How else does SETI think to seek an extraterrestrial mind

I will say right away - I am a big fan of science fiction, and I sincerely believe that fantasy (and science fiction is nothing more than a fantasy passed through the lens of a scientific approach) is one of the most important qualities of a person. Thanks to fantasy, we find inspiration, we do not cease to feel something childlike and bright in ourselves, thanks to it we invent and do not stop at what has been achieved, for we see ahead already new ideas and discoveries. And fantasy sometimes produces quite interesting things.

Before we begin, I also want to note that everything written below is just my own thoughts, and in no case is it an attempt to impose my opinion on others. And let you,% username%, not be confused by a similar topic on Habré, for all of us are interested in space and we all have heard about SETI - remember the dashing 2000s when we set ourselves a screensaver that counted something there, and thus we made your small contribution to one big deal?

The idea to write an article came to me after reading an article on fromquarkstoquasars.com about the Dyson field. It also tells about what it is and who is the author of the idea. But the strangest thing that struck me was the paragraph regarding Geoff Marcy, chair of SETI at the University of California, who said that in order to search for extraterrestrial life, it is also necessary to focus on finding objects similar to the Dyson sphere. For those who first hear what it is, let's delve a little into the history of this term. For the rest, I think you can safely skip the next paragraph.
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So, as the name suggests, the term was first introduced in the 1960s by Freeman John Dyson , an English theoretical physicist. He suggested that one day any civilization will reach a level of development in which for the purposes of its existence and development it will need energy, which cannot be obtained only on its own planet. His assumption is that such a civilization, with such a need for energy, will try to make the most of the energy of the native star, capturing and transforming the energy emanating from it. Dyson suggested that one of the ways to capture and transform the energy emanating from a star can be the construction around the star of a structure consisting of elements that convert the energy of photons into, for example, electricity - something like solar cells. For the most efficient generation of energy in this way, it is necessary that as many of the photons emanating from the star be captured. Therefore, Dyson suggested that a civilization that maximally uses the energy of its own star will create an object similar to a sphere of large radius (of the order of the radius of the orbits of the planets) around its star, the inner surface of which will consist of elements that convert the star's light into another kind of energy, which later civilization can use for their needs.

The Dyson sphere today has a lot of criticism regarding the design itself. For example, the very idea of ​​making the design of a spherical shape already entails the problem of preserving the rigidity of the whole structure: if the centrifugal force on the plane of rotation is enough to balance the star's gravitational pull, but at the poles (that is, closer to the axis of rotation), the centrifugal force extremely small, and therefore the structural elements at this "latitude" can simply fall on the star under the action of gravity. To solve this problem, many options have been invented, you can read about them, for example, in Wikipedia .

So, let's argue. Yes, indeed, it is possible to agree with Dyson and Marcy that for a civilization constantly in need of more and more energy, a moment will come when its needs (civilizations) will reach a point when you look at the sun and think that here, they say, how many energy, it would be necessary to use it. To Dyson in the 60s, and to many followers of his idea, it seems that for a sufficiently technologically advanced civilization, it would not be too difficult to create a solar battery that is so ambitious by today's standards, and I think it is so. But I do not think that this civilization would do that, and here is why.

Fast forward to, for example, in the year since the 70s, and look at the computer of the time. With its dimensions to the room, it operates at a frequency that is difficult comparable to today's processors that are about the size of a coin. It turns out that if we slightly extrapolate Dyson’s idea of ​​satisfying the need for large amounts of energy, then it would happen that we would need more computational power in the future, for example, we would take and force the entire IBM System / 360 moon "Huge" computing power. But in reality it didn’t work out this way - today all this computing power from the 40–50 year old fiction area fits in with us at our fingertips. Do you understand what I'm getting at?

All our technological progress boils down to increasing capacity while reducing size. Every year we see that what worked like this yesterday, today is smaller and more powerful. We improve processes, reducing the energy requirement for these processes, thereby increasing the efficiency from year to year. And when we seem to run into some kind of limit, we come up with something different and progress moves on. So we had arquebuses, and steel machines, so we had carriages, and cars became. And so much more. And so, I am sure, it will be with energy sources, because today we do not need to build monstrous sizes of hydroelectric power plants - we can extract much more from nuclear power plants, which in terms of area will take much less.

So what about the Dyson Sphere? I think it was a great idea for that time, on the basis of which more than a dozen wonderful books were written. But according to the pace of progress that we all observe, it seems to me that not a single highly developed civilization would have begun to build such a structure solely because of inefficiency, low efficiency and monstrous consumption of materials. You can even arm yourself with a calculator and calculate how much material you need to create a solid sphere around the sun with a radius of, say, from the orbit of Mars and a wall thickness of 1mm. It will be very, very much. And then it is necessary to mount everything, maintain it in working condition, divert the received energy to the right place, and a huge number of problems. What to say - the idea of ​​creating such an object already seems strange and unpromising, albeit ambitious.

Instead, I believe, a developed civilization will progress with approximately the same trends and results as we see today - reducing the size and increasing the potential. A developed civilization, instead of building a solar battery to produce 1 watt of energy per hour, the size of 10 football fields, I think, will come up with a pocket-sized fusion reactor the size of a battery. One can immediately argue that a thermonuclear reactor also has many problems, such as induced radiation, but these are nuances and we will omit them, for I sincerely believe that it is just a matter of time when we solve all these problems, and this time does not run into the centuries.

Therefore, in summary, it seems to me that we will never find signs of extraterrestrial life trying to find objects like the Dyson sphere simply because there is no sense in building a highly developed civilization. Is not it?