01-02-2015, 02:35 AM
@Drashner:
You wrote:" a) Most notions about what an alien (or future human) civilization might do with its time are built on the notion that a civ must/will grow in material and energy consumption until it has no choice but to limit itself. But current thinking on conservation and sustainability (and just plain birth control) indicate it might be possible (or even likely) for a civilization to hit the point of limiting its numbers (and resource needs) well before it hit the point of building a dyson or the like. If that is the case (and if that mode operates as a 'steady state' over the remaining lifetime of the civ, itself a notion that is debatable), then there would be much less or no need for things like dyson spheres or other megaengineering that might be detectable across interstellar distances."
True that. I'd even venture the reason that we can't detect other civs is that they hit their resource limits, collapsed, and slowly rebuilt themselves with less energy/resource consumption. Maybe that's what's awaiting us.
You wrote:" a) Most notions about what an alien (or future human) civilization might do with its time are built on the notion that a civ must/will grow in material and energy consumption until it has no choice but to limit itself. But current thinking on conservation and sustainability (and just plain birth control) indicate it might be possible (or even likely) for a civilization to hit the point of limiting its numbers (and resource needs) well before it hit the point of building a dyson or the like. If that is the case (and if that mode operates as a 'steady state' over the remaining lifetime of the civ, itself a notion that is debatable), then there would be much less or no need for things like dyson spheres or other megaengineering that might be detectable across interstellar distances."
True that. I'd even venture the reason that we can't detect other civs is that they hit their resource limits, collapsed, and slowly rebuilt themselves with less energy/resource consumption. Maybe that's what's awaiting us.