From: Spike (spike66@attbi.com)
Date: Sun May 25 2003 - 12:01:16 MDT
Robert J. Bradbury:
>Regarding your proposed stellar management/disassembly processes,
>I agree that the ideas would be useful -- but can the physicists
>manange to pull the rabbit out of the hat? Yep, we can slow light
down.
>But that doesn't imply that we can negate gravity or the processes
>it drives.
spike:
No rabbits or hats. Use ordinary physics as we know it with
some imaginative engineering, starting with your own concept
of an Mbrain made up of nodes with reflective surfaces. We
could concentrate the sun's output onto a small region of the
sun's surface. (You DID burn stuff with your mother's makeup
mirror as a kid, right? If not, you were the only kid to have
never done this. That being said, it is still not too late to
have a misspent childhood.)
That superheated region of the sun gets hot enough that many
of the atoms achieve escape velocity from the sun's surface.
The resulting expanding blob of material is then differentially
heated by the reflecting MBrain nodes, in such a way as to
herd the material into a solar-orbiting subcritical blob of
hot hydrogen, which loses much of its heat via radiation
very quickly (a few million years or less). The hydrogen
is then available for chemical reaction with the available
heavier elements or for controlled fusion into heavier elements.
>I simply prefer some reasonably concrete evidence before I'm sold.
Evidence schmevidence. An ounce of imagination is worth a pound
of evidence. Robert you have tons of that.
Humans are apparently the first emergent sentience here in
this galaxy. In principle, the first sentience in any galaxy
will be puzzled as to why it is alone. If there were other
intelligences in this galaxy, I am at a loss to explain why
they aren't here by now, as well as everywhere else. Perhaps
we do not yet recognize ETI because we do not know what it
looks like.
Do let us mercifully spare the next emergent ETI this puzzle by
getting to its star and being there waiting for it to emerge.
We would subsequently devour it, of course. But at least it would
spared the excruciating uncertainty about why it was not being
devoured, as humans are currently doing.
spike
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