Alien civilizations may be forced to capture stars and harness their energy using ginormous structures – all to keep themselves alive in the cold, ever-expanding vastness of universe, a Fermilab cosmologist believes.

Expansion of the universe, thought to be further accelerated by dark energy, is flinging matter apart, while galaxies are being pushed away from each other. This is a challenge alien technologies will have to deal with in order for them to survive, Dan Hooper, a senior Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory scientist, writes in a new study.

https://www.rt.com/news/430473-aliens-stars-megastructures-study/


The paper looks at the use of megastructures, popularly known as Dyson spheres, which may theoretically be built around stars to harvest their energy. But it goes further than that, arguing that the huge balls of gas will also have to be shifted in their course so as not to escape the energy-hungry aliens.

“In order to maximise its access to useable energy, a sufficiently advanced civilisation would chose to expand rapidly outward, build Dyson Spheres or similar structures around encountered stars, and use the energy that is harnessed to accelerate those stars away from the approaching horizon and toward the centre of the civilization,” Hooper, who is also a professor of astronomy at the University of Chicago, writes.

While the futuristic scenario may or may not be already playing out somewhere in the universe, the study suggested that “any sufficiently advanced civilization” which is faced with the problem of possible isolation, will be prompted to start hunting for available stars in order “to secure as many of them as possible” before it is too late to reach them and extract their energy.

“Over the next approximately 100 billion years, all stars residing beyond the Local Group will fall beyond the cosmic horizon and become not only unobservable, but entirely inaccessible, thus limiting how much energy could one day be extracted from them,” Hooper writes.

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So, as we should know, scientifically with our slide rule in hand, the end of the universe does not have any angelical trumpets nor fire, brimstone nor judgement, but a vanishing future into nothingness, falling apart from the other bits.

Locally though, there could be some nasty arse-burning when our sun, with its limited life, extinguishes itself in about 5 billion years, after exhausting its nuclear H and He fuel… Planet Earth is cactus obviously. We won’t be there to witness the event as it would absorb the spacial sphere up to about the orbit of Jupiter, then collapse into a zero-ish maximum and burp like a red dwarf. Before this, we, clever humans, might have managed to conquer outer space and reside on our artificial moveable plastic planet with its own support system and resurrected dinosaurs — not relying on the god sun, now as useless an old man’s fart — but devoted in an arty fashion, with offerings to the good Goddess Kardashianissus, every Thursdays.

Despite this predictable local apocalypse which our observations have detected in other collapsing star systems, It could be said that since humans could talk, we have not understood our accidental adventure. We think we’re god’s arse people...

We invented the biggest lie we could con ourself with: god, gods and the associated derivatives — those  nasty painful deceitful demons or cyclops, or other monsters in Dedalus. It is quite ironic that in this deception of our own mind we have invented a deceitful adversary to our hopes of becoming immortals, in a space that is vanishing at the rate of sideralical knots. 

All this religious lie is to make us accept our own death with dignified colours, but the whole thing is mostly designed to make us accept a structure of control: politics. Religion and politics have gone hand in hand since year dotty.

Even in Germany the ruling political party is the “Christian Democratic Union” (Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands) not the “Godless Demokratische sub-branch of South Miranda”…

Often you hear religious people saying “Oh lord, give me strength”. Bugger off! Go to the Gym! And should you be too old to do push-ups, just enjoy life as you have lived it, not as if god was going to give you a cattle prod-nod to make you stronger, as you breathe away your last molecule of atmosphere. I apologise. Here I shall pay respect to those who are dying and have problem with this process. I know, Nature is a bitch… and we genuinely feel for you. We do. That’s what we human do best: empathy, mainly because we are in the same boat and we really love(d) you.

John Locke, one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and known as the "Father of Liberalism”, was one of the first of the British empiricists. He was also an acute detector of bullshit. Locke's empiricism is encapsulated in this quote, "whatever I write, as soon as I discover it not to be true, my hand shall be the forwardest to throw it into the fire.” And he does not mean hell-fire. 

Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and of the self. Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that, at birth, the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa. Contrary to the Cartesian philosophy based on pre-existing concepts, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from our sensory perception.

So what went wrong?

Individually we cannot survive. From birth, we need to be provided for a few years before we can be “independent”. Do we ever become fully independent? This is a natural characteristic in many animal species. See, the penguins in Antarctica look after each other for warmth and to protect their own brood away from the bitter cold. It’s efficient at their level of evolution and the memory of the new little penguins develop beyond mere instincts. Without this social congregation, the penguin species would die off.

Locke's "Tabula Rasa" of the human mind needs to be written upon. 

But to tell the truth, it is already imprinted with basic survival reactivity to existence — otherwise called instincts. Basic instincts are what make a baby cry when it is hungry, and to soil its nappies after the digestive system, independent of philosophical thoughts, goes into production mode.

The care we get will strongly imprint the next instalment of awareness upon the Tabula Rasa: this is a shitty world or this is a comfortable zone. Our happy nature depends a lot on on the care received then, but not exclusively.

In the past, old and frail, we would quickly die, in pain, in our bed. These days with modern medicine, our death is prolonged over a few years without pain, in a public hospital or in a profitable retirement village, caught in a tabula rasa daze (a return to the blank page) so thick that many people don’t even know they should wish they’d be dead instead. We also become a statistic about longevity.

So how to deal with this human species that is made of so many divergence, from racial, political, age variability and a peppering of religious hubris?

Only sciences can provide a framework to this but, really, do we really want to “unify” and promote the same “universal” tale?  

Since the 20th century world wars, many attempts to unify this loony species we call homo sapiens has been attempted. Unlike the penguins, of which there are SEVERAL species coping with the same problems of survival, we are a global species, having to cope with variations of style — rather than variations of DNA.

In the past, nature would have separated us into subspecies. This happened with the Neanderthals and the Denisovans. Species evolved differently in isolation. But our isolation was not “long enough" and scientifically we evolved survival skills and stylism much faster than our hereditary modifications. Here lie our essential stylistic lies.

We lie to ourselves in order to maintain a sort of unity, while we are different in our styles of “doing things”. Deceit is at the core of humanity survival. And we have fought wars of deceit ever since to achieve supremacy — from local to global.

Religions have been one of the tool to achieve this supremacy. Religions have nothing to do with god sitting on a cloud or giving us special privileges, but about maintaining the illusion of god, to achieve POLITICAL control.

Often you hear religious people saying “Oh lord, give me strength”. Bugger off! Go to the Gym. Sorry.... Uncouth of me. But should you be too old like me, passed “your prime", just enjoy life as you have lived it, not as if god is going to give you a prod cattle-nod to make you stronger. It’s ridiculous.

So what have we been writing on our tabular rasa ever since we’re born? 

It becomes complicated, soon after we become aware, we react to smiles and anger of people, as well as absorb language. Communication becomes a feature. We’re not at the receiving end of a teat anymore but we can express a demand for it. This develops fully into our adulthood, in which we are encouraged to ”think for ourself” without thinking too much, otherwise we fall of the control platform of the social set. 

From father Christmas, fairies at the bottom of the garden and other fiction, we are taught to lie and to accept lies until we know the truth — which we never do. So we learn a lot of bullshit that manipulates our reactive senses and we try to discern the reality of what’s what. Can we become self aware without the lies?

This is Locke’s powerful and understated message. Our main retarding dichotomy is that between us being individuals and in a group — and democracy does not escape this problem. We have our own ideas and we have to submit to the “majority” which we often describe as a "bunch of ignorant greedy bastards with no philosophical depth whatsoever". In Australia, namely the Libs and in the USA, the GOP. In England, there is a bit of redemption on this score, considering that the place is not democratic, considering the House of Lords (regal stuffy house of parliament) controls the final say. To think of this, the Australian political landscape is not far from this anachronism with its “Governors” answering to “the Queen” rather than to the people.

We need to improve the democratic system urgently — the present one with its prospect of tax cuts and religious hubris winning over ideals of humanity is a joke.

Where are aliens when you need them?

Gus Leonisky
Your local alien of South Miranda.