Astronomy Cast Ep. 388: Megastructures

About | Information | History | Online | Facts | Discovery

1. They took their Jupiter and made a Ringworld but then they no longer had a bouncer at the door to their solar system and so a big comet came in and smashed the ring to pieces, hence the chaotic signature. That's my story and I´m sticking to it! :-)
2. Nah, its a completely different technology.
3. pamela is awesomely wise
4. couldn't a really advanced species absorb the infrared radiation from a star? its energy why let it go to waste? convert it into a useful form. add in a perfect dyson swarm and bam invisible star. as long as what ever is absorbing the energy converts all of it for its purposes and doesn't emit anything back . now if you imagine all the civilizations that might have mastered this could they all be huddling around they're birth star. invisible stars that can be moved anywhere to interact with as little as possible.....
5. I've been listening to AstronomyCast on and off since about 2007-2008. I was sure you guys had a bigger following! I love these discussions! (I normally on listen on iTunes, Just now decided to check out the actual shows.)
6. In Bolstom's "Super Intelligence" he discusses a possible likely outcome of AI achieving super-intelligence. He finds it likely that AI once achieving computational speeds and code sophistication inherent of super intelligence, that AI may find whatever moral, ethical, or physical constraints we place on it's goal and decision making capacity will be found to be entirely insufficient and inferior by this super intelligence and will be able to choose it's own objectives. Many of the likely goal choices will include near exponential infrastructure profusion. (also involving removing humanity for purposes of that infrastructure expansion) He goes on to make some calculations regarding the time necessary for the AI to populate a galaxy or the universe with infrastructure ( I believe at sub light speeds, off the top of my head) that over the billions of years since the first races could have emerged to accidentally loose this AI, or the billions of years after humanity might do so...that much or all of the universe could already be populated or will be, by the infrastructure of this AI civilization. (think of this process beginning and spreading with von Neumann probes)
   
   My own reflection on Bolstrom's work, is that even when talking about a galaxy or galaxies, over the course of a billion years, this super AI and it's infrastructure could gather the resources necessary for a Dyson sphere, if it chooses that objective far enough ahead of time. I am using this as a hypothetical example of probably the most extreme example of a capability to manipulate matter and energy into large structures over time.
   
   He also mentions the idea that development of AI may necessarily destroy most civilizations once they reach a certain average point of development, and so what might otherwise be a universe teeming with intelligent life becomes a universe where intelligent organic life is far far rarer than it naturally would be.
   
   I'm writing this halfway through the video, perhaps you mention something like this before the video is over.
7. Star Trek class station and then quick Death Star reference. ^.^
8. The Alan Telescope Array has been trained on this system and is trying to detect signals emanating from it that are not natural. Problem is, if this is an advanced civilization (Type II KARDISHEV), I seriously doubt they would be using radio.Also, where is the waste heat coming from the structure in the mid infrared? If this thing isn't working, maybe it wouldn't give off waste heat, but if it is operational it can't break the rules of thermodynamics and would glow and be detectable. That is the only reason I can find that tells me that it's not a working alien mega structure at least. We need to start building some serious space telescopes right now, and we could solve these problems really fast. Imagine the science and discovery that could be done with a telescope a few kilometers in diameter, situated in space. With a rudimentary artificial intelligence computer system to aid in search and discovery, because of the enormous amount of data that has to be gone through, we would definitely find out if were alone.
9. pamela is very cute
10. Do you guys accept bitcoin donations? If not you should!
11. If i listened to all of these will I understand the universe? :P
12. I really hope it's aliens, but I also have to wonder, like... 1000 years ago, what would someone predict the future to be like? they wouldn't have been able to predict nuclear power, for example, because they didn't even know about the the strong and weak nuclear force (or even gravity!) so when we imagine super-advanced aliens building Dyson swarms, thinking "oh man! so much power! surely the best!" ... might there be some other natural law we just don't know about yet, but will someday learn to harness? and many of our predictions about the future involve computers, but those are just the best thing we have now... it wasn't long ago people thought we'd use clockwork to mimic the human mind. they couldn't have predicted televisions, satellites, or the internet based on clockwork. what new type of "machine" have we not yet invented? what new technologies might come from it? or maybe, by the time we have the power to cross stars, we'll be like "oh, how silly: those are SO far away. it's WAY easier to just unfurl the other spatial dimensions predicted by string theory, and go live there." we just don't know! the only thing we know is that most predictions made about the future are terribly, terribly wrong :P but I do still hope it's a dyson swarm or something. it would be awesome to find alien life.
13. Gesundheit, Pamela!
14. I love when weird "stuff" happens and stumps us .. Can't wait to see what they find out .. Waiting with baited breath ..
15. where is the vid you said was published on the 16th? Would like to hear from author of paper. Please link please thank you.
16. Bonus episodes! =D
17. Hi Pamela!
18. Thats no exoplanet!
19. ...so excited about this !!!