From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Mar 17 1999 - 06:32:03 MST
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, but
looks 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
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