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How else does SETI think to seek extraterrestrial intelligence?
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I will say right away that I am a big fan of science fiction, and I sincerely believe that fantasy (and science fiction is nothing more than a fantasy passed through the prism of a scientific approach) is one of the most important qualities of a person. Thanks to fantasy, we find inspiration, we do not cease to feel something childish and bright in ourselves, thanks to it we invent and do not stop there because we already see new ideas and discoveries ahead. And fantasy sometimes generates quite interesting things.
Before we begin, I also want to note that everything written below is only my own thoughts, and in no case is an attempt to impose my opinion on the rest. And let you,% username%, not be confused by such a topic on the hub, because we are all interested in space and we all heard about SETI - remember the dashing 2000s when we set ourselves the screensaver that counted something there, and thereby we introduced your little contribution to one big thing?
The idea to write an article came to me after reading an article on fromquarkstoquasars.comabout the Dyson sphere. It also talks about what it is and who is the author of the idea. But the strangest thing that struck me was the paragraph regarding the statement by Geoff Marcy, SETI Chair at the University of California, who said that to search for extraterrestrial life, you should also focus on finding objects similar to the Dyson sphere. For those who first hear what it is, let's dig deeper into the history of this term. For the rest, I think you can safely skip the next paragraph.
So, as you can already guess from the name, the term was first introduced in the 1960s by Freeman John Dyson in his work- English theoretical physicist. He suggested that one day any civilization will reach a level of development at which it will need energies for the purposes of existence and development, which it is impossible to obtain only on the home planet. His assumption is that such a civilization, with such an energy need, will try to make maximum use of the energy of the native star, capturing and transforming the energy emanating from it. Dyson suggested that one way to capture and convert the energy emanating from a star can be to build a structure around the star, consisting of elements that convert the energy of photons into, for example, electricity - something like solar panels. For the most efficient energy production in this way, it is necessary to capture as many photons emanating from the star as possible.
The Dyson sphere today has a lot of criticism regarding the design itself. For example, the very idea of making a structure of a spherical shape already entails the problem of maintaining the rigidity of the whole structure: if the centrifugal force on the plane of rotation is sufficient to balance the gravitational attraction of the star, but at the poles (i.e. closer to the axis of rotation), the centrifugal force will be extremely small, which means that structural elements at this "latitude" can simply collapse on a star under the influence of gravity. To solve this problem, many options were invented, you can read about them, for example, on Wikipedia .
So, let's reason. Yes, indeed, one can agree with Dyson and Marcy that for a civilization that is constantly in need of more and more energy, there will come a moment when its needs (civilizations) reach the point where you look at the sun and think that there’s supposed to be energy, it would be necessary to use it. To Dyson in the 60s, and many followers of his idea, it seems that for a fairly technologically advanced civilization it will not be difficult to create a solar battery so grandiose by today's standards, and I think that it is. But I don’t think this civilization would do that, and that’s why.
Fast forward, for example, in the years of the 70s, and look at the computer of that time. He, with its dimensions in the room, operates at a frequency difficult to compare with today's processors, the size of a coin. It turns out that if we extrapolate Dyson’s idea a little about satisfying the need for large amounts of energy, then it would happen that when we needed more computing power in the future, we would, for example, take and force the entire moon IBM System / 360 and then we would have "Huge" computing power. But in reality it didn’t turn out that way - today all this computing power from the field of 40-50 year old science fiction fits at our fingertips. You see what I'm getting at?
All our technological progress boils down to an increase in capacity with a decrease in size. Every year we see that what worked this way yesterday is smaller and more powerful today. We improve processes by reducing the energy demand for these processes, thereby increasing the efficiency from year to year. And when we kind of rest against a certain limit, we come up with something else and progress moves on. So we had arquebuses, and machines became, so we had carriages, and cars became. And so much more. And so, I am sure it will be with energy sources, because today we do not need to build the monstrous size of hydroelectric power stations - we can extract much more from nuclear power plants, which will occupy much less space.
So what about the Dyson sphere? I think it was a great idea for that time, on the basis of which more than a dozen beautiful books were written. But according to the rate of progress observed by all of us, it seems to me that not a single highly developed civilization would begin to build such a structure solely because of inefficiency, low efficiency, and a monstrous consumption of materials. You can even arm yourself with a calculator and calculate how much material you need to create a solid sphere around the sun with a radius, say, from the orbit of Mars and a wall thickness of 1 mm. It will turn out very, very much. And then it is necessary to mount everything, maintain it in working order, divert the received energy to the right place, and a huge number of problems. Needless to say, the idea of creating such an object already seems strange and unpromising, albeit grandiose.
Instead, I believe that a developed civilization will progress with about the same trends and results that we see today - decreasing size and increasing potential. A developed civilization, instead of building a solar battery to receive 1 watt of energy per hour the size of 10 football fields, I think, will come up with a pocket-sized fusion reactor the size of a battery. One can immediately object that the fusion reactor also has many problems like induced radiation, but these are nuances and we will omit them, because I sincerely believe that this is just a matter of time when we solve all these problems, and this does not take centuries.
Therefore, in summary, it seems to me that we will never find signs of extraterrestrial life trying to find objects like the Dyson sphere simply because no highly developed civilization will have any sense in building them. Is not it?