33 replies to this topic

[Parsec]

Bison, thank you for your explaination
So, they should move from their planet and live around their star, in order to have energy.
This looks every minute more impracticable and inefficient to me.

bison, on 13 October 2012 - 05:05 PM, said:

Human use of energy has grown exponentially over time.  We use about 115 times more than our remote hunter/gatherer ancestors, before they discovered fire. It doesn't seem likely that even someone from the Renaissance, fresh with the idea of human progress, could have believed that people, 600 years hence, would use 12 times as much energy as they did; what use they could possibly make of it, or how they could afford it. Nevertheless, we manage to do so, and even to foresee the need for more energy, and the possibility of producing it. It seems risky to try to place limits on what may be possible in the future.

Where did you get those numbers?
Honestly I thought were higher. Are they expressed in Joule or which unit of measurement?
To me it's not completely correct to confront pre-electricity civilizations and us in terms of energy consumption.
You say that It seems risky to try to place limits on what may be possible in the future, but maybe it's more risky to not place a limit on where we can go with energy demand, otherwise we're really just a virus on this Earth.

[DieChecker]

A Dyson Sphere would be fantastic if a civilization had gravity manipulation, and/or energy to matter conversion.

If a society could produce raw materials directly from energy, and if they had gravity control, they could build a dyson sphere and live on the inside and have room for billions of trillions of people. And they would still need more energy....

[bison]

Parsec, on 14 October 2012 - 12:27 AM, said:

Bison, thank you for your explaination
So, they should move from their planet and live around their star, in order to have energy.
This looks every minute more impracticable and inefficient to me.




Where did you get those numbers?
Honestly I thought were higher. Are they expressed in Joule or which unit of measurement?
To me it's not completely correct to confront pre-electricity civilizations and us in terms of energy consumption.
You say that It seems risky to try to place limits on what may be possible in the future, but maybe it's more risky to not place a limit on where we can go with energy demand, otherwise we're really just a virus on this Earth.

  I got the numbers from the website linked below. They are rendered into Kilocalories, so that the heat production of human and animal metabolism and of simple fires can be compared to modern forms of energy, like electricity. In common with life in general, humans have expanded their territory, numbers and energy sources, over time.  If we can learn to do this in an environmentally sustainable manner, I see no reason why this process should not continue.             http://www.wou.edu/l...erspectives.htm

Edited by bison, 14 October 2012 - 03:21 PM.

[Mr Right Wing]

Saru, on 08 October 2012 - 10:36 AM, said:

Three astronomers have been awarded a grant to assist them in locating Dyson Spheres in space.

I think this is pointless.

I expect any Dysons Spheres to have true stealth capability.