Well for one, planets aren't efficient. You have to deal with gravity, which is costly if you want anything to leave the planet. It's not efficient in terms of space. That is, the matter that composes a planet could create more space for humans to live in if it was stripped down and used to make space stations that people live on, which is one form a dyson swarm could take.
But I guess more importantly, there is an assumption here that at least some of these space faring civilizations would always seek to increase their energy output. That there will never be a point where they decide "We've got enough, let's just stop now" when they could probably have a largely automated process that keeps expanding it instead. You could definitely argue that some space faring civilizations would not seek to increase their energy output, but that wouldn't solve the fermi paradox because even if only 1/1000 would choose to do this you'd expect to still see some dyson swarms. You'd have to come up with a reason for why all civilizations don't want to build dyson swarms.
i'd challenge 'planets aren't efficient'. labor is much more efficient where people can actually survive and thrive. assuming as we do that other life'd be planetbound, the same constraint exists.
i might be getting a bit big for my britches here but it kinda seems like this imagining of the fermi paradox has built in assumptions we can't assume are true:
the ever-expanding needs of power thing is obv entrenched capitalist realism. the assumption of an innate interstellar wanderlust and thirst for exploration is basically uncritically accepting the mythology of european imperialism. the assumption technology will necessarily make fantasy engineering possible @ dyson sphere/swarm...
I don't see why a planet would allow people to thrive more than a space station necessarily would. And if that's true, I feel like a single planet is going to get pretty crowded.
I definitely see your capitalist realism point. I'd probably counter it with firstly that "exploration" in this context would be pretty low effort for the types of civilizations we're talking about. It'd take millions of years provided no interstellar travel, but sending a probe to every solar system would be trivial, and probably worth doing. And secondly, would a fully automated luxury gay space communist society not want to increase its energy output? I feel like you'd want it to support the "fully automated luxury" part. And with a massive amount of automation, it likely wouldn't require an immense amount of labor to get a dyson swarm started. But overall, yeah I guess it's possible that the idea of a civilization always desiring to grow it's energy output is rooted in capitalist realism.
I strongly disagree with the last part though. FTL travel is fantasy engineering, and a dyson sphere probably is as well, but a dyson swarm really isn't. It's at a scale that's hard for us to imagine, since it'd be probably billions or trillions of small space stations, but building such a space station doesn't require breaking a law of physics or some unimaginable technological breakthrough.
Elon's loop doesn't require breaking a law of physics or unimaginable technological breakthrough either, its just something with fatal premises & problems---for a dyson swarm there's an actually unimaginable amount of factors we're simply brushing aside to say its something we can definitely do. granted, a wee solar panel station floating around the sun isn't crazy, but an operation made entirely or almost entirely of robots harvesting raw resources & doing an entire production line to churn out billions of those? that's an insane organizational, nevermind technological, feat.
it's similar with 'trivially' sending out probes to survey the expanse of space... is it trivial though? one of the proposals is self-replicating probes--just casually making robots that can explore, prospect, mine, refine, smelt, manufacture... while also fueling itself somehow... all this for the only guaranteed return being survey data?
we know a staggering amount about distant astronomical objects just with fancy telescopes, wouldn't more & better telescopes & such---possibly in various-but-still-nearby places---be a much simpler investment with similar guaranteed returns?
Elon's Loop's fatal problems are that at best it's shittier than a train. I guess I don't think it's comparable.
It definitely would be a huge technological feat, but put in the context of what we already know what's possible, millions of years to work with, and the size of the universe, it doesn't explain none being currently observable by us unless you are suggesting that these technological challenges may be absolutely insurmountable.
I would say the same about the Von Neumann (self-replicating) probes. Also, from what I understand, telescopes have some limitations, like if a planet's orbit does not pass in between a star and us, we can't detect it, since we can't detect the star's dimming from when it passes by (I could be wrong though).
my point is more the L00p can never function as its supposed to even if 'car go thru tunnel' is something that works. satellite that absorbs solar energy is plausible, but billions-strong network of automatically constructed versions of that incorporates a lot more elements that might not work.
i kinda am asserting that either the technological challenges are insurmountable--which is probably an opinion that'd be shared by artificial intelligence skeptics, or that the technological challenges aren't worth surmounting. If it would take several million years to do a project, even a couple thousand, I wouldn't blame anyone for not doing it.
Is your opinion the same for a project that, though it could take a million years for it to be "finished", you start reaping the rewards immediately? (E.g. A dyson swarm, where each additional station is useful.
idk unless we've got immortal beings overseeing it the timescale is gonna throw a wrench in it, hell, even if they're immortal. cultures are constantly developing, language changes, bad things could happen. there's no examples yet of the kind of institutional & political cohesion we might need. space communism being an infinitely stable and enduring system is probably a bit naive
I don't think I agree that such a high amount of political and institutional cohesion would be necessary. It's less of a singular project that has a start and a finish and more of a thing that would be continuously added on to as power and/or habitats are needed until it's full and we can't add anything else.
idk why you'd do a dyson sphere/swarm tbh
what kind of power demands couldn't be met with much, much easier terrestrial fusion?
Well for one, planets aren't efficient. You have to deal with gravity, which is costly if you want anything to leave the planet. It's not efficient in terms of space. That is, the matter that composes a planet could create more space for humans to live in if it was stripped down and used to make space stations that people live on, which is one form a dyson swarm could take.
But I guess more importantly, there is an assumption here that at least some of these space faring civilizations would always seek to increase their energy output. That there will never be a point where they decide "We've got enough, let's just stop now" when they could probably have a largely automated process that keeps expanding it instead. You could definitely argue that some space faring civilizations would not seek to increase their energy output, but that wouldn't solve the fermi paradox because even if only 1/1000 would choose to do this you'd expect to still see some dyson swarms. You'd have to come up with a reason for why all civilizations don't want to build dyson swarms.
i'd challenge 'planets aren't efficient'. labor is much more efficient where people can actually survive and thrive. assuming as we do that other life'd be planetbound, the same constraint exists.
i might be getting a bit big for my britches here but it kinda seems like this imagining of the fermi paradox has built in assumptions we can't assume are true: the ever-expanding needs of power thing is obv entrenched capitalist realism. the assumption of an innate interstellar wanderlust and thirst for exploration is basically uncritically accepting the mythology of european imperialism. the assumption technology will necessarily make fantasy engineering possible @ dyson sphere/swarm...
I don't see why a planet would allow people to thrive more than a space station necessarily would. And if that's true, I feel like a single planet is going to get pretty crowded.
I definitely see your capitalist realism point. I'd probably counter it with firstly that "exploration" in this context would be pretty low effort for the types of civilizations we're talking about. It'd take millions of years provided no interstellar travel, but sending a probe to every solar system would be trivial, and probably worth doing. And secondly, would a fully automated luxury gay space communist society not want to increase its energy output? I feel like you'd want it to support the "fully automated luxury" part. And with a massive amount of automation, it likely wouldn't require an immense amount of labor to get a dyson swarm started. But overall, yeah I guess it's possible that the idea of a civilization always desiring to grow it's energy output is rooted in capitalist realism.
I strongly disagree with the last part though. FTL travel is fantasy engineering, and a dyson sphere probably is as well, but a dyson swarm really isn't. It's at a scale that's hard for us to imagine, since it'd be probably billions or trillions of small space stations, but building such a space station doesn't require breaking a law of physics or some unimaginable technological breakthrough.
Elon's loop doesn't require breaking a law of physics or unimaginable technological breakthrough either, its just something with fatal premises & problems---for a dyson swarm there's an actually unimaginable amount of factors we're simply brushing aside to say its something we can definitely do. granted, a wee solar panel station floating around the sun isn't crazy, but an operation made entirely or almost entirely of robots harvesting raw resources & doing an entire production line to churn out billions of those? that's an insane organizational, nevermind technological, feat.
it's similar with 'trivially' sending out probes to survey the expanse of space... is it trivial though? one of the proposals is self-replicating probes--just casually making robots that can explore, prospect, mine, refine, smelt, manufacture... while also fueling itself somehow... all this for the only guaranteed return being survey data? we know a staggering amount about distant astronomical objects just with fancy telescopes, wouldn't more & better telescopes & such---possibly in various-but-still-nearby places---be a much simpler investment with similar guaranteed returns?
Elon's Loop's fatal problems are that at best it's shittier than a train. I guess I don't think it's comparable.
It definitely would be a huge technological feat, but put in the context of what we already know what's possible, millions of years to work with, and the size of the universe, it doesn't explain none being currently observable by us unless you are suggesting that these technological challenges may be absolutely insurmountable.
I would say the same about the Von Neumann (self-replicating) probes. Also, from what I understand, telescopes have some limitations, like if a planet's orbit does not pass in between a star and us, we can't detect it, since we can't detect the star's dimming from when it passes by (I could be wrong though).
my point is more the L00p can never function as its supposed to even if 'car go thru tunnel' is something that works. satellite that absorbs solar energy is plausible, but billions-strong network of automatically constructed versions of that incorporates a lot more elements that might not work.
i kinda am asserting that either the technological challenges are insurmountable--which is probably an opinion that'd be shared by artificial intelligence skeptics, or that the technological challenges aren't worth surmounting. If it would take several million years to do a project, even a couple thousand, I wouldn't blame anyone for not doing it.
Is your opinion the same for a project that, though it could take a million years for it to be "finished", you start reaping the rewards immediately? (E.g. A dyson swarm, where each additional station is useful.
idk unless we've got immortal beings overseeing it the timescale is gonna throw a wrench in it, hell, even if they're immortal. cultures are constantly developing, language changes, bad things could happen. there's no examples yet of the kind of institutional & political cohesion we might need. space communism being an infinitely stable and enduring system is probably a bit naive
I don't think I agree that such a high amount of political and institutional cohesion would be necessary. It's less of a singular project that has a start and a finish and more of a thing that would be continuously added on to as power and/or habitats are needed until it's full and we can't add anything else.