EvMick@aol.com writes:
> What type of Stellar engineering would be required to alter a star
> generate excessive carbon? What might it look like from earth?
There are already carbon stars, and some red giants accumulate carbon soot in their outer atmosphere where it can likely be scooped up. And the R Coronae Borealis stars are even better: they seem to accumulate so much carbon that their light output drops a 100 times over 10-20 days, and then blow away the carbon shell. Yum-yum for the posthumans!
http://www.phys.canterbury.ac.nz/~physplc/rcb.html http://www.phys.canterbury.ac.nz/~physplc/GC_tabs.html http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/stars.html (a different explanation for RCB) http://www2.mcse.hu/Magyar/meteor/text/9612_45.html (in Hungarian, butlooks interesting :-)
RCBs are fairly rare, so either there are few carbon-gobbling beings out there, or they exploit the stars to such an extent we never notice anything unusual. Maybe RCBs are simply stars where the local carbon economy has strong booms and busts, while most other stars are simply better (self)regulated :-)
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y