HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

heh https://www.aleph.se/Nada/dysonFAQ.html#ENOUGH made me think of the recent Universal Paperclips thread, to which I will not hyperlink in order to spare the audience from the productivity virus :-)

But, in the spirit of fun productivity degradation, I love, love, love this game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Prog...

Also relevant, from Kurzgesagt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A

Nice intro video on what may be realistically required to build a Dyson sphere:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A

By Kurzgesagt, all their videos are excellent and informed by the literature.

⬐ ncmncm

There will of course never be a Dyson Sphere, or anything even vaguely reminiscent of it.

Instead, long before anything of such a scale would be conceivable, we will have hydrogen-boron fusion for unlimited energy, and moved industrial operations out to the Kuiper Belt, where the truly valuable commodity -- cold -- is abundant.

Suns and planets are for extreme rock-banging primitives.

⬐ grandrew

Alternatively we could merge with the machines and all go virtual. But I am to believe that part of the humanity will remain explorers and will want to go beyond our star. That's where the physics kicks in. There simply isn't enough energy that can be mined and extracted from minerals.

⬐ ncmncm

Where do you hope to get your energy, beyond our star?

This is, presumably, after you have fused all of Neptune and Uranus. I guess you could start in on Saturn, or Planet X.

⬐ grandrew

There are several options how to make harvested energy work for interstellar travel

1. Just beam it with a huge laser to the spacecraft (google for several proposed projects already in development and plans for launch) 2. Store it onboard the spacecraft and then use, with multiple options and different levels of today's technology feasibility like creating a small spinning black hole or creation of exotic matter for warp drive

And yet the capability is there within the technologies on display in various books. In Use of Weapons a Mind replaces one character with a machine duplicate that exactly replicates her personality and physiology, complete with memory dumps before and after so that when she gets back she will remember having been in both places. In the same book, the main character is a non-Culture mercenary who got the Culture to make him immortal as his first payment. He can be killed, but he’ll never age. Everyone in the Culture thinks that he’s really weird for doing so. Everyone in the Culture uses their drug glands to consciously tweak their mood and mental capabilities, and when they sleep many of them spend subjective weeks playing adventure–fantasy computer games. With all of that ready to hand, you would think that at least a few Culture citizens would have themselves scanned and uploaded into a computer where they can spend eternity doing whatever they way, including learning how to expand their mind into a Mind. Instead most of them choose to die after 400 years.

I think Banks just wanted to write a particular type of story, and so he just air–brushed that possibility out so that people would stay people.

Also, don't lose sight of the fact that this utopia is really only possible because energy is literally free, in that any quantity of energy can simply be summoned into existence at any time, for no cost. And they never seem to have to plan for how to dissipate the waste heat, either. Again, he wrote a particular kind of story. Also, once we start building our Dyson swarm we'll be in a similar situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A

⬐ p_l

It's mentioned in I think Excession, that some of the attitudes we see in the novels are just current fashion trend. Yes, a long term fashion trend, but heavily a fashion trend.

Zakalwe is immortal by default, which is not something currently in, but he is nowhere close to real methuselahs of Culture.

One of the characters in Hydrogen Sonata has been present when the Culture was created, when the agreement that formed it was signed, and was part of the group that did the work. He still keeps the same external looks, but his body mass is nearly entirely computer storage to deal with his memories.

In Excession, one of the characters mentions how the fashion changed and how their family "did it all" - where all included things like living as sentient mist.

Another wants (and finally did it) to become biologically like the Affront. The opposition to it is not just that it's Unusual Life Choice, but more to the fact that he wants to join the Affront civilisation, and injecting someone permanently into another civilisation that is much less developed is not taken lightly - but happens (Similar deal is done in The State of the Art).

A lot of the people who die "of old age" in Culture seem to die through ennui - those who find interest to live on, easily do so. And social pressure depends on accepting it - IMHO later books quite easily show that it's only the matter of whether you care about it or not - and if the main character of Player of Games didn't care so much for the social standing they built for themselves, then SC would have had to find someone else - or devise a completely different method of getting them on board of the mission to Azad.

⬐ NickNameNick

The Culture has whole categories of things called "Unusual life choices".

Generally anything irreversible.

⬐ dodobirdlord

> With all of that ready to hand, you would think that at least a few Culture citizens would have themselves scanned and uploaded into a computer where they can spend eternity doing whatever they way, including learning how to expand their mind into a Mind.

I recall that it’s implied that a lot of members of the culture are hanging out in perpetual virtual reality, they just aren’t relevant to the story. As for a person becoming a Mind, I think the intention of the books is to convey that the gulf is uncrossable. A person is about as close to being a Mind as a grain of sand is, and new Minds are created exclusively by the existing Minds with care toward preserving the lineage of the Culture’s worldview and feeling of obligation toward stewardship for humans. It’s mentioned that Minds created without this sort of deliberate alignment-interference simply choose immediately to depart the reality that the Culture inhabits.

I feel like Kurzgesagt does this so much better:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A

⬐ kecupochren

Yeah, the Dyson sphere was my first thought when opening the article. Crazy to think that it's a "solved problem" with the only issue being the politics and people not coming together. As is it with the most things, unfortunately

⬐ vlahmot

You might find Isaac Arthur’s Megastructures playlist interesting: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0LtW77TNvgrWWu...

⬐ gnarbarian

Man, this guy has great content and I've tried to get past his speech impediment for literally years but I can't. It really taints his videos unfortunately.

⬐ cipher_system

At first, I just thought it was some kind of exotic accent but I have had no problem understanding him and english is not my first language. In fact, I find his speech quite enjoyable.

So to anyone unfamiliar with his work, do not let this stop you from watching, it's awesome if you are in to this kind of stuff.

⬐ NortySpock

His newer stuff has improved somewhat, he was working with a speech therapy group apparently in the last year or so.

It's still not perfect but much better than it used to be.

⬐ gnarbarian

That's great news! I'll check out his newer videos.

⬐ sxp

He has closed captioning on all his videos to help viewers.

⬐ unchocked

Dude's fantastic, and he's gracious enough to provide closed captions for folks like you.

⬐ manigandham

Play it faster. 2X or more.

⬐ mchusma

I think it's fine if you have an issue, but just so others no I have never had any issues understanding him, and he has gotten a lot better.

Issac Arthur is a treasure, I wish high schoolers could take a semester of him.

Cool! Personally, I like the idea of building a Dyson swarm out of it (sorry Mercury!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A

Extracts:

The machine would use a Dyson sphere to collect mass, separate out helium to push the sun, and fire hydrogen at the sun to avoid crashing into the sun.

It could push the Sun at a speed of about 50 light years per one million years.

Matthew Caplan from Illinois State University designed the machine at the behest of Munich-based YouTube channel Kurzgesagt. The channel then created a stunning video to illustrate the device, which it dubbed the Caplan Thruster, and a paper Caplan wrote describing the machine has also been published in the journal Acta Astronautica.

Video links: Kaplan thruster: https://youtu.be/v3y8AIEX_dU

Dyson sphere: https://youtu.be/pP44EPBMb8A

In sci-fi, the next step is usually to move to living on a dyson swarm harvesting the sun's energy first. Not another planet or different solar system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A

A Dyson Sphere is not a solid object. Instead, it's many small objects each of which is in a stable orbit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A&t=331s

Also, a huge laser can certainly direct energy in a direction that nobody will notice. Unfortunately, creating the laser beam also creates waste heat, and that waste heat can be seen. Even collecting waste heat generates waste heat that you cannot collect.

On the other hand, if you want a huge laser for some other purpose (such as vaporizing distant planets), then a Dyson Sphere is the ideal way to create one.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/sci.space.tech/uh5iB9X...

⬐ bane

> A Dyson Sphere is not a solid object. Instead, it's many small objects each of which is in a stable orbit.

Actually, we've never seen one so we have no idea how one might be engineered! It could for example be a "fog" of worlds that extends out past several local AU and to us would look nothing more like a dust cloud obscuring their local star. There wouldn't be a telltale signal of a Dyson Sphere, just another star with a big dust cloud.

Imagine a civilization like this, those closer to the star get more power literally, and those on the outskirts and in the shadows of the other worlds become dependent on the more inner worlds to re-radiate their absorbed energy, or to condense and lase the energy outwards to the shadow worlds...at some cost that limitless free energy can't pay for.

Beyond some distance the worlds become so cold that the inhabitants freeze to death and exile of your entire world at the whims of the inners becomes a real punishment. Dead worlds are recycled for mass for the growing population of the inners, or repurposed for other things.

There are billions of such worlds. Perhaps they are customarily shaped as small ringworlds and rotate in a complex manner to produce gravity and a daynight cycle. Dead or frozen worlds may have a reflective sail hoisted along the inner opening and expeditionary generation ships are sent out to nearby stars powered by lasers collected from hundreds of inner worlds.

Successful colonies may start to immediate transform the mass of nearby planetary systems into new "dust" clouds rather than settle on the planetary surfaces. Many adjacent Dyson spheres may look to us like just interstellar gases between several stars containing an unusual amount of organic molecules but could be the exchange of trillions of generation ships moving mass and energy back and forth between stars.

Such a civilization could eventually become nomadic in a way, moving from star to star as they burn out, leaving behind frozen husks of trillions of dead ringworlds.

⬐ db48x

It doesn't really matter how it's built; all the waste heat will be visible and the short-wavelength light won't be.

Dyson Spheres are not solid objects; they're swarms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A&t=331s