Most Popular Posts
Search
-
Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
Read More. -
Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
Dumb SETI Idea
February 23rd, 2008
I came across this article that concerns Jaron Lanier’s proposal to move stars into unnatural formations to signal to others that, basically, we’re here.
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
It’s an interesting idea, and would make for a great Big Dumb Object story. I love big thinking. But it’s very slow and kind of pointless if your entire purpose is to just to signal our existence. Given the timescales and energy available to do what the article proposes, there must be a gazillion better ways to achieve that goal. We could build giant radio antennas and broadcast, point lasers directly toward other systems, even send out von Neumann probes and begin to broadcast local signals across the entire galaxy. I mean, engineering stellar positions means that we’re already talking whatever interstellar velocities a civilization can achieve.
There has been some science fiction along these lines (Stanislaw Lem had a short story or two, and I think I’ve heard of an upcoming novel with a similar premise — anyone recall the one I’m not remembering right now?). I don’t think it’s impossible. I just think there should be a good reason to do it other than broadcasting our existence. For instance, if we wanted to have multiple star systems nearby each other engineered to our specifications, perhaps in order to facilitate an interstellar empire and avoid the human race splitting into multiple species.
Anyway, to reiterate, once the coolness of the idea and the audacity of its size fades, I don’t think there’s much “there” there. And it isn’t even clear to me that it could be seen all that far given how difficult it is to look through the plane of the galaxy due to the gas and dust. I really don’t think this has been thought through all that well, especially in comparison to the alternatives available with the posited time and energy available.
Related Posts
Related Posts
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
<
February 25th, 2008 at 8:37 am
It sounds extremely difficult to make a structure like that that would be stable. If it takes millions of years to make it, you would think that it would be nice to leave it visible for at least as long…
February 25th, 2008 at 10:54 am
I agree, since anything stable would most likely have to superficially resemble something natural (e.g. nested binary stars as suggested). There already are some known binary binary stars (e.g., Mizar — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizar). No one has gotten too excited about that yet.
There may well be stable configurations that would stand out more, but I still don’t see this as the most effective SETI tool if you’ve got the technology at that level.
February 25th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
I am reminded of a comment by Winchell Chung (http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/index.html):
“… since the United States went from the Wright Brother’s flyer to the Apollo moon landing in about 60 years, in the 900 odd years of the Roman Republic and Empire eras a technological culture could go from FTL ships to astroengineering chains of galaxies into a large ‘Drink Coca-Cola’ sign.”