The Physics of Extra-Terrestrial Civilizations

http://www.mkaku.org/ ^ | unk | Michio Kaku

[onedoug]

I'd ask 'em if they perceived of God, too.

[FreedomSurge]

All this is so very interesting.

[Ogmios]

You played Halo yet?

[Reeses]

For intelligent life to form it probably requires a lower life form to develop a war making disposition. War is in effect unnaturally fast evolution. Without it, development is too slow and a meteor would reset life. The reason we can't find any intelligent life out there is probably because the universe is a very bad neighborhood. They are hiding. Some advanced civilization may have already seen The Jerry Springer Show and lobbed a black hole missile in our direction.

[aculeus]

Horse hockey. Anyone who insists a la the arm-waving Carl Sagan that there must be extraterrestrial intelligent life hasn't thought about life on Earth with sufficient rigor.

Brain cells exist on Earth only in Bilaterian animals creatures that came into existence only once. Not a single brain cell exists in other sexually-reproducing multicells, not in plants, sponges or jellyfish.

Life elsewhere? Sure, why not? But intelligent life elsewhere is about as likely as the future emergence of intelligent Earth-bound plants.

[RightWhale]

we'll be cooking like Level III's

Not with the burden of the neo-Luddites hanging around our necks. We're going nowhere whether there are civilizations out there or not. No kidding, they worry that we will spread our thought pollution to outer space given a chance.

[Wright is right!]

"Build a sphere around the entire sun?"

No, build a sphere around the PLANET. Gathers and conserves energy.

Michael

[MHGinTN]

"Then we will wonder, as Sagan did, what a civilization a millions years ahead of ours will look like..."

I'm a fan of Michio Kaku, thus I'm hesitant to offer the following in so great a company as have assembled to comment here:
it is our primitive understanding of 'time' that limits our imgination of the possibilities. The universe is first considered spatially vast, then the light comes on and one realizes that it is not the spatial separation but the temporal limits of our current technological abilities that hold sway. Perhaps, in the not so distant future, we will come to have a better conceptualization of time and how it is integrated with spatial variables. Since we sense nothing in the present of the phenomena we measure, and have no inkling of how to measure that which is coming to us from the future, we're stuck with a penumbra of present cobbled together through our measurements of past events.

[RightWhale]

Looks like a highway.

[playball0]

BTTP. Sounds like navel gazing to me.

[Billthedrill]

It would come down to energy. Those dang Type III slickers and their interstellar SUVs are gonna screw up the whole thing for the rest of us.

[Liberal Classic]

Verging into science fiction here, the Ringworld is a half-way step before the construction of a Dyson sphere. Instead of a sphere, a ring is built which circles a star. The advantages are that it requires significantly less mass, it can spin to simulate artificial gravity, and spacecraft don't need to launch from the surface, they can be slingshotted off the rim. An interesting mental excercise, such as this article, but highly speculative.

[Liberal Classic]

I need a new PC before I can get any new games. :/

[RightWhale]

Looking at aesthetics rather than science. Niven was somewhat annoyed when he learned that Ringworld might be unstable. It's round planets for us, that and hollowed out asteroids.

[PatrickHenry]

Looks like a highway.

Yes. Larry Niven, the author of Ringworld, related some correspondence he had with an engineer who said that the dynamics of ringworld were, in essence, like a very long suspension bridge.

[LibWhacker]

. . . one can still use the laws of physics to place upper and lower limits on these civilizations . . . Members of these hypothetical civilizations of Type IV, V, VI, ... and so on, would be able to manipulate the structures in the universe on larger and larger scales, encompassing groups of galaxies, clusters, and superclusters of galaxies.” Civilizations beyond Type III may have enough energy to escape our dying universe via holes in space.

In other words, there are almost no limits on these civilizations.

[Junior]

Having a galaxy-spanning civilization does not necessarily mean it will be a unified civilization. Western civilization encompasses dozens of countries, some of them actively hostile to one-another. Of course, warfare within a Type III civilization would probably be something none of us would ever want to experience...

[Liberal Classic]

I'm sure he was. :) I read his book years ago and it must have been built from some super-material. I'm a Babylon 5 kind of guy myself.

[BlueNgold]

But .. what if we are the most advanced?

[Capitalism2003]

"Build a sphere around the entire sun? Do you realize how much mass that would require? Probably the total of several thousand planets depending on the circumference. Not gonna happen."

Everything is relative.
Haven't you seen Men in Black? ;)
Our entire galaxy is more insignificant than a single grain of sand in the grand scheme of things. The universe is 15 billion years old vs Earth's 5 billion years. Of the 5 billion years, man has only been around for a few thousand...There are potentially civilizations out there that had our technology 10 billion years ago...With this much evolution past, there really would be virtually no limit to what they are capable of.