
Alien Supercivilizations Absent from 100,000 Nearby Galaxies - sriku
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alien-supercivilizations-absent-from-100-000-nearby-galaxies/
======
jotm
I don't know why people are expecting the kind of supercivilizations that
build Dyson spheres. It just seems too over-the-top.

The sheer amount of resources available in our own solar system, _one_ solar
system, is mind-boggling and enough to sustain a civilization for millions,
maybe billions of years.

At least for humans, there would be no need to waste resources encasing the
Sun in some gargantuan structure.

Instead, we'd have local nuclear fusion reactors that would be powered by a
steady stream of materials from the outside. Small, effective, no single point
of failure, perfectly in line with our love for individualism.

That, plus the optimization of resource usage (lower energy consumption, more
recycling, etc.) - we'd be more likely to reach a certain technological point
and expand as far as possible (=pretty much infinitely in space) instead of
building some crazy s&&t in our galactic downtown.

To make an analogy, once we created sailing ships and navigation, we explored
and conquered the whole planet. There was no need to create internal
combustion engines or advanced life support systems. Those are optional even
today.

~~~
dave_sullivan
I agree. Dyson sphere is the right idea (higher energy requirements) but wrong
implementation. One idea I've heard that I really like is that some black
holes and very dense objects are actually alien civilizations that have
uploaded their brains to computers and miniaturized. So basically, some black
holes == dyson spheres. It's not as crazy as it sounds!

[http://accelerating.org/articles/transcensionhypothesis.html](http://accelerating.org/articles/transcensionhypothesis.html)

~~~
zackmorris
Still too over the top. Probably the easiest way to do it would be a Dyson
“mirror”, maybe two cone-shaped mirrors built around a star that focus the
radiation into a disk, or a parabola on one side, something like that to
harness the power and project it where it's needed (most likely to power solar
sails for traveling between stars). So probably we should be looking for stars
with irregular brightness that's not due to planets or instability. At some
point they should also find lines connecting stars where the dust is hotter
than it should be. They probably won’t find any of this, which is perplexing.

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fizixer
> ... Wright’s group instead turned to the Templeton Foundation, ...

Unfortunately, I have to stop reading at this point.

(In case anyone doesn't know, this foundation is motivated by religiously-
conservative ideology, although I'm not sure if they overtly admit it. More
often than not, studies funded by them result in conclusions like 'this
universe could not have been created by accident', 'we humans are special',
problems with evolution, etc, etc).

~~~
codecamper
Wow. Scientific american published something linked to religious conservatism?
Are you sure?

~~~
Zigurd
Templeton cultivates respectability. They are not bible thumpers. The
foundation and the associated Templeton Prize do not exclusively award money
to Christian initiatives. It's only pernicious to the extent that having a
billionaire's fortune sloshing around funding people who give a nod toward
"spiritualism" might elevate squishy "not-quite-science."

~~~
Luc
Half the Wikipedia page on the Templeton Foundation is about controversies.
It's not near as clear-cut as you make it seem.

~~~
vinceguidry
They cultivate respectability. They have to cultivate it out of something.

------
Tloewald
It seems like the obvious answer is that no-one is enveloping galaxies in
Dyson spheres. As Dyson says at the end of the article: "The failure of one
guess does not mean that we should stop looking for aliens."

The Dyson sphere is really just the extrapolation of 1950s USA - maximize
comsumption, ignore pollution, expand at all costs.

~~~
greggman
There are other extrapolations. Humans put their minds in computers -> people
need more and more computing power to do the things they want to do -> all
available matter is turned into processors -> energy is need to run them all.
They only thing limited humans at that point is matter for processors and
energy to run them. Everything else is pointless.

That has nothing to do with "maximize comsumption, ignore pollution, expand at
all costs."

~~~
Tloewald
This is _exactly_ "maximize consumption, ignore pollution, expand at all
costs". When you decide that your use of energy / matter transcends all other
purposes (including the evolution of other life) then exactly what are your
priorities?

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danieltillett
I think the problem is they are assuming that the Dyson spheres are relatively
close to the star and hence the black body temperature is relatively high. If
the spheres are far out or arranged in shells then their black body
temperature could be only slightly above the background radiation temperature.
You will not be able to detect a galaxy filled with such spheres like that
optically, only by gravity.

Edit. I just wanted to add that any civilisation capable of building Dyson
spheres would not waste any energy that can be captured. The emissions of any
energy at any temperature more than slightly above the background radiation
level would be inefficient.

~~~
gus_massa
Since you essentially can't store energy for long times [1], you still have to
dissipate it as heat after use.

For example, you can use energy in computer calculation. Other use is
transport operations (like car and naval ships) they move but the energy is
transformed into air or water movement and later into heat. Another use is
steel blending, you change the shape of the metal, that makes the metal
slightly hot. ... Anything you do, you get a lot of heat to dispose.

Also, to dispose that heat fast enough, the dissipater has to be hot or big,
because the black body radiation is the faster you can emit. A big dissipater
require a lot of material, a hot dissipater waste energy, it's a tradeoff.

[1] You can store energy for a looong time making coal and burying it, the
plants we have done that unintentionally . An alternative is to make a lot of
aluminum and try to avoid the oxidation. But they don't look like a sensible
use of energy for a civilization.

~~~
ridgeguy
Rough estimates give me fairly low surface temperatures for Dyson spheres
having the average diameter of Pluto's orbit (~ 5.85e9 km) or the Kuiper Belt
(~6e10 km).

The Sun radiates ~ 10e26 Watts, or ~ 1.21e8 W/m^2 at a temperature of ~
5800°K. Given that radiated power is proportional to (area)*T^4 and making
simplifying assumptions about emissivity, etc., I get that a Dyson sphere
around our Sun at Pluto's orbit would have a temperature of about 76°K, and a
Dyson with a diameter of the Kuiper Belt would have a surface temperature of
about 24°K.

So if the radiator is large enough (i.e., if your civilization is sufficiently
advanced), you can dump stellar levels of power to space at quite modest
temperatures.

~~~
danieltillett
Nice work. You don’t need a solid Dyson sphere of that size, just IR mirrors
or Fresnel lenses (these could down to a molecule in thickness) to direct the
IR energy into collectors. I would imagine that it would be more efficient to
have multiple shells of Dyson spheres with each capturing the waste heat of
its immediate inner shell.

I read through the original paper and the lowest object temperature they were
able to detect was around 150˚K. Any Dyson sphere dumping that amount of
energy would be pretty inefficient.

------
hurin
Terence Mckenna who I generally think is kind of, really, nuts - criticized
the way of thinking which anthropomorphized the idea of alien life, In this
particular case I think it is a highly valid criticism: our conception of
extra-terrestrial life is perhaps akin to the ancient greek's conception of
gods.

There is really no basis to assume that another life-form should in anyway
resemble a human, a mammal, or some funny green dude. This should go for
assumptions about an alien-life forms energy-use/requirements as well.

~~~
pakitan
I used to think that way but not anymore. We didn't just pop out of somewhere
with randomly created features. We are the result of an evolution and (almost)
everything we have serves a purpose. If we imagine a distant planet similar to
ours, bets are the evolution there will produce life forms similar to ours.
Whatever the dominant life form is there, it still needs to move around, to be
aware of its surroundings, to communicate, to breed, to get energy in some
way.

And even if you were designing a life form, it's hard to get creative with the
"features". What would you invent to replace eyes? You may put eyes on the
back, you may triple the count, you may call them "the seeing things"...but
you still need to have something that makes the life form aware of its
surroundings.

Now, the fact that we have evolved from monkeys may be a matter of luck. On
other planets the dominant life form may evolve from birds or fish but I don't
think it's very likely that it will be something that we can't even imagine
now.

Of course, with all this I'm assuming a "simple" model of our universe - no
God, no intelligent design, no artificial intelligence and no "living in the
matrix".

~~~
hurin
> bets are the evolution there will produce life forms similar to ours

That's exactly the anthropomorphic bias. Why wouldn't it be a huge mycelium?
How do we even know there aren't types of life-forms made of structures that
current scientific theories wouldn't consider possible?

More so it's entirely unclear why the life should have to be intelligent - or
intelligent in a individual-animate-tool-building-animal kind of way.

> And even if you were designing a life form, it's hard to get creative with
> the "features".

It's hard to get creative, because creativity after-all builds from
experience, therefore our imagination of alien life is still derived from the
experience of Earth.

For that matter I'm very unconvinced that even Human civilization or life
(should it survive for another 10,000 let alone 100,000 or a million) years
will resemble anything like the organic individuals, with similar interests
(i.e. space-travel, colonization) as it has today.

~~~
pakitan
> Why wouldn't it be a huge mycelium?

Why hadn't it? I mean, not only doesn't it posses a drop of intelligence,
there isn't even something similar that does. And that's after billions of
years. My guess is something like this - intelligence is the most powerful
evolutionary weapon and due to the way evolution works, you only get that
weapon if you have to survive among powerful adversaries. However,
intelligence is of no use if the species can't react fast enough according to
changing circumstances. Something with mycelium's structure can't run, can't
hide and can't attack fast enough. If it somehow evolves to the point it
could, it would start resembling existing intelligent species.

> More so it's entirely unclear why the life should have to be intelligent -
> or intelligent in a individual-animate-tool-building-animal kind of way.

All life doesn't have to be intelligent and it's not, even here on Earth. It's
just that here we are discussing intelligent life that can build stuff.

> I'm very unconvinced that even Human civilization or life (should it survive
> for another 10,000 let alone 100,000 or a million) years will resemble
> anything like the organic individuals

Come on, we've had millions of years of evolution and we're still monkeys with
less hair. Unless we start meddling with our DNA and/or actually develop
artificial intelligence, we won't be changing much.

~~~
hurin
> Why hadn't it? I mean, not only doesn't it posses a drop of intelligence,
> there isn't even something similar that does.

If you were an intelligent fungus (on a planet without humans) and could
express similar thoughts, you would be saying _exactly_ the same thing about
monkeys. Same goes for all of your other reasoning.

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switchb4
The first realistic attempt to analyze extra-terrestrial civilizations from
the point of view of the laws of physics and the laws of thermodynamics was by
Russian astrophysicist Nicolai Kardashev. He based his ranking of possible
civilizations on the basis of total energy output which could be quantified
and used as a guide to explore the dynamics of advanced civilizations:

Type I: this civilization harnesses the energy output of an entire planet.

Type II: this civilization harnesses the energy output of a star, and
generates about 10 billion times the energy output of a Type I civilization.

Type III: this civilization harnesses the energy output of a galaxy, or about
10 billion time the energy output of a Type II civilization.

A Type I civilization would be able to manipulate truly planetary energies.
They might, for example, control or modify their weather. They would have the
power to manipulate planetary phenomena, such as hurricanes, which can release
the energy of hundreds of hydrogen bombs. Perhaps volcanoes or even
earthquakes may be altered by such a civilization.

A Type II civilization may resemble the Federation of Planets seen on the TV
program Star Trek (which is capable of igniting stars and has colonized a tiny
fraction of the near-by stars in the galaxy). A Type II civilization might be
able to manipulate the power of solar flares.

A Type III civilization may resemble the Borg, or perhaps the Empire found in
the Star Wars saga. They have colonized the galaxy itself, extracting energy
from hundreds of billions of stars.

By contrast, we are a Type 0 civilization, which extracts its energy from dead
plants (oil and coal). Growing at the average rate of about 3% per year,
however, one may calculate that our own civilization may attain Type I status
in about 100-200 years, Type II status in a few thousand years, and Type III
status in about 100,000 to a million years. These time scales are
insignificant when compared with the universe itself.

On this scale, one may now rank the different propulsion systems available to
different types of civilizations:

Type 0

Chemical rockets, Ionic engines, Fission power, EM propulsion (rail guns)

Type I

Ram-jet fusion engines, Photonic drive

Type II

Antimatter drive, Von Neumann nano probes

Type III

Planck energy propulsion

------
yc1010
Here is a crazy thought what if dark matter/energy is the result of advanced
civilizations? The researchers looked for decrease in visible but increase of
infrared radiation, what if highly advanced civilizations can actually make
use of all the energy of a star with this unexplained and unknown dark mater
or energy being the result.

~~~
vacuo
Cool idea, but [http://io9.com/5797597/are-we-surrounded-by-dyson-
spheres](http://io9.com/5797597/are-we-surrounded-by-dyson-spheres)

~~~
wcummings
Whenever I read something like this, I hope that we really are alone in the
universe, and just hopelessly deluded. The loneliest species inventing
fantastic friends for itself.

------
kokut
what is this nonsense? if a civilization were to emit the energy of a whole
galaxy in a single planet they would blow up. Advanced civilizations won't be
oriented towards spending their resources in the same way we do either. Why
would a supercivilization even want or need to use that much power?
Considering they are really advanced, they would orient their technology not
to destroy the planet like we do here, but to emit the least amount of energy
possible and focus on happiness and well being instead of expanding and
destroying like primitive creatures we are.

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davidgerard
> the Templeton Foundation, a private organization with a history of
> supporting controversial and speculative research

... yeah, no. Their history is of attempting to get scientific support for
religion. Their aim in practice appears to be to corrupt the public discourse
concerning science in the interests of religion, by swaying academics with
much more money than they'd get any other way. Anything or anyone funded by
Templeton should be viewed in this light.

Of late, they have expanded beyond religion to funding climate change denial.
[https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/templeto...](https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/templeton-
funds-climate-change-denialist-groups/)

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konceptz
I know this is a bit of a divergence but does this type of finding, assuming
it's true, bolster the "we are in the matrix"?

Not directly, of course, there are many other assumption that come first, as
discussed above, but it's fascinating nonetheless.

~~~
visakanv
Well... why not simulate alien superintelligences in the Matrix? Would it be
that the superintelligence running the simulation isn't sufficiently
intelligent to simulate itself?

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nik61
As a visitor here from one of the supercivilizations in question (and enjoying
the sex, red wine and rock music, I must say) I feel I have to point out a
couple of things that may have been missed. One is that many of you are
spending a lot of time looking for 'dark matter' when clearly the shrouded
Dyson spheres are fulfilling that role in their great abundance - talk of
infra-red signatures and such-like is technical defeatism. Secondly if you
find a way of getting at other dimensions in the multiverse, then you can find
one soon enough that consists largely of energy and funnel some of it back to
your own locale. Take your pick.

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misja111
What a misleading title. First of all the title suggests that all
supercivilizations build Dyson spheres, so that the absence of Dyson spheres
implies the absence of any supercivilization. But in the article itself we can
already find scenario's for other kinds of supercivilizations.

Second, the fact that we didn't find any sign of a Dyson sphere, doesn't prove
that they are not there. We definitely can not see every (Dyson) star in those
100,000 galaxies, so even if supercivilizations require Dyson spheres, they
still might be there and we could just have missed them.

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backlava
Why do so many people on forums like this expect intelligent life in space?

~~~
mikeash
Because if it's possible once, it makes more sense for it to be possible more
than once.

~~~
backlava
It happened once out of how many "tries"? What if there are an infinity of
parallel universes?

~~~
mikeash
Could be, but historically things have leaned towards "we are not special" and
it seems like a good working assumption to continue with that. Despite
previous thought, we're not really any different from animals, animals aren't
really different from other forms of life, living matter isn't really
different from non-living matter, our planet isn't really different from other
planets, our star isn't really different from other stars, etc. That obviously
doesn't prove that life is a common thing, but in the absence of better info,
it gives a decent starting place.

There's also the fact that life arose on Earth almost immediately after
conditions allowed for it. If it were an extremely rare event then there
likely would have been some lag. Again, not conclusive, but suggestive.

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bsenftner
Does it make sense that if such energy hungry super civilizations exist, they
would also covet Dyson Spheres created by other civilizations. The Dyson
Sphere then have a dual purpose: capture all energy, as well as cloak the
existence of the super civilization from other preditor super civilizations.

~~~
V-2
When there are two good explanations for something, the default choice is the
simplier one...

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th0br0
Reading such articles I always wonder: what if, by some weird chance of fate,
we're among the firsts or even the first to be "out there"? Highly improbable
and whatnot - sure. But we'll never know and neither will we ever be able to
give up our search either.

~~~
jaegerpicker
Someone has to be first right? It's not that improbable that we are the first.

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Beltiras
I think the scale is totally wrong. You don't jump from utilizing some portion
of your home sun energy to totally utilizing it, next step is realizing the
energy content of empty space. Solar systems can't compete with that once you
can harvest energy from vacuum.

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aceofpack
I'm surprised Kepler wasn't mentioned. And what is a supercivilzation? Are we
one of those?

~~~
bjz_
I thought they were talking about Type 2 and 3 civilizations. We don't even
count as a Type 1.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale)

~~~
aceofpack
Ah thanks for the link, not even type one! Some way to go then ;)

