The Dyson Sphere Debate and Von Neumann Probes w/ Dr. Zaza Osmanov 

I would guess it would depend on how advanced you are. I think spreading out to other planets and terraforming would be better. Spread out is better to survive supernova and wayward planets.

Would an advanced species need the same energy scale as we need? Or would they have found a more efficient way of meeting their energy requirements? The concept of Dyson Spheres seems like a very human solution.

I don't think a Dyson Sphere is something someone "builds". As envisioned by Dyson, they are swarms of power satellites. As such, if they come to be, they will come about organically as a society grows builds more and moe orbital habitats and solar panel stations. As such, they are very likely to arise as a population grows around a star... but it will be VERY gradual, and nearby stars will be colonized well before a full sphere can take shape.

@@andyoates8392 It's not really about a species' energy needs, but its total population. If it keeps growing, then energy requirements will keep growing irrespective of efficiency. If they control population, then it's another story.

no. we are on the brink of getting practical functioning fusion reactors. why would we follow a primitive approach of collecting sun light, once we can produce an almost endless amount of power ourselfs localy? it never made sense to me. its like imagining to build a ladder to the moon before there was flight technology. wendelstein 7x produced a stable plasma of 100 mil celsius? everything else is a matter of engineering, the foundation is already layed out. I think the us has made major advancements with their laser based methology too. despite, could we please consider that we are not at the end of the road and that we will devolope with utter certainty a deeper understanding of physics? if one would assume that sailing is the fastest way of travelling, for all times, every conclusion made from this further on, would be deeply flawed. expect the unexpectable. ftl travel is possible and no civilization has the motivation to settle every solar system. there is a turning point between quantity and quality. both are important but quantity leads to quality. meaning once humanity has settled a dozen, or a hundred or a thousand solar systems, direction will change towards a new path of development. if you look at a plant and consider its options for survival, you could argue that becomming the ultimate dominant life form and conquering every niche, if possible, would be desirable, but that is false. the opposite is true, competition leads into symbiosis. complexity benefits the parts that make up any given system, reducing complexity is always self defeating. a plant that is so "successful" as to drive out every other life form, would ultimatly be its own demise. i strongly suggest that we find wisdom in the aknowlegement of our own limitations and standing within the timeline.the real fermi paradox is to assume we would be capable to find extraterrestrial civilizations with our very much limited technological capabilities several hundred light years away. aliens, wherever they may come from and whoever they may be, are visiting earth and have been doing so for thousands of years. the simple fact that we struggle to believe that, despite the endless indications, should really make us wonder about the concept of tunnel vision and elitarism. if we know our flaws, we can adress them, if we chose to ignore them, we remain unchanged and therefor burdened by these flaws. why is it so important that we immortalize certain figures throughout history? because we ourselfs want to rise up into the olymp? i always liked greek mythology because they fought their gods instead of bowing their heads. aunt edith wants to add that seti literly uses wishful thinking as their guiding principle. we want to find a dyson sphere because we could possibly find a dyson sphere, so lets search for a dyson sphere. we could detect radio signals, we want to detect radio signals, lets search for radio signals. where is the objectivity in this?

There always has been from my recollection. Only now, Academics have grown a pair of balls and are willing to discuss it too!

Might be correlation with living in a time where the term "conspiracy theory" doesn't hold the same stigma that it used to

@@BurnDoubt Surely the concept of extraterrestrial life is less whacky than the concept of god?

@@BurnDoubt Uhh.. big difference between conspiratorial nonsense and the scientific possibility of other life elsewhere in the universe.

@@gorbachevdhali4952 I don't doubt it, I never have. My point was it was only a decade ago when you couldn't really say these things out loud without being called a Nutter and get shouted down. I am old enough to remember when Area 51 "didn't exist" and You are called a wacky conspiracy theorist to say otherwise

There is no law that states the growth is linear with time. It may happen that after certain years there is no more growth possible in technology.

The technological growth might be limited, but they might be able to leverage scale and brute force their projects. What a population of trillion people and machines could do?

@@moviesfan5513 There is no law that says it can’t remain linear, or become exponential, either. You are simply being limited by, well, your limited human intellect to see more possibilities than the sample size of one we currently have (but seemingly not for long) to base our thoughts on how civilizations can and can’t be capable of advancing. This is the same self-limiting fatally flawed thinking smothering innovation and advancement in academia today like a fog of CO2 descending onto a trash can fire. We need that fire back in academia that has been lost due to the culture that ridicules innovative thinkers for trying to challenge the status quo. The folks in academia are too worried about their tenure status and their self-congratulatory awards they pass around like pats on the back to remember how to be real scientists and have debates about not only what is known, but what might also possibly be known. Just because an idea might wind up being bad doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be set forth in the scholarly realm of debate and discussion to ensure no parts of the idea might be little nuggets with merit and worth developing further.

@@pavel9652 See? This is the kind of thinking that I like to see. Your mind is open to possibilities we might possibly be able to achieve in the future that we can’t do today. Well done exercising that noodle to dream of possibilities beyond current human capability.

@@pavel9652 Good point but even brute force has a limit. We live in a finite earth with finite resources.

Yes.

This was recorded two months ago.

I hope John covers those no matter what they turn out to be.

@@scottjarvis123 I'm sure he will cover it on his John Michael Godier channel. Although it will probably turn out to be someone's cell phone or, a local satellite

There was anouncment? I thought it was only in newspapers.

It's been a long time since but I read a book and it said stars actually get most of there energy out of the carbon oxygen nitrogen cycle of fusion products . Our reactors will fuse tritium or hydrogen and lithium, stars simpley can fuse far more elements and have no energy requirements for magnetic confinement. Also if you get to the point you need a Dyson spheres worth of energy, that's gonna be alot of fuel you have to find to fuel your alternative fusion reactor idea. The logistics of moving water from the ort cloud, spliting it down, separating the desirable isotopes and delivering it to fusion reactors would just be immense.

Thats the issue with using our way of life as the barometer. Cave men would imagine huge fires and better spears, Freeman Dyson would think of harnessing the sun with a ludicrous structure because of that deep ingrained notion that bigger is better. Its actually the opposite when it comes to consumption, a cars engine is a good example, we used to use large capacity and then we switched to turbos and small capacity, now we are switching to no internal combustion at all. Advancements of energy production and usage would follow a similar basic logic

Waste heat. There's still a lot of reasons to use solar energy even when you have fusion. Much as we use different sources today.

@@jamesn0va Drawing unlimited energy from the quantum vaccume is actually the way to go!

I mean sure Fusion would seem like the way to go, IF we actually can harvest it in its maximum potential, however just letting the energy of the Sun radiate in to space as waste seems very inefficient. Fusion is clearly just easier to assemble, but if robotics and space transportation can come a long way then even a Dyson Sphere or Swarm will soon become a necessity with the expansion in our solar system. The material for Fusion does not last forever, however solar is practically infinite. All of the surface area that you can harvest from a star adds up very quickly.

We live in a complex and profound universe. Perhaps our collective consciousness is unconsciously connected

Trisolarians!!!

Same- it was so heavily hyped and so far I’m so disappointed with the speculative science aspects, just seems really unimaginative and limited. I do enjoy the perspective from Chinese history, that’s neat. And the writing is very good.

Homeboy just typed out a novel LOL

We sometimes need to make changes when we release a video to make sure people actually watch it.

I’m afraid you will get old and depart from this mortal coil alone in the universe. The nearest intelligent civilisation is probably in other galaxies and will be too far away for us ever to find them.

@@Vile_old_Bastard_3545 doubt that. Our galaxy is massive.

Anton Petrov did a vid on it

@@Macleod644 You are naive because you have not thought through all the reasons why intelligent life is so hard to come by. I have had 40 years of thought put into it but you go and dream on.

@@Vile_old_Bastard_3545 So in 40 years you didn't learn anything? That's considering they have our technology lvl! Sorry to inform you that your government has been studying ufos and keeping it a secrate from the public for years!

Don't chat bs ok a swarm or sphere that's what they talk about I am stating the fact that the sun is 99.8 % mass in our solar system do you think .2% is enough to cover our sun excluding waste

@@tezmundoalvarezthe1st335 if you are going to open a conversation that way, then you can go f@%^ yourself.

@@painmt651 I’ve been smoking weed all morning and I’m definitely in the stupid human oval of the Venn diagram. However, I did think up some pretty good sci-fi tech just now. A bioengineered fungus that survives in space. Seed clouds of hydrogen with it to change the properties of the cloud enough so the surface area of it acts as an enormous antenna for a futuristic radio telescope. Hmm? We might even be able to skip the fungus if we study how radio waves bounce off giant clouds of hydrogen enough.

This is true! As we often take from nature and improve on it, it makes sense that the same would be done for other civilizations if they exist. A lot of our discoveries and physics didn't just come from thin air or even per se just because of a brilliant mind. Rather, we often tend to base some of our best discoveries and works off nature. This ranges in everything, from flight, to medicine with the various natural herbs which we often base our medicine on or even straight up use as medicine unaltered, to a wide variety of math and physics, to engineering marvels. Things like the Golden Ratio which can be seen all around nature. Or Pi, which is based on the nature of a circle. We like to think we're so far away from nature and technology separates us from nature, but the reality is, often technology is based on or around nature in varying degrees.

@@WildWombats - I’ve often wondered why our society hasn’t put more into artificial photosynthesis… If we could figure out how to harness synthetic photosynthesis on an industrial scale, we’d solve a lot of problems. We’d be cranking clean energy as well as a couple other applications. That would be another techno signature to consider too…

@@chrisdraughn5941 This is true! Another thing we use nature on - we base our own AI's currently on our own neurons in our brain and how they work - quite literally, we put the same idea as how the neurons work in our brain, and translate that into computer code version. I imagine this idea of using natures ideas and fundamentals can continue to be used. I would argue "Synthetic photosynthesis" is simply solar energy though. Is that not the case? It is absorbing energy through sunlight and allows energy to be used, only plants use that energy to grow, while we would use the energy for other purposes. The main difference is the efficiency in solar is not quite up to par with photosynthesis, but it continues to get better through the years. We currently have about an average of 15-20% efficiency rate of conversion of potential energy. So we still have room to grow and improve for sure on that front.

@@WildWombats - synthetic photosynthesis is different than solar energy cells… artificial photosynthesis could be used to produce hydrogen fuels … learn how to do this on a large economical scale and you’d benefit… you could produce other chemicals to… there would be a few other applications for it… agriculture would possibly be made easier in hostile conditions…

Perhaps what can be made of that is - we just simply don't know and don't have enough data to positively say one way or the other.

It is nice to dream but I’m afraid we will probably never discover other intelligent civilisations as they would be too far away.

He was using the Kardashev scale when he said that. If understood him correctly he said we don't have the technology to detect a type 2 civilization in another galaxy. A type 2 is a civilization that has harnessed the power of it's host star with something like a dyson sphere/belt/swarm. He added that we would have seen a type 3 civilization in another galaxy. A type 3 is a civilization that has harnessed the power of it's entire host galaxy so almost every star would have a dyson swarm around it. In theory the galaxy would have an abnormally high amount of IR as well as some other strange features. When he talked about finding one in our galaxy he was going back to the type 2. There have been some unexplained observations around stars in our galaxy that many are still researching. In few cases something has been periodically dimming the star from our perspective. At first this was explained as dust but in this time frame dust would have been blown away from the star by now by the solar wind but the observations haven't changed. He was suggesting to observe these stars with something like the FAST telescope which would be able to determine if the observations are coming from something artificial and not dust.

@@Vile_old_Bastard_3545 Detection can still be made at great distances hypothetically. Contact, as in talking to them due to distance would be less likely.

He's talking about Dyson galaxy's. Effectively, all the starts in a galaxy are turned into Dyson swarms. We could detect that as we see the galaxy shines in infrared but it near invisible in visible light

Awesome timing.

Something meaningful would be nice but imagine how awesome it be if he uploaded an hour+ of utter nonsense. 🥰

That comment started off sounding much more awkward and uncomfortable than it turned out to be in the end. English as a second language can make for some comical misunderstandings. Don’t give up trying to perfect your skill.

@@JROD082384 English is awkward - period. German - my mother's tongue - can be awkward too - and it's getting worse these days, as English gets mixed into (I guess) many foreign languages ...

@@JROD082384 wouldn't it be nice if John makes hour long videos ...

Someone probably said this same sentence 100 years ago....and it would be true.

There will be incredibly advanced AI that will solve most all of what we will want to know in the next 20-30 years.

Gonna miss the big new invention of the bow and arrow, probably just a couple hundred years from now.

Humanity already peaked in the 90s

Even if we won't make it to interstellar era, it's up to us to raise and educate generations that will. This in itself is a fascinating perspective!

bruh

Bruh makers of Dyson spheres will go to hell

It depends on the system, but broadly speaking yes, for example ours does. The major issue is that it implies the ability to transmute elements with some efficiency, since much of that mass tends to exist as hydrogen and other elements that don’t exactly make great construction material lol. Transmutation isn’t impossible (stars do it, after all) but it ain’t cheap either. Costs a ton of energy.

After reading the paper, as far as I can tell Dr. Osmanov basically handwaves this away, assuming that such far future probes would somehow be able to transmute hydrogen and other simple elements they encounter in the interstellar medium straight into the advanced machinery they’re made out of. Personally, I’m very skeptical of this assumption.

Jesus does not approve Dyson spheres

It's on my radar for sure.

Yep and its going to lead to endless false positives.

@@nutyyyy so long as we all end up with a positive, positive situation it’ll be worth it. We’ll get there.

would make more sense to move a shield closer to the planet and make it as small as possible, like our moon for example.. still not sure how it won't turn into a solar sail and drift towards the planet, but def. not visible as something "small" as the moon won't cover 1%

because planets are an inefficient way to do it, on earth you have 10^21 tons of material, almost nothing of which make the ground you are standing on if you turn that mass into rotating spaceships, you can get a lot more surface area for each amount of mass and so can fit much more people

You could do it quite feasibly. The sun is most of the mass but very dense. You can create a lot of surface area with the material in the solar system. Since most of the material is not on the surface of objects.

It is if you want to produce energy without massive amount of waste heat. Fusion is great. But lets say you have a trillion people on earth, then you need to watch your waste heat a lot. Beaming down energy from a Dyson swarm or Solar satellites solves this. We don't use just one source of power generation today and it's likely there will be multiple sources in the future too.

When have humans ever needed an excuse other than "because we can" to do anything? Why would aliens be any different?

And than the reason why "we" think, alien civilization would use the same nonsensical methods as a source of energy is anyone's guess. Just like the hypothesis 'math is universal. It's typical for humans to be this arrogant.

Ahahaahahaaas with cables of course you silly

They could be stuck where they are, just like us. I'd say the vast majority of them probably are. Seems like all this wormhole and warping talk is a bit much. I can't see how it would be beneficial to bounce around the galaxy or what have you.

Because dyson sphere is built from all the material that is in the system, there wouldnt be problem with asteorids and planets.

Heres a fun thought experiment: think about harnessing the stars entire energy supply, while also thinking that the planet you are on gets none of it. In other words - either a Dyson sphere and death of all life on your home planet (not talking Earth here, obviously), or no Dysons sphere, and business continues as usual. For any civilization to bother with a Dysons sphere, it would have to be implemented in a completely separate solar system from its own (dont ask me how they would transmit the energy generated over to their own solar system). On the other hand, the alien environmentalists would finally shut the fuck up about global warming or whatever, because the entire planet would be supplied with power by another solar system, allowing your home planet to drop fossil fuels completely. So, i guess thats that...

Immense amounts of energy from a source that lasts billions of years would be quite meaningful for any civilisation, one would think. Mind you, a solid object is nonsense but an immense swarm of solar panels around a star would be very useful.

@@randomguy4167 The solid sphere wasn't even suggested by Dyson originally. He always envisioned a swarm basically.

Asteroid belt is way too far for efficient solar panels operation. The intensity decreases with square of the distance.

Well goverment has motive to fake alien detection because of population control/financial gain

yes, but its also possible to let some light through or add artificial lighting if you want to keep the planet alive

Dyson sphere is so huge, that there would be no planets after. They would be used as building material.

@@jaroslavpesek6642 So we're assuming they'd be built in a 'lifeless' system, basically farming the sun and surrounding planets. I like this theory.

This is separate from that. That news seems to be radio interference

@@EventHorizonShow Fair enough, just wanted to get the pun in. ;)