starlifted Stars. ;-) Great job Isaac. THANK YOU!!!
That's an interesting point. I think basic biology may be at play too. When I was a kid I ran population experiments with my fish aquarium using freshwater guppies. At first I just started out with a male and a female and they started out with numerous offspring (I forget how many), but with each successive generation, even when increasing food inputs so that every guppy continued to get the same average amount of food, I noticed that the births per pairing continued to go down as the tank filled up with guppies (I prevented cannibalism as well). While totally unscientific (lack of controls, repeatability, etc). I can't help but wonder if there's some type of biologic mechanism (vs. sociological) at play that keeps birth rates down when a species starts to feel overcrowded, regardless of the level of resources.
Such an existing population control mechanism wouldnt apply to the Fermi paradox. The point about building orbiting habitats and colonizing other stars is that the available space keeps increasing. The thing that keeps the population size stable must be something relatively new.
But alas it might just be that highly advanced and old intelligent life is very very rare. Or we might just be early to the party:
www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2016-17
One problem I have with the Fermi paradox is that if aliens had colonized our planet billions of years ago then we wouldnt be here to wonder their absence. And if FTL travel is impossible then there is a limit to the stars the aliens would be able to reach. Who knows maybe the edge of their stars was visible from Earth but the expansion of the universe has carried it beyond the visible universe before we started looking. Or we havent looked in the right place hard enough.
or Dyson Sphere is a ridiculous technology that civilization rarely pursue it, when there could be simpler methods of harvesting the sun's energy.
Sure, but why is it impractical?
it's not impractical, just seems like if I what to drink a milkshake instead of waiting for the milk to evaporate and collecting the vapor is could just use a straw. so instead of building million of solar panels why not build a pipeline to suck up the plasma.
I just have a hard time picturing any advanced civilization with the energy requirements of a star to be using solar panels. but that aside I do have other problem with the idea.
1.) if u build a swarm to close u risk blocking the sun energy from reaching to planet resulting in the environmental problem and the further away u build the swarm the resources and labor required would increase exponentially.
2) what about logistics, maintenance, and manufacturing does the civilization have enough resources, labor, and energy to maintain, replace as well as build fast enough to keep up with growing energy needs and will each node return on energy investments within it operational lifecycle.
3) is it practical to build or does a civilization concluded that their rate of advancement they would be able to create better means of generating or extracting energy. before they Dyson swarm can return on its investments.
so How is energy from the swarm being collected? (I presume some sort of laser or microwave network).
1. No, it's quite easy to arrange not to block the light hitting a planet, we've discussed that in other videos (you are watching the second video I ever did out of like 60, including a redo of this video).
2. Railroad as are also a pain to build and maintain, so is a power grid, so are solar panels, the things sheer immensity is off set by it supporting way more people. You might need trillions of people to maintain sucha things (or not, we usually assume automation has gotten pretty good before you build one) but if you're population is pretty big, like a million trillion, its not that huge a deal. The US has more road workers maintaining our highway than most ancient historical empires had people.
3) If they do, as the video discusses, find a better source of power, it will in most cases amount to the same thing. The video isn't about dyson spheres, its about interstellar civilizations being prone to make use of stuff that isn't otherwise being used, and that being noticeable far away.
My perspective is that because of Moore's law, Alien technology would become smaller and smaller, thus requiring less energy. It may be that it's easier to make things more efficient on the home planet rather than building a Dyson sphere. Also, with quantum computing, it may be that it's not necessary to keep expanding the size of the computer itself. Another point is: In most first world countries the population is falling, not rising.
How about the fact that we become advanced and expand our civilization... each component of a dyson swarm can be a station allowing millions of people to live on it... with that then we have a living space eventually of 4(pi)r^2 lets say we build the dyson at 1 au (distance between earth and our parent star)
4(pi) 0.5 au ^ 2 = 3.1415926536 square au or square 292,029,281.238394 miles of living potential living space.. if we had the swarm at 1 square au we have 12.5663706144 square au or 1,168,117,124.953578 square miles of living space and at 2 au ... 50.2654824576 square au or 4,672,468,499.814311 square miles of living space. we would be able to expand our civilizations population and provide the food and energy, allow for sections .. to be for research for different fields... our exponential growth of medicine, technology, advancement in general would be even faster... MUCH MUCH FASTER and allow based on the current amount of people on earth with 196.9 million square miles of surface area... at 4,672,468,499.814311 square miles of living space lets say... the comfortable saturation amount of people to live on earth is 20 billion. Then the population of human beings would be 474,603,199,574 or 474.6 billion people ..... for maximum total saturation or living humans around the star. and we can expand to other planets very very fast and we would reach another planet before we meet this saturation of 474.6 billion people
The thing I wonder about with the Fermi Paradox is if we are placing too much focus on intelligence and not considering culture enough.
What is the likelihood that a culture develops that favours organised cooperation, hard work and long-term planning over immediate needs and individualism?
When our own history is discussed, the combination of cold winters and protestantism if often mentioned as a driving force behind the increase in organised technological development in the west. Would this have happened in all other configurations?
It must be hard to estimate what the chance is of not only a species capable of advanced technology to develop, but also a culture that encourages industrialisation, globalisation and the associated technological progress. We have had several candidate political ideologies that do not prefer this focus.
It reminds me of the idea that since we have physical constants that are perfectly tuned for a universe existing where life is possible, our point of view could not be any other.
Similarly; our precise history as a species, and as far as we know, ONLY our exact history leads to the situation were we are asking this question. Perhaps not many other sequences of cultural events lead to the idea that one should cooperate to reach beyond the planet?
+Hallvard Kristiansen You pretty much nailed it on the head Hallvard, and I talk about this a bit in the companion videos. Obviously developing a brain all by itself is a pretty long process and not necessarily a certain route, lots of indicators are the human brain is a bit of a freak anomaly. But even if you get one, there could be tons of tiny variables that stop technology from ever getting rolling even if you have a brain that can handle it.
Something as seemingly irrelevant as the critter being the largest land animal around - which really wouldn't be that weird a scenario - might keep them from ever using dray animals, and its hard to imagine the kind of impact that could have on them. They might regard labor saving devices as utterly dehumanizing and be unswayed by logic otherwise in the same way we tend to regard cannibalism, most of us not being inclined to bring knife and fork to a funeral no matter how much someone says its an empty shell that's just going to go to waste. There's a lot of factors in between developing a large brain and developing a rocket, and we probably shouldn't be assuming the former almost inevitably leads to the latter.
+Isaac Arthur - So THAT'S why elephants never landed on the moon! It was beneath them!
This is great, thank you!!
Thank you for a great video Sir
The basic fault in above reasoning is assumption that civilization with unlimited resurcess supply will be constantly interested in organic population growth. We have already first signs on Earth that some may choose for quality intsead of quantity and the real question / dilemma is :
If there is any theoretical limit how perfect/ complicated / smart single living entity could be ? Then whole sphere above could be inhabited by single being. We are in difficult position to judge what vast superior being may want/ desire even if could achieve every possible outcome. It will be like asking our earth worm what this farmer is doing on his fields and how spend free time of chewing dirt.
Completely agree. This is all based on current human trends which we cannot project on to an unknown advanced entity/entities. If anything I'd think they'd go smaller & compact. Prob parked & hidden on some icy stable body. Instead of space conquest they/it lives in a rich endless comfortable virtual reality, safer than actual reality. But at this point we can only speculate & prob wrong in all our speculations as we can only imagine things based on our extremely limited experience, & knowledge.
Peter Bilski Expansion would still be necessary, if the being wants to survive. Usable energy in this universe is finite, as far as we know. Thus it has to gather and store energy just to postpone its demise.
If it does not want to expand, this will just leave more room for others.
Hey man, great videos! They are very informative and summarize very clearly and concisely what the Fermi paradox and Dyson spheres are all about. So well done!
My only comment is on point 1) and that maybe this point does not hold over time. Point 1) is essentially an evolutionary pressure, and will hold true if Darwinian evolution persists, but as civilizations become more technologically advanced, they may by default (deliberate or otherwise) start to remove themselves more and more from the pressures of evolution. Darwinian evolution is a painful and uncomfortable process, and humans (and essentially all animals and possibly aliens) naturally tend to seek pain avoidance. For instance, our own civilization has gone to great lengths to try and remove ourselves from the uncomfortable pressures of evolution as best we can, and we have done this over a very short period of time.
It seems that point 1) needs to hold over a fairly significant period of time that the technological civilization exists, in order for it to put enough pressure on it to expand, but if technological civilizations can remove themselves rapidly from the evolutionary processes, then the pressure from point 1) becomes less significant and this otherwise key evolutionary driver that would lead expansion may weaken or eventually not even persist at all.
As you said, it only takes one civ to keep this evolution pressure there, but they would almost have to make a conscious effort to do so. As well, if by keeping this evolutionary pressure there causes deliberate detriment to the individual organism in the immediate moment, then they may be much less inclined to do so, and it could theoretically be a natural outcome to almost always get rid of it (ie another filter).
Anyway just my two cents, like you I will put myself in category 1B) in your other vid for now, and reserve the right to change my mind whenever new ideas/evidence come to bear lol. What are your thoughts?
Ian White Thanks! As to evolutionary pressures decreasing, we'd really try to have to imagine a culture which existed with zero competition, expansion, or aggression drives and there's something of a catch-22 there because for a culture like that to come into existence and be the entire culture left they'd have to have been very, very aggressive, competitive, and expansionist. It's really hard to construct a hypothetical culture that doesn't have any of those drives and yet is actually able to even come into existence or if it did, enforce its own rules on any rebellious members.
Isaac Arthur I know, and I agree, but that's the thing with the paradox, because if these conditions hold, alien civilizations should be there; but instead they are nowhere to be found (which is an unsettling feeling for some weird reason) So, if we go back and look at our conditions, it is easier to think that aliens will be able to exempt themselves first from laws/theories of biology and evolution, then physical laws/theories, such as relativity. And they probably will try and exempt themselves (as this leads to greater control of environment, immortality etc), given the chance, humans would exempt themselves from physical laws, such as faster than speed of light travel and thermodynamics.
But anyway, I was going to ask, if 1B holds in your other video, this would seem to imply that the great filter is now behind us, as technological civs are rare, so, if this is the case, then what was the filter? Was it intelligence, tool making, language, agriculture, industrialization? Because whilst no other animal has broken through any of those ceilings, humans have appeared to do so, and have broken through by a huge margin. If those ceilings are so hard to break through, why have we broken through so exceptionally (it's not like we just squeaked through into agriculture and stayed there for 500K years). And then also, does this mean that humanity will inevitably be the first to reach out beyond our solar system and create things like dyson spheres and be the ones to solve the paradox?
Ian White The paradox is pretty eerie, it's not hard to see why a lot of writers, arguably even back to HP Lovecraft, have taken the absence of life vs sheer size/age of the Universe conundrum and written it up as horror stories.
As to a Great Filter, I generally subscribe to their being a lot of Major Filters, physical and biological, along the way that just keep slashing the odds down. I tend to figure it was our brain architecture combined with slow maturation, being omnivorous, and tribal setup.
As to us being the first, my guess is yes, volume and stars, once you get into the millions of light years, starts rising again as the cube of distance so evne though we're looking back in time, if I'm looking at a spherical shells a ten million light years thick the volume at 100 Million Lyr for that shell is just an eighth of stuff of one at 200 MLyr and a thousandth of billion lights. I could believe intelligent life gets more common with time but not enough to justify saying that if we can't see any dyson'd up galaxies out to a billion lights now that there's going to be a plethora of it within a 100 MLyr where the light just hasn't got to us yet. Here's nothing to indicate that extra 900 million years would have made intelligent life a thousand times more common. Out past a couple billion light years though the light is getting old enough that the Universe might have been just too young and the Observable universe is only a few orders of magnitude bigger than that bubble so going from one in quintillion worlds spawning civilizations to one in a sextillion isn't all that much bigger of a leap.
By the way Arthur. I love your channel and it really gets me a thinking. ( no I wanted it said that way ). Also I am a lake Erie resident also. Great to have fresh water to swim in as opposed to salt water. Living on the northern coast has its privileges does it not. Keep posting more so I can be more informed about the universe and where we are in it. Gratefully. Mr. B
Great videos! Highly enjoyable.
Love coming back to one of your old vids and seeing Greg Egan and Charles Stross referenced :)
Watched a TedX video recently that suggested that not only are technological civilizations incredibly rare, but technological intelligence is extremely rare to be almost impossible-- that only a particular series of very improbable events gave rise to human evolution, making it extremely rare in the universe.
great video, very compelling and interesting to watch, thank you.
+brian rob Glad you enjoyed it Brian, but there's a new version of the video out I wish you'd watched instead, I tend to consider this vid sufficiently low quality that I almost deleted it:
ruclips.net/video/QfuK8la0y6s/видео.html
Excellent breakdown and analysis!
This was a great video, thanks for making it!
i am sure that our understanding of laws of physics will dramatically change in next 1000 years, just like it did in the past 1000 years. who knows what possibilities would better understanding of physics laws allows us to do. maybe some of the possibilities would be to willingly completely remove ourselves from the equation and transcend. i consider somewhat arrogant position that current understanding of physic is at its pinnacle and that current generation is know it all. i still greatly appreciate the video
Thank you Isaac, very well presented!
Thanks Todd, though I keep getting surprised folks watch this old version rather than the updated one :)
ruclips.net/video/QfuK8la0y6s/видео.html
Ah, and if I had acted like an intelligent being and read your whole posts here - I would have seen that! :-) So, now I am going to listen to the new one!
thanks for another great video Issac. best in RUclips!
+internot Thanks, though this being one of my original vids I always want to redo it to look better and maybe be a bit less sprawling and meandering in the narrative :) It continually surprises me this remains leaps and bounds my most viewed video, albeit it's had more time to collect views.
Ahhh one of Isaac's older videos...a blast from the past!
I recently heard of a possible problem concerning satellites. When there are many satellites, destruction of one can send out thousands of potential particles that collide with other satellites, thereby resulting in a destructive chain reaction around the earth. Could this also happen with a Dyson Cloud?
You know, there is a region in space where there aren't as many stars compared to the adjacent areas, and I believe there is a slight IR radiation. It has been theorized that there is a point of neighboring touch between our "univorse" and a parallel one
citation?
About the visibility of the dyson swarm/matrioshka brain, it actually can be invisible, circumventing the need to radiate heat in all directions by refracting infrared light as a narrow beam to a specific direction in some far off galaxy in order for a probable ulra-advanced hostile civilisation in that far off galaxy that detects it for them to be difficult to interact with it.
Interesting video. I think the best explanation is that the appearance of intelligent species is extremely unlikely. It could be that life is unlikely, or that multicellular life is unlikely, or that intelligent life is unlikely, or that technological life is unlikely, etc. I believe it is probably all of the above. My take on this is that fine-tuning of the universe seems to indicate that there is either a creator (God or simulation) or a multiverse. The fine-tuning is so incredibly precise that it cannot be waved away as the result of luck. If we live in a multiverse, the extreme fine-tuning suggests that there are a *huge* number of universes, and the vast majority of them don't support intelligent life. It is likely that among the universes that do support intelligent life, a huge majority only *barely* supports it, and they only contain one intelligent species. Obviously the ones that strongly support it may contain many intelligent species, but if these universes are sufficiently rare, it is quite possible that it is much more likely for an intelligent species to belong to one of the many universes that support only one intelligent species rather than one that supports a lot. If think that this makes a strong case for the fact that we are alone. The bad news is that it also suggests that we live in the least hostile part of the universe and that we will find other parts of the universe to be less hospitable. On the other hand, it makes our existence in this universe much more important: we are not just one among billions of civilizations, we are *the* civilization, the one that will take over the galaxy and beyond.
That's a pretty common take on the fine-tuning issue, the logic is fairly solid but the issue with assuming a creator, divine or digital, is that we have to look at the entire thing from the perspective of motives and optimization. For instance, if we assumed specifically that the Universe was designed to only permit one intelligent species to arise you would have to explain why so much of the universe is out of reach, as the super-majority of even those parts we can see will flee over the cosmological event horizon long before we could reach them. It seems non-optimal, on the surface anyway.
Isaac Arthur Agreed, that's why I favor the multiverse interpretation instead of the creator interpretation.
Just one thing to say, I don't think your idea of a 'least hostile part' of the universe is correct. The universe is petty big and rather old and is going to get a hell of a lot older. This spec of time that we have evolved during was not, not long ago and will not in the relatively short time be a hospitable place. So your idea that life is more likely to be limited to one per universe is not right. I know we have only found it on earth so far but we find it absolutely everywhere and the rest of the universe is made of the same stuff going through pretty much the same thing as us. Ok two things, Also saying that we are more likely to be in a universe that only produced I life form is 'bad math' in my opinion. In the multiverse theory you have infinities of infinities, so we are just as likely to find your self with others than not.
Dan Pope Thanks for your answer. I'm not sure I understand your first point: if there was no one before us and no one after us, then our universe will have contained just one intelligent species. At no point was there more than one. As for your second argument that the whole universe is made of the same stuff, it is very appealing, I agree. However let me answer with an analogy: imagine a world with 10,000 islands, each covered with a large forest. You live on one of those islands and unfortunately the forest is on fire. The fire spreads everywhere on your island. You reason: "look, there's fire everywhere here, and since we know that all other islands are made of the same stuff, there must be lots of islands on fire". But what if it's incredibly hard to light a fire on this planet? Maybe there's one chance in a million that a fire will start on any given island. In that case your island is the only one on fire.
To me, Life spreads like fire so seeing it everywhere around us does not prove that it can appear easily, it only shows that once it has started it spreads easily. Wdyt?
Aurélien Geron
The first part was me replying to your idea that we might find other parts of the universe more hostile to life. Our part of space, not so long ago was very hostile to life and will return to that state pretty soon. We have only been around for a very short space of time and by the time we can travel between stars we will have the ability to avoid or alter parts of space that would harm us. Yes the universe is very hostile to life but not at every place at the same time and with long enough periods in between for life to reach a stage where it can save it's self. I like your fire analogy but i do not believe life is 'hard' to get started. life emerged many many times and was probably wiped out in a few spots too. The idea that life evolved once and we are all descended from it is an old one. Life started in many different forms individually using the same ingredients and chemical processes and as survival of the fittest started and they began to eat each other genetic material was swapped narrowing the tree of life until we reached to point of complex multicellular specialized organisms at which point we began to diverge again. I like the multiverse theory as it makes it easier to believe at we had a chance to exist and gets rid of the 'fine tuned for life' problem but in the end it doesn't really matter as the other universes can not effect us nor us them. Like your island that is on fire, it doesn't make the dammed bit of difference to one island if another is on fire but it makes one hell of a difference to the one that burning. The way I look at it is our universe is abundant with the ingredients for life, it's start many times as soon as it could on this planet, as little as 400my after the forming of our sun, using chemical processes that are the same through out the universe. I would be more inclined to believe in a god if we were the only planet with life on, I'd call bull shit on that.
for building a Dyson Swarm: if you have large surface objects (like a sollar array) that has little mass, you may end up having to power them otherwise they will be pushed out of their orbits by solar wind..
Ioan-Paul Pirau True but not a real obstacle. If they're thin enough to be significantly pushed by the solar wind you just modify their orbit. This is how a 'statite' works, a static satellite that can hover over a star rather than orbit. And there'ss room in between, for one that's too heavy to be a statite but still seriously impacted by solar wind, to permit slower orbit like a L1 Lagrange point is.
Isaac Arthur Agree, but then you will not be able to put too many objects in orbit due to the high risk of collision between objects (the same issue is raised today for the over-population with "space junk" of eart's orbit.. aka Kessler syndrome). I'm not sure if that thinning out of the layer of objects will not negate the goal of the Dyson swarm (since it's not so dense to capture a significant part of the sun's radiation). Just thinking out loud here..
Ioan-Paul Pirau The collision concern isn't all that great, you have to keep in mind just how big one of these things is in volume and subsequently how incredibly vaporous they are in density. Our satellites mostly take up a fairly narrow window with all sorts of orbits that crisscross every couple of hours. These would generally crisscross twice a year but you're talking about tens of millions of kilometers of 'depth' in terms of the radius of the shell they occupy. If you compose it of many concentric rings of orbiting bodies, cocked at angles to each other, those rings can be thousands of kilometers apart and still allow for thousands of rings. Plus you've got all that energy to use to correct orbits with or vaporize ones that blow up or go screwy from accidental or intentional damage. Collision will always be a concern, but it's a pretty manageable one.
Cool stuff.
I enjoyed this video a lot man. You Have A NEW subscriber.
Dookie Draws Glad you liked, welcome on board!
The Kardashev Scale is old, inflexible and obsolete. I use the newer, much more flexible Makarios Scale, which has ten+ levels, and refers to materials and technology, as well as energy use. You can find this, and its definitions on the blog:
www.emunahechad.blogspot.com
And there is a lot more intriguing stuff there, too. Subscribe and share!
Looked at the link but couldn't find any Makarios Scale.
You say dyson spheres don't exist around us because we can see the stars. But then you say dyson spheres would only block visible light, so... we would still see the stars even with dyson spheres. Which is it?
How can you tell the difference between a cool temperature star and a dyson star? How can you tell the difference between a red shifted star and a dyson star? And why can a dyson sphere only capture visible light for energy? Why can't you capture all or most of the energy?
I think the Fermi paradox is a perfect example of using our own, not very spiritual, yardstick and applying it to the rest of the universe. The paradox relies on civilisations being wild consumers like ourselves. If civilisations are perfectly content in their learning, happiness, and love for their environment, total domination of stars or galaxies wouldn't enter the equation
Your adrevenue is growing? Thank me... I'm always watching your latest video at night ... woke up today after autoplaying ten hours of your content, no ad scipping but now I want to buy shit, I don't need :)
I fucking love your channel! Gonna watch every single video from now on
:) Welcome on board!
We’re really fixed on the Dyson swarm idea and how that must be prevalent throughout the universe because it’s a most efficient end for an advanced civilization up the Kardashev scale, but that’s all still rooted in our way of looking at things. It’s hard to unite around the persistent need to grasp and possess an object of power. With us that always leads to politics and the struggle for control. Maybe a super advanced civilization would consider that the baser outlook. You can’t keep a society going like that for long before there’s endless infighting. All the intelligent civilizations that destroy themselves in the long run must have that mindset. That’s why we see no widespread evidence of Dyson spheres. And you could argue that a super advanced civilization can still go the Dyson route entirely out of practical necessity, just to power and maintain itself, but they probably have a better way of living with energy.
Bro. I mean dude. Your videos are amazing.
Your impression of Cindy Brady narrating a video about quantum mechanics is spot-on. Truly impeccable. I already feel like a dick for saying that.
BigBoatDeluxe Ankyloglossia
Rather than surrounding the sun, would it perhaps make more sense to place floating fusion generators in gas giants?
Gas giants are basically small suns that haven't ignited. You can burn the energy at your leisure in a controlled fashion, rather than uncontrolled, like the sun. So the fuel will last many, many, times longer.
If I recall our entire energy requirements are presently only in the kilos of hydrogen/year kind of range. This would last virtually indefinitely from a gas giant
Nicely done, great content.
possible hypothesis: most species are tend to spend a large portion of their time in existence squabbling with themselves over resources rather than working together to advance the whole
how the truth is bitter pill to swallow, sir.
The rebuttal to that would probably be that you just sent me a message on a computer, rather than us squatting around a fire talking while waiting for a deer to finish cooking.
using humanity as a baseline, it took 20,000 years to get to this point. The majority of us are relatively poor of resources and information. A human beings' number one predator is another human being. And populations humans are more likely to be wiped out by war or terrorism than a natural extinction level event.
Brilliant video, great facts and covered all the bases. I believe all 3 conditions are not true though. 1) I find it unlikely a civilization would choose to increase in numbers even if they could comfortably do so. There is no advantage to having more organisms than the carrying capacity of an environment so eventually it would become unproductive to keep expanding in population since resources are finite. 2) there are likely MANY sources of energy superior to the photons given off by stars. (Sound waves, dark energy, synthetic nuclear fusion, Higgs Field, extradimensional energies, or something we can't even fathom are all possible sources of energy). 3)Worm holes
1) *when, bullshit, and it only takes one.
2) its not just photons. its every element. and they are 99% of the mass (needed for stuff)
3) you can't believe in a bunch of satellites bc you believe the universe has a hole in it?
One other option needs to be explored IMO. What of societies that learn how to upload conscience into a virtual existence?
A virtual immortal existence replaces the need to propagate. As long as you have available computing resources to have every individual living in a total paradise in virtual reality, no expansion is needed. You would trade in your physical life for an eternal virtual life.
i can think of a reason why you would "hide" a dyson swarm, only it would not be so much hiding as just a side effect. if you are a long term thinking civilization who wants to live as long as possible then one of the things you are likely going to do is shrink down the size of any star you swarm up, this will make that star live longer and also dim it, you might then fpcus on a way to collect and concentrate your waste heat using IR mirrors or something since every watt you can store now is a watt of power you can run on when your star finally burns out.it would still have all those other effects gravity, blocking light, and all that stuff but the star itself might become to dim to really notice against the background.
mirrors pointing where? i think the only option would be a black hole to dump that waste heat
Reminds me of a theory I came across in a scifi novel: A civilization's lifespan was either 50 years after the discovery of nuclear weapons or indefinite.
Thanks buddy, I liked this alot.
Hi, I have a thought about the dyson dilema. Its an argument against it happening. A race won't necessarily 'dyson up' if the resources are available because every stage or artificial habitat requires capital resources to initiate. Energy and mass are not the only factors - ultimately the main requirement is cold hard cash. Governments and other organisations may lack the political motivation to expend such resources to build something that wont immediately provide a political gain, or a benefit for the population of that nation. Governments rarely work to expand the population - otherwise why not build large desalination plants and begin colonizing the great desserts? In order for the dyson swarm to continue even after being initiated, there must be immediate gain, or else some form of self sustaining progress - such as an expansion tax for all habitats and a legal framework which makes breakaways difficult. Races won't dyson up because there wont be an immediate benefit or else the investment resources always get sucked into other less grand projects such as transport, education or healthcare.
Something I disagree with this video about is that he claims cultures with the resources will always expand but if that's the case why are birth rates dropping in rich nations and why do so many rich humans have such few children?
Do neutron stars have any particular use for a type II? Or are they just too dangerous?. By the way, "Evacuate Earth" was an interesting Discovery Channel "what if?" piece involving the topics of neutron star + O'Neil cylinder + anti-matter + nuclear pulse detonation propulsion.
+Joseph Rajewski Oh sure, I mean beyond being handy clocks early on, you can Dyson one up, you just wouldn't be using anything classically photo-voltaic to do it since neutron stars emit down in the nanometer, soft x-ray range. Tapping that spectrum of energy efficiently is actually a really big deal in fusion research and several groups are working on tricks for doing it better but we already have pretty solid methods, even ignoring the old fashion one of just heating up slurry of water and something X-ray absorptive to turn a turbine. You could also weaponize one, a X-Ray based Dyson-Nicoll beam would be pretty nasty, but I've never considered the Dyson-Nicoll beam concept terribly strategically logical. Same for transmutation, the working theory is Gold and a few other heavy elements are produced principally by Neutron Star on Neutron Star collisions but that's always struck me as a bit inefficient to do deliberately, if you've got tons of power, tons of hydrogen and helium, and little metals, you can just run a massive supercollider to get your metals instead of relying on supernovae.
+Isaac Arthur Good points. I was thinking it could make a terrifying Doomsday weapon, given it's small size and destructive pull. Didn't think of the focused beam scenario, like a pulsar. Will you be covering spacecraft design, mainly propulsion systems, in future videos? Thanks again!
+Joseph Rajewski Kind of depends, in theory my next video is supposed to be Rogue Planets followed by Interstellar Colonization but its been a busy month and I keep getting distracted or feeling like I need to short ones on a few unrelated topics. The Interstellar Colonization video will spend some time talking about ships but I don't know how much yet, and that will be mostly about propulsion regardless.
+Isaac Arthur Take your time my friend! You've given us a ton of material. Looking forward to the new ones, whether short or long.
I am so totally a fanboy of your work!!
+Rl Badger Thank you, though this particular video is in a loose tie for what I consider my worst creations... also ironically still the most popular one. Hard to believe its been nearly a year since I made this thing.
There's a problem with a supercomputer so large that the speed of light becomes an internal communications problem. Any AI in it would develop multiple identity crises, as regions that are below the size scale that the speed of light doesn't present a problem develop allegiance to some local processing center and begin to view other parts of the whole supercomputer as rivals for resources.
Enter quantom computing! To me, it seem more and more likely that quantom computing will be the futer of computers nt and will probably be tthe driver that leads us into a sort of aingularity. Not only can information travel instantaneous based on emtanglement, but the sheer number of combininations possible would be a leapfrog in socientif
I'm probably not the first to bring this up and I'm sure you're fully aware of this, but space itself can travel faster than light. It would be more accurate to say that nothing material can travel faster than light unless that material object is located in a pocket space that travels faster than light. (NASA FTL research for example.)
+timelike01 As for the Fermi Paradox, I'm of the mind that the Rare Earth hypothesis effectively explains it.
+timelike01 Surprisingly no, nobody has brought that up before in the comments on this video, but yes you're right, there's a number of things that can move faster than light itself, like a shadow, or a laser pointer's actual dot reflecting off an object, or the expansion of space itself between galaxies. Or, in theory anyway, as you mention, a small pocket of space which was contracting or expanding at superluminal speeds. Truth be told though, there's not much chance of that actually allowing a causality violation and that's about the only way you can have useful FTL.
+Isaac Arthur I think you mean there's no way of FTL travel being developed anytime soon. It might be achieved after a few centuries of research, but it's not going to happen within the current human lifespan.
+timelike01 I wish that's what I meant. No, I genuinely don't expect us to ever lick FTL or Entropy. I would be very glad to be proven wrong but I don't see it in the cards. Too many of the FTL cheats that are proposed rely on handwaves involving things like exotic matter or the ability to directly manipulate space-time when we don't even know where to begin. That really could change, we've only been at this science game for a few centuries and we've billions of years to improve in, but right now FTL is as far outside our reach as the last digit of Pi.
I somewhat disagree. Because I'll only accept the claim that FTL travel is impossible only after one or more (preferably more) spacecraft designed for FTL travel have been built and tested and FAIL to exceed the speed of light. After all, experimentation is part of the scientific method.
Forgive me for going UFO hunter but I would like to consider the possibility that Dyson swarms do exist and aren't recognized as such.
Here is the premise: Alien civilizations like to build their Dyson swarms really close to the star or other high energy source, exactly why is not important. They also care about hiding. While they can't make their heat exhaust go away they can make it look like something else: like turning a small hot star into a large cool star, or making an illusion of a nebula.
Am I completely off base here?
Daniel Hall Not really off base, you could spread your Dyson out to mimic a red giant. It would work but you've got two problems. First the components would be as hot as a red giant and its hard to make living space at 2500 Kelvin. If you can work at those temps somehow you might as well build in the star itself. Second, those observing you are going to wonder why the star appears to be way older than its co-moving neighbors. In a non-science analogy everything you do to hide a Dyson just shifts the anomaly rather than removing it. A year or so back I chatted with some other physics types about all the ways we could maybe hide one and every suggestion just popped up another anomaly. Tech civs probably tend toward curiosity and evolution encourages healthy paranoia, so you'd have to assume if you give an observer any anomaly they are going to stare at it till they decipher it.
It also raises the "Who are we hiding from?" problem. A K2 civ is only going to be worried about other K2 civs, but the observational assets of a K2 civ are obscenely huge. We have about 10,000 professional astronomers on Earth, a K2 civ with a billion times our area and pop employing the same percentage of its population for that would have around 10 Trillion astronomers, enough to assign more than a dozen to every single star in the galaxy full time and each team with a scope at least of Hubble sensitivity. They've also probably got a lot of extra-solar resources to give them a different viewing angle. I wouldn't give good odds on hiding a Dyson around a star even from a dozen modern astronomers with modern equipment tasked to look at that star, let alone whatever sort of juiced-up options in terms of better equipment and better brains are probably available to a K2 civ. So if they're hiding for fear of attack it starts making a lot more sense for them to devote their resources to expanding and arming instead.
What if Humans are the first intelligent life in the universe? Would that mean humans would be the Aliens other life forms would talk about, take pictures of human flying saucers with bad quality cameras and so on?
Awesomesauce.
Sending links to others.
In other words, the response to someone who brings up simulation hypothesis is "What is the in-universe explanation?"
I mean you could explain anything via the simulation making an exception.
Isaac Arthur How likley is the possibility we simply assume: not seeing visible light but, infrared from a galaxy that it was just so far away all the visible light had red shifted? Therefore would we just make a mistake on how far away the galaxy is rather than assume it had been "Dyson" consumed by a K3 civilization?
Freewill is totally irrational. Proving that is not like proving Simulantin theory.
I can't have a great day after this :( !!!
*Great video :D
Never seen your channel before, let's see how this goes. Good luck :)
+sazibeg Hope you enjoy it, although it drives me nuts that RUclips's recommendations always pick my oldest and most poorly produced video :)
+Isaac Arthur i enjoyed it a lot! in light of youtube's behaving like a grandma showing old pictures to your girlfriend... care to recommend a personal favorite?
+sazibeg For me my favorite is always the newest one, but the second to last made, Interstellar Colonization, is pretty connected to Dyson Dilemma so it might be a good choice.
ruclips.net/video/3y3MmmfZmP8/видео.html
*Raises hand!* Can I put in a request? Isaac, could you do a video on what an alien civilization would require to exist in terms of body mechanics, intelligence, and culture? For example, would it be necessary or just more likely that they would be super predators? Would they need to be abstract thinkers, even philosophical? That sort of thing.
+MultiKm1 Sorry for the delayed answer, missed this one. This is hard one for me because I'm in the Fermi Paradox camp that thinks there are a lot of hurdles from abiogenesis to technology but that a big one, probably the biggest one, is exactly what you're describing there, the complexity involved in finding the goldilocks spot that pushes a decently large brain into sapience and there's tons of little variables that were they just a bit different (diet, maturation rate of brain, social structure, long term memory, food density, etc) might impede that ever developing and staying around. Brains are very expensive. The tricky parts are 1) I'm biased, and may unfairly represent it and 2) It's not my field, I'm physics, not bio, anthro, neuro, medicine, psych, etc and I'm just not sure I have a grasp of those fields detailed enough to give a fair analysis in depth. But we will doubtless talk about it more, I think we did in some of the other videos in brief dives.
FTL in this sense per either wormholes or the Alculberri Warp drive (both requiring a source of negative mass-energy...which now seems at least plausible) does seem to be at least plausible without actually violating physical law. This exacerbates the Fermi Paradox as you note, but it would solve the Dyson Dilemna.
+ian Chapman It's really hard to say, I talked about FTL and its implications in this regard more in the newer version of this video I released last week and the subscribers talked me into doing an entire series on FTL concepts about a month back that's got those two options slated as the next two episodes. Most of the negative mass/energy FTL concepts have a hint of promise to them, and negative energy at least is quite probably real, but I remain reluctantly pessimistic about the subject. Anyway there should have been an annotation at the beginning directing you to that, though I gather a lot of mobile devices are bad at showing those:
ruclips.net/video/QfuK8la0y6s/видео.html
Biggest objection I have for dyson's sphere is the amount of resources needed to create one. Every civilization is limited to resources their planet houses. I don't think we can just assume that most civilizations are capable or willing to cannibalize their home planet for Dyson's sphere. If the Dyson's sphere project fails the civilization might end up destroying itself.
siprus Well it isn't the resources of the planet but the system that matter for making a dyson and an incomplete one is perfectly useful too. The swarms are generally thought to be composed either of statites or many tilted rings of satellites each like a Klemperer Rosette. A thing to keep in mind though is that while there's not enough mass in our system for a terribly 'thick' swarm there is way more than enough for an englobement meant to just absorb solar energy and there's nothing really stopping someone from using a Dyson as a heavy elements factory. Transmutation of lighter elements into heavier ones, fusion, isn't something we've been able to do for an energy profit yet, but the reverse, dumping wads of energy into cramming lighter elements into heavy ones, is a lot easier. So you ought to be able to use the energy from a star via a thin dyson to lift mass off that star and turn it into building material, and as the star shrinks it's lifetime extends and its power output goes down, requiring a smaller dyson. So this enough matter in our solar system and probably most others to wrap a star in solar collectors many times over again and still do a lot of natural world-mimicking rotating habs, and you should be able to use your extra energy to make more raw material even if it's very energy inefficient, and its entirely possible and even probable we'd be able to get a lot more efficient at the process.
if a synthetic intelligence were to be attempting to expand processing power and had found sentient life it would not lose a possible source of processing energy. a computer would not lose a possible asset. it would instead attempt an "update" upon such a species to transform into a usable processor and take control. my movie reference; humans would not go extinct like "the terminator". we would be controlled like "the host". the only difference, the motives.
Cool, informative video :-)