Discussion
i would like to remind you all as the AI bubble starts deflating that not too long ago scammy altman was talking about creating a dyson sphere to power AI
it's important none of us forget the soaring heights of their stupidity or how the majority of tech press took this shit fully 100% seriously
@eniko I wonder how many knows how complex a Dyson sphere is. We are insanely far away from that type of tech. I expect replicators and FTL/Warp much sooner and we are nowhere near that either.
@yon or that the original paper was meant to troll the scientific publishing community
@eniko @yon I often wonder the same thing about the Turing test.
Alan Turing: Please fuck off with your "are computers alive". If you couldn't mistake a computer for a human, it's not a real question.
Tech bros: OMG we must trick people into mistaking computers for humans
Alan: In a better world I would be kissing boys right now.
@eniko Not unpossible for sure. The scale is just bonkers, and how are you even collecting and using it?
At most a thought experiment. We are probably too primitive to figure out anything “large scale” (energy, FTL, planet destroying weapons, lightsabers, bikini armor that works, etc) even in theory.
Even I can figure out that if you spend a lot and make very little you do not have a business plan. You have a Ponzi scheme for investors. They’ll sell the stamps later, promise. Invest moar!
No, seriously, Eniko is right. It was an act of trolling.
Freeman Dyson was a notable engineer but there's no engineering whatsoever in his paper that conceptualises the sphere. It's just a spiteful comment from the astronomy discourse at the time. The SETI programme was just starting up then, which was a colossal allocation of astronomy resources that many people including Dyson thought was absurd.
If you haven't worked in space science, you might not know how precious every hour of telescope time is, or how broad the electromagnetic spectrum is. SETI was using massive amounts of telescope time to scan only a tiny range of frequencies. This meant that a) there was less telescope time for everyone else, and b) there's a real chance that SETI would miss any aliens if they happened to be looking at the wrong frequencies.
Dyson wrote the "Dyson Sphere" paper to make fun of SETI by proposing a plausible-sounding alien civilisation which would emit primarily infrared radiation. He ends the paper by saying that this means that SETI should instead be looking at the infrared frequencies. He didn't do this because he seriously considered it to be a likely way for aliens to live, or a good way for SETI to search for them; he did this because he wanted SETI cancelled so other people could use that telescope time for more useful things.
@eniko I definitely won't forget who pushed for this, especially within our communities, what a bunch of despicable fash enablers. The more they are privileged, the more they push for it.
@KekunPlazas @eniko I will not forget those who were keen to use this stuff, even as they fall silent.
@eniko