Re: SETI/ASTRO: MBrains/JBrains & Globular Clusters

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon Jul 16 2001 - 05:50:09 MDT


On Mon, Jul 16, 2001 at 07:31:20AM -0700, Technotranscendence wrote:
> On Monday, July 16, 2001 12:19 AM Anders Sandberg asa@nada.kth.se wrote:
> > On the other hand, no such events are visible in the past light cone (it
> > would be rather obvious, I think, if a cluster collapsed very suddenly
> > in a fairly regular fashion into a quasar-like very small object). This
> > seems to suggest a kind of Fermi argument against my Ouranos quark
> > brain...
>
> Although it kind of makes for an unprovable assertion, isn't there a
> possibility of stealth here? Would Jupiter brains or your Ouranos quark
> brains want to call attention to themselves?

Well, when you re-engineer an entire globular cluster you are bound to be
noticed quite far off. My scheme even involved planned supernovae; I'm not
sure you can convert stars to quark matter in a quiet way. Dysoning the
whole place might make things less obvious, but it still seems hard to hide
the enormous amount of energy being dissipated.

One might of course argue that the reason we still see the clusters is that
nobody dares to break stealth by going for them.

> Also, I'm not sure how clear the Hubble data are. From my reading, the
> globular clusters don't currently have detectable planetary disks. That
> doesn't mean they didn't have them or that they don't have them below
> detectable levels. Add in stealthing and -- well, add it in and you can
> pretty conceive of any possible reason not to get a peek at Jupiter brain
> artifacts.

Globular clusters are mainly older population I stars if I recall right, so
if they have planets they will be low on the heavier elements we would like
to use for megastructures, such as carbon.

-- 
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Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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