12-22-2020, 06:40 PM
To all the people who are about to tell me I'm making a lot of assumptions about what life looks like ... well, maybe so. There are a lot of different things intelligence could look like. It could operate on different time scales, or different wavelengths, or it could have a different chemical/mechanical substrate, etc. It could be a giant post-biological interlocked network system containing no single thing that could be considered to be an individual consciousness.
But most of those things would necessarily find the same kind of utility in building a Dyson Swarm, and things in the outer fringes of Dyson swarms naturally escape the Hill sphere and go into orbit around other stars sometimes. Even if they don't make a particular effort to spread out, at least some of them will spread out. They'll just do it more slowly.
Most of the categorical alternatives anybody has ever offered are clear nonsense. Niven (in Bowl Of Heaven) writes about Intelligences that look and act like stones. I immediately think, without the ability to manipulate their environment why would intelligence be a useful adaptation for them? The energy expenditure for brains is a wasteful maladaptation for a sessile life form. To be even comprehensible as a possibility there has to be some evolutionary path that leads to it and no obviously simpler or more efficient way it can be while surviving as well.
But most of those things would necessarily find the same kind of utility in building a Dyson Swarm, and things in the outer fringes of Dyson swarms naturally escape the Hill sphere and go into orbit around other stars sometimes. Even if they don't make a particular effort to spread out, at least some of them will spread out. They'll just do it more slowly.
Most of the categorical alternatives anybody has ever offered are clear nonsense. Niven (in Bowl Of Heaven) writes about Intelligences that look and act like stones. I immediately think, without the ability to manipulate their environment why would intelligence be a useful adaptation for them? The energy expenditure for brains is a wasteful maladaptation for a sessile life form. To be even comprehensible as a possibility there has to be some evolutionary path that leads to it and no obviously simpler or more efficient way it can be while surviving as well.