[slimsag]

No stake in this game, but your likeliness assumption depends on the idea that a civilization could get to the point of creating a Dyson Swarm. If civilizations are statistically likely to destroy themselves before then, 'detecting a few decades of radio emissions' could be the only scenario.

[oceanplexian]

Or civilizations find a better way to generate energy.

Why would you build this big mass around a star when you can create your own, much more efficient fusion reactor where and when you need it? Stars are insanely inefficient; they convert less than 1% of their mass into energy, take billions of years to do it, and you can’t turn them off when you aren’t using them. Plus, if you wanted to use it for some exotic warp drive or something, you would have to haul the mass of a star around. None of it really makes sense to me.

[dividedbyzero]

Or civilizations stop growing and never get to a Dyson something stage. You're a hundred billion or so immortal beings that can engineer their very wants and propensities, with a trillion autonomous robot minions, near-inexhaustible amounts of raw materials from asteroids, and more than enough renewable energy to live very happily ever after, why keep growing? Maybe the great filter is just that, a shift in priorities that prevents the others from getting big enough to be easily detectable.

[jmyeet]

The most likely alternative energy soruce is fusion. Personally I'm not convinced this will ever be commercial. I'm not saying it won't be but there are huge problems to overcome, most notably destroying the container and plasma turbulence.

We already have the tech for space-based solar. Putting it in space makes it much more efficient. It's relatively low tech and doesn't require exotic materials or solving the massive engineering problems that fusion (for example) does.

Then there are other way more exotic methods (eg antimatter, black holes).

But all this misses the point. If you generated 10^26 Watts of power on Earth using fusion power you would still need to dissipate that heat into space or you'd quickly cook the Earth. So you're pretty much back to where you started.

What I like about the Dyson Swarm idea is that it requires no new physics and is relatively low-tech. So even if there is something far-future that's an option (eg antimatter, black holes) you have to ask questions like: Will everyone reach that point? Will civilizations build Dyson Swarms as an intermediate step anyway? How long is that reality? Will there still be a mixed-use future with both space-based solar and exotic enegy generation?

The Sun radiates a ton of energy into space. Capturing it is relatively simple. Dismissing that seems to defy credulity (IMHO).

[voldacar]

Yeah any civilization capable of building a dyson swarm could probably develop technology to dissasemble a star and use its matter for a more efficient nuclear process. I'm not sure how you would practically go about doing that though, a dyson swarm at least is relatively simple (in principle) to construct

[ajkjk]

"Disassembling a star" has to actually be possible in principle for this line of reasoning to make any sense.

[ceejayoz]

Oh, we've plenty of evidence of that going on.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/03/study-theres-no-blac...

> "Our best interpretation so far is that we caught this binary system in a moment shortly after one of the stars had sucked the atmosphere off its companion star, said co-author Julia Bodensteiner, an ESO fellow in Germany. "This is a common phenomenon in close binary systems, sometimes referred to as 'stellar vampirism' in the press. While the donor star was stripped of some of its material, the recipient star began to spin more rapidly."

[ajkjk]

Well, that's by another star, not by engineering.

[est31]

There are some sources that discuss the idea here:

https://sites.google.com/view/sources-stellar-engines https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3y8AIEX_dU

[voldacar]

the Caplan engine is quite nice! Assuming there is no need to move the solar system, it seems advantageous to dispense with the dyson sphere and just use the mechanism described to siphon out mass from the sun to directly power fusion reactors. Even a perfect dyson sphere captures <1% of the energy released by the sun's nuclear fusion.

[kibwen]

The efficiency of stellar fusion doesn't matter, only the cost does. Whether or not humanity decides to harvest it, the sun emits a ludicrous amount of energy for free, just waiting to be captured with today's tech.

Of course, you'd never want to actually use a Dyson Thing to ever transmit 100% of the Sun's energy to Earth, because all energy turns to heat eventually and you'd scour the planet clean from all the inevitable waste heat.

[chmod775]

> they convert less than 1% of their mass into energy

Isn't that about typical for fusion reactions? What are you fusing in your hypothetical reactor?

[maxerickson]

Get a star to eject mass is probably one of the more reasonable ways to go somewhere else in the galaxy.

You need a pretty big vessel to be self sufficient.

[Hydraulix989]

A star IS a fusion reactor

[colechristensen]

The second possibility is that there’s just another form of communication using a known or unknown physics phenomena which becomes common for long term usage. There’s this baked in presumption that we have discovered all of the basic technology and physics in the last couple hundred years that civilizations would be using for millions of years.

[jmyeet]

In the context of the Fermi Paradox, that's not really an issue. Let me explain.

Imagine the chance of a civilization getting from our point to a Dyson Swarm without destroying themselves is 1% for wahtever reasons you like. If there are 10,000 equivalents to us within 10,000 light years it becomes incredibly likely we won't see one of these. You can argue we're "first" but being "first" out of 100 or 10,000 civilizations gets unlikely.

Now imagine there are 5 instead of 10,000. Then not seeing any gets much more likely.

So my point is that not seeing any evidence of these so far is still evidence of something and that something is most likely to be that civilizations reaching even our point is rare.

As for destruction of a species at our point, that's a whole separeate avenue of discussion. But the short version is that this is incredibly likely. Even if all the superviruses get released and all the nuclear weapons get detonated humanity will still likely survive.

A lot of our advances were delayed not because that advance is hard but because we didn't know any better and just coming up with that idea is the problem. Once you know the structure of matter and ideas like smelting steel (which is realtively low tech) can be recovered way quicker than they're lost.

1,000 years ago we were throwing spears at each other. A little over 100 years ago we took our first flight. In the last 50+ years we've gone from landing on the Moon to reducing LEO payload costs from $50,000+/kg to arguably <$1,000/kg and it's likely in the next 20 years that'll come down to possibly as low as $100/kg.

Barring some cosmic catastrophe it seems that permanent habitation of orbitals within the next 1,000 is pretty conservative.

[wildermuthn]

Good explanation, but I disagree about the improbability of being “first”. Probability doesn’t apply when taking about why we are conscious at this moment in time. The same applies to the why I experiencing consciousness as a 21st century human verses a 50,000 BC human. Unless we propose that there is a unique pre-existing soul that gets assigned to a single human body out of every single human who will ever exist, consciousness is just a non-individualized phenomenon of the brain and has a 100% chance of existing for every human who will ever exist.

When you look at it this way, the idea of being “first” is actually the most simple solution to the Fermi paradox. It fits with what we see (or rather don’t see) without denying what history shows us: life seems to have sprung up quite easily on earth and by its nature is driven toward intelligence, insofar as intelligence is at root the capacity to predict and control the world around us. Non-intelligence can flourish as long as conditions in its world don’t diverge from the survival patterns encoded into biology. Only intelligence is capable of adapting to new and changing circumstances. Ironically, the harder it is for life to avoid annihilation, the more that evolution needs to select for intelligence. The same is true even for self-annihilation: we will have to be smarter to avoid it, not dumber.

Additionally, why would we expect earth to have evolved intelligent life if another intelligent species spread and settled across the galaxy?

The first ought to be the last.

[MR4D]

Not the OP, but if you think about it, putting devices at Lagrange points is in some ways the start of the process of building one.

The JWT is the most famous device at such a point, but there are a few others as well. [0]

The great thing about a swarm is that you can do it one at a time. Change the timescale to a thousand years or more, and there implied size even with our current level of tech would be nearly unimaginable compared to what we have today, while probably nowhere near a sphere.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_objects_at_Lagrange_po...

— - - EDIT: meant to add - even if the world were destroyed today, the JWT would still transmit signals for some time (I don’t know it’s design lifetime, but likely years if not decades).

[Ekaros]

I'm not sure but there is question also about resources. Let's say we turn all rocky objects excluding most of Earth and our Moon in the solar system to Dyson swarm. Would this have any noticeable effect on how we show outwards? There is lot of dust around solar system already and asteroid belt is also there.

[jmyeet]

I've seen one estimate that 1% of Mercury's mass is sufficient to build a full Dyson Swarm around the Sun.

That's part of what makes Dyson Swarms attractive: planets are incredibly inefficent uses of mass in terms of living area created.

Why Mercury? It's metal-rich, has no atmosphere, has relatively low mass and energy is incredibly abundant due to proximity to the Sun.

Many seem to think we would need to dismantle the Solar System. We do not.

[kingcharles]

No stake, but what if a civilization just doesn't care any more? For instance, we all download our consciousness into the Singularity and our every wish is fulfilled. Why bother doing anything else as long as you have enough solar power hitting your planet's surface for whatever you are currently doing?

[goatlover]

This assumes everyone in the civilization would want to do that, including any AIs. We don't have an example for history or contemporary society where this is true. Not everyone wants to immerse themselves in digital entertainment, despite the proliferation of it. People engage in a wide range of activities, some of them which require deprivations and real danger, like climbing mountains. It would be odd if nobody from a civilization retained an interest in exploring space, with the possibility of finding something truly alien.

[tomrod]

Ennui seems motivating.

[zackees]

Funny how none of the solutions to the drake equation include the possibility that a government would hide evidence of alien life.

It’s literally more probable that all life in the universe dies than our government would cover up contact, according to the media.

[midasuni]

You assume mass competence of different governments in different countries over a dozen administrations. That’s a mass conspiracy theory, one which seems pretty much impossible.

[zackees]

And with all the media stories about alien life with laughable grainy footage of people walking in stilts and anal probes, what signal would you use to be able to determine what the "truth" is on alien contact? Would it be "your gut feeling"?

There's literally so much mainstream disinformation in the UFO space that there is zero chance that someone casually be able to figure out what's fact from fiction. The noise is so high that the signal is effectively buried.

So I disagree with your assessment that the truth would be viral. Most of the human population has already been inoculated to a viral UFO truth narrative.

[wincy]

I mean, it makes sense. If we had definitive proof that alien life existed a large portion of society would go absolutely bonkers. I'm pretty sure I would.