• There is still a possibility of KIC 8462852 being a Dyson Sphere
    61 replies, posted
Wasn't this like, the plot of the new Star Wars movie or something?
[QUOTE=Zeke129;49574064]It's easy to conceptualize for us because for all of human development our societies have been limited by the amount of energy we can collect. We always want more energy, so it makes sense to us to harvest a star. But the whole "alien dyson sphere" thing makes the mistake of assuming that an alien species would have the same motivations as us, which just adds a whole new layer of improbability to something that's already improbable. Maybe they don't need that much energy so it never occurs to them, or maybe they found a way to get all the energy they could ever want "early" in their development, maybe they're a bunch of hippie alien elves who live and frolic in nature, etc. There's an infinite number of ways aliens could be [i]not[/i] like us, surely that's more likely than aliens so similar to us that our science fiction is their reality.[/QUOTE] I think people try to take this whole, "aliens would be different than us," idea too far to the extreme sometimes. The [I]only[/I] kinds of species we [I]are[/I] going to detect at all (baring any potential discoveries of interstellar travel by us or them putting one of us at the other's metaphorical doorstep) are those who consume huge quantities of power (it'll be the only way they'll stand out against the background), so it stands to reason if we ever do detect another form of life it's probably going to be concerned about the harnessing of power. Stars are an obvious source of power that the universe has effectively given us for free. I mean, sure, you can make your own fusion reactors, and I'm sure they would, but you wouldn't just ignore the enormous ones the universe is supplying for you if you had the technological capability not to. If the aliens are hippies, we're never going to hear from them or see them anyway, and if they have the capability to communicate across interstellar distances without their signals being drowned out in the interstellar medium they're going to want to harness a lot of power, so they're likely to construct these kinds of things. That's not to say this is a Dyson sphere. I'd like it to be one, but realistically it's probably just going to turn out to be a heap of astronomical rubble from some planet that was torn apart in some violent event.
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