After reading The Dark Forest, my bet is that an advanced society would never advertise themselves in such an obvious fashion.
Type III Societies (Apparently) Do Not Exist
41–50 of 91 posts
Re: Type III Societies (Apparently) Do Not Exist
#42This really tells us extremely little about advanced civilizations, beyond that we haven't seen them doing a few variations on a very specific activity—harnessing all the stellar radiation in their galaxy.
There are huge number of assumptions based on that idea. A fundamental one is that a civilization in a relativistic universe would grow to densely inhabit a galaxy. Another is that they would need that much energy. Another is that even if they did have need for that much energy, they'd bother collecting EM radiation from stars.
That third is an interesting one to me. Now, you could muck up the night sky for the entire Milky Way, or you could, with Sufficiently Advanced Technology (tm), annihilate a total of 10 Jupiter-masses a year across the whole galaxy. For your average star system, that's extracting energy from 1.1 billion kg of mass a year, or roughly what NYC's garbage collection services dispose of every two weeks.
Pondering that, I suspect it's the wrong idea to imagine that a very advanced civilization, something we can only understand in the dimmest sense, would be constrained by something as specific as stellar energy emissions.
Re: Type III Societies (Apparently) Do Not Exist
#43Why should an advanced civilization necessarily create the artifact mentioned in the article. The conclusion because we don't see this artifact, so type III societies don't exists seems too strong. Maybe they don't create giant veils around galaxies and instead have virtualized themselves, or can simply convert matter to energy at will. What use would there be in wrapping a giant ball of dust around a galaxy when you can convert matter directly to some other energy/form?
Probably I think "they" are formless and more information based than physical. We aren't even sure if this reality is real or a simulation anyway, so why limit our thinking to advanced civilizations in the world as we know it?
Re: Type III Societies (Apparently) Do Not Exist
#44I wonder what ants think of airports? Or what mice believe about tube trains as they scuttle under the platform. We are separated from mice (or at least somewhat similar animals) by approximately 40m years of evolution, I think that the separation to a Galaxy altering level entity would be much more profound, and frankly we wouldn't understand what it was if it came and tickled us.
We are in no way separated by 40m years of evolution. Our common ancestor 'is'. That mouse you see today has been evolving just as long as you have, but with different priorities.
Good point. Separation can be even greater since each is 40M apart from a common ancestor.
Re: Type III Societies (Apparently) Do Not Exist
#45> Whether technological societies remain small and planet-bound like our own, or ultimately span across galaxies is an open question in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
What questions in this field are not open?
Re: Type III Societies (Apparently) Do Not Exist
#46My speculation has for a long time been what I call the uniform cooling hypothesis. There are no type III civilizations because such things haven't happened yet. If the universe is all the same age and if the emergence and evolution of life is tied to the overall thermodynamic evolution of the universe, then everything might be approximately of the same scale and complexity within a certain standard deviation. If thi…
Yes, but if someone is off by just one percentage point, then they're 13 million years ahead. There needs to be something so unlikely about sentient life, that it only arises approximately one at a time in each galaxy, or the Fermi paradox would apply.
I think the Fermi paradox has a hidden assumption, that we are intelligent enough to detect aliens. We couldn't detect that the earth revolves around the sun till quite recent in our (genetic beings on earth) evolution. I say give it a few years, we'll figure out that aliens are too alien right now to us. Computationally speaking, our brains are quite limited, though we have recently gained the ability to share ideas across the internet. Nice hearing from you cousin!
Re: Type III Societies (Apparently) Do Not Exist
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What if [...] all "all" is usually the key issue with solutions to the Fermi paradox. We can certainly find reasons for any given civilization to go the other way, but it's more difficult to argue that all of them do.
There are very strong reasons to believe that all civilizations (multitudes of independent, individualistic semi-cooperating sentient creatures) are inherently chaotic and therefore unstable. There are loads of arguments as to why they are doomed to fail, or to try to expand exponentially. If we take a cold and realistic eye to technological civilizations, they do seem doomed to self-destruct or "sublime" into someth…
I think you take a particularly narrow view of what constitutes a "society". Arguably, current human society is the product of over 10,000 years of continuous development. Yes, there have been numerous changes in structure and power, but our fundamental "human" identity hasn't really changed in that time.
I would also argue that life itself has proven remarkably long-term stable on our planet. Granted, it has not been stable enough to produce a type-III society, but if we remove homo sapiens from the planet for a thought experiment, there exist other species that are developing communication or tool-use skills and might succeed us even on the technological path.
So my view is that, unless we continue to fail spectacularly, life will still continue without us. Even if we do not reach type-III, that does not necessarily preclude Earth from producing a type-III society in the future.
Re: Type III Societies (Apparently) Do Not Exist
#48They call economics a "dismal science", but I find such attempts at 'astrophysics' (or whatever this and stuff like the Drake equation are called) even more dismal... Tons of unknown variables filled-in with vigorous hand waving, ad-hoc and unproven assumptions left and right, etc, and some high school math thrown in for good measure...
I think you're taking a wrong look at this paper. This paper isn't actually about whether or not type 3 societies exist. This paper is about the fact that there appear to be no galactic clusters that show a particularly abnormal, greater, amount of electromagnetic emission than the known standard. Which, actually, I'm pretty dang surprised hasn't been searched for already. Then, in order to be a little whimsical and…
> This paper isn't actually about whether or not type 3 societies exist.
Ah, I see. It's a play on words. "Apparently" is meant as "is visible", not in the sense of "this is true". Astronomer humor.
Re: Type III Societies (Apparently) Do Not Exist
#49I wonder what ants think of airports? Or what mice believe about tube trains as they scuttle under the platform. We are separated from mice (or at least somewhat similar animals) by approximately 40m years of evolution, I think that the separation to a Galaxy altering level entity would be much more profound, and frankly we wouldn't understand what it was if it came and tickled us.
We are in no way separated by 40m years of evolution. Our common ancestor 'is'. That mouse you see today has been evolving just as long as you have, but with different priorities.
Our common ancestor 'is' what?
We are separated from mice by 80million years of evolution -- 40million from the common ancestor, and 40million to the other modern species.
Or simply 40million years of divergent evolution.
Re: Type III Societies (Apparently) Do Not Exist
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, this idea has been explored and discarded. Thermodynamics requires the emission of detectable EM energy from such shells, just at longer wavelengths. We'd expect to see dark matter emitting in microwave or IR, but we don't.
It doesn't require that a Dyson Sphere be an isotropic radiator, though. It could be emitting its heat in a different direction.
Well, if you emitted it all in a beam away from the plane of your galaxy, that might make you very stealthy. That would impart thrust on the sphere... which if it wasn't perfectly balanced might cause it to wobble, and then start rotating...
... and now we have a sci-fi reason for quasars. :)