I sometimes wonder what it would be like if another species had survived and developed alongside us. They would be humans but....not quite what we conceive of as human(basically our species). What would their culture have been like? Music, art, language, etc.
As tribal as our own species is I imagine we would have gone to war eventually and one exterminated the other (assuming no large difference in population, technology, etc.). I think that might have been what happened to Neanderthals?
But still, the thought of going about day-to-day business alongside, let's say homo floresiensis, has something intriguing to it. Perhaps it's the same reason we imagine interaction with extraterrestrial life - it's really just a reflection on us and our own humanity.
Humans are already almost as diverse as canids (wolves, dogs, coyotes) as a whole. Until the Bantu arrived in Southern Africa (I think less than 300 years ago, definitely les than 500) the San has been reproductively isolated for at least 200,000 years. You don’t need to wonder what that world would be like, you live in it. All non Sub Saharan Africans are ~2% Neanderthal. Papuans are 5% Denisovan, from probably three different sub populations, likely as different from each other as the major continental ancestry groups of today. Tibetans have a high altitude adaptation from
Denisovans at more or less ~100% fixation that is almost absent among the Han Chinese they otherwise closely resemble.
We fought with, killed and mated with the other kinds of human. They may not all still be here but there’s a lot of them in us. Humanity mostly comes from Africa around 200,000 years ago but there’s a lot of deep population structure that’s much older than that.
There are still a few uncontacted tribes left. I remember reading about the Sentinelese[1] last year when some guy snuck onto their island to try to convert them to christianity and died.
I forgot where I read this but apparently they don't have a concept of gift-giving as a sign of goodwill. I had a really hard time wrapping my head around that!
Like how else could gifts be interpreted? Maybe as a sign of submission, like cats who think it must be a god to people who feed it? But can it even be possible for biological humans to not have a concept of reciprocal altruism? Or did their culture evolve to a different point where they can get (homicidally) mad at people for being too nice?
The fact that this simple gesture wasn't as universal as I thought really got me thinking about how much of our actions only make sense within a narrow shared context.
Dan Everett, the subject of the New Yorker's article, wrote a book about his experiences with the Pirahã called Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes which is excellent. It's one of my absolute favourite books ever.
Not sure if I am understanding you correctly but they didn't kill him because he brought them gifts, they killed him because previous outsiders brought disease and death, so they are rightly xenophobic.
Be careful: The Sentinelese and all other uncontacted tribes are Homo sapiens exactly the same as you or I. Just because they might have a very different culture doesn't make them alien in the way Homo neanderthalensis or Homo floresiensis might have been to our (and the Sentinelese peoples') ancestors.
I'm half way into a book by James C Scott "The Art of Not Being Governed, An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia"[1][2] where he makes a compelling case for why (hill) people/tribes evolve differently. Not because they are in some sense isolated (and backward). It's research mostly about the tribes escaping China and looking for safety by going to higher grounds. They chose not to have a written language, reject religion, or farming, etc out of necessity and to avoid the encroaching state (which means slavery, etc). He shows that despite the difference in geography and their scatteredness (Burma, Vietnam, Laos, ...) all have certain customs in common (and even they are not all from China).
they are not unaware of civilization or reject "culture" because they are "backward" but have been part of it at some point. And they have chosen to become outcasts either because of heavy tax collection, risk of enslavement or imprisonment. People who flee into higher altitudes and away from what the rest calls "civilization" (the rice growing padi states).
The Sentinelese and Jawari (despite not being hill people) are hunter-gatherers presumably because it allows them to stay independent (enslaved, taxed etc). Their customs and strange ways should be seen as having evolved out of necessity to avoid being absorbed by a different group.
"The Sentinelese and Jawari (despite not being hill people) are hunter-gatherers presumably because it allows them to stay independent (enslaved, taxed etc)."
I don't know anything about the Jawari but this just seems like speculation w.r.t the Sentinelese. You're ascribing a single-liftetime conscious decision ("I know civilization, it is bad, so we should all just keep to ourselves in this isolated place and not develop technology") to groups of people who have been living in isolation for centuries, possibly even thousands of years. In the case of the sentinelese, it may not even be a type of cultural evolutionary trait to avoid people so much as a consequence of isolation, that people just don't go there because it's out of the way or they don't know about it. And their hostility to outsiders could have any number of explanations... it could be that they see civilization as a threat to their way of life, but it could also be that they are just scared of people who look different and use seemingly magical tools, or due to some pervasive myth/aspect of their religion.
The wiki article include descriptions of several visits where they seem to understand gift giving as good will quite well:
> During a 4 January 1991 visit, the Sentinelese approached the party without weaponry for the first time. They collected coconuts that were offered but retreated to the shore as the team gestured for them to come closer. The team returned to the main ship, MV Tarmugli. It returned to the island in the afternoon to find at least two dozen Sentinelese on the shoreline, one of whom pointed a bow and arrow at the party. Once a woman pushed the arrow down, the man buried his weapons in the beach and the Sentinelese approached quite close to the dinghies for the first time. The Director of Tribal Welfare distributed five bags of coconuts hand-to-hand.
But even if they didn't, it's quite possible that there are other factors influencing their decisions than basing it purely on receiving gifts. As for the missionary that was killed, it seems disliking proselytizers turning up at your door is another universal human attribute.
Neanderthals or denisovans encountering sapiens probably would have been much like sapiens encountering sapiens of a different culture/tribe. Fighting, trading, cultural exchange and some breeding. They would have registered as different tribes but I doubt that the "species" concept (all sapiens unite to defeat the denisovan threat!) would have registered.
They weren't that different to us biologically, but people can be pretty different from eachother behaviourally) culturally. One tribe is nomadic, eats a lot of elephants, does monogamy and lives in big hierarchical groups. Another is settled, clannish, matriarchal, polygomous and does a lot of fishing. Behaviourally, that's a lot of difference.
It's possible that neighboring neanderthal tribes we're culturally more similar (food, language, art..) to your sapiens tribe than some far off sapiens tribe.
Also, it can be little bit misleading to think of those two as separate species. It's more that the human gene pool was much deeper then than now. We are all very close genetically today, especially for such a populous and widespread species. Back then, even within groups classed as Sapiens or Neanderthals, the genetic (and to an extent, morphological) diversity that existed was much bigger.
The newly discovered species though... Homo Naledi, florisiensis and luzonensis. These guys do seem like different species. Hopefully, some DNA will be found and we'll know more about them.
Even though everyone is very similar, people will figure out some differences and call that "race", positing that there's some fundamental difference why one group should be treated differently to another. And you'll get societies where some group is targeted, people will be forced to segregate public transport and schools, and so on.
But there's also going to be movements that focus more on the similarities.
Just finished reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, which deals with a theme related to that, about a terraformed planet where jumping spiders become a dominant, intelligent species. Good read. You might enjoy it!
Children of Time is excellent, and does a really good job of tracking the evolution and eventual ascension of the Portiid spiders. Tchaikovsky creates a really convincing civilisation based on the limits of the planet and the spiders: a technological civilisation without major metal use and with nearly perfect information transfer between generations.
The sequel Children of Ruin was a disappointment. It came out recently and I bought it straight away. I'm fascinated by octopuses, but I felt their civilisation was given short shrift to make way for the rest of the story he wanted to tell
It is not my domain but, as far as I know, before finding neandertal DNA in current humans we thought they probably had been exterminated but now the statu quo seem to be that they have been integrated and have mixed with our species.
I believe it would be a good bet that another human species living alongside us would have merged with us by know.
You're refuting his view as rosy, but positing that the real answer was horror. It's almost certainly something in between the two.
Personally, I think that the most likely explanation is that most mixing came through adoption of fertile women into the human tribes. Males of other tribes would probably not have been accepted so readily, and likely driven off or killed, but fertile females would have been more easily integrated. From there, you naturally get a mix of the two.
The relative percentages of Neanderthal and Sapien DNA in modern humans would indicate that Sapiens outcompeted the Neanderthals and relatively few interbred with us.
Neanderthal mtDNA is fairly rare in humans while nuclear DNA is much more common.
Oddly enough in population with higher percentage of nuclear DNA mtDNA is rarer so it’s not clear which side did the gene transferring.
It could be that there are other reasons behind this for example that Neanderthals and modern human female offsprings were less likely to survive or reproduce than males.
But overall it’s really not clear how the populations mixed and who did more of the pillaging and raping.
That's probably more a matter of natural selection. neanderthal y-chromosome DNA was also almost entirely eliminated from the human genome, as well as neanderthal genes in several other places.
When two different dog breeds have pups those mutts are just as fertile as any other dog. When a horse and a donkey have a mule that mule is almost entirely infertile. The first human/neanderthal descendants were probably significantly less fertile than their parents but generations of selective pressure seem to have purged the particular genes that were causing problems which you would expect to include mDNA.
Rape was a valid reproductive strategy for humans for most of our history.
Why do you think mongol DNA is so prevalent?
Reproduction through “love” is a fairly modern concept, while not all rape was at the hands of an invading army or by some serial predator in a dimly lit cave (or parking lot) the sexual dynamics were very different across the population and would be considered rape by most people today especially in the west.
Rape is probably behind at least 10% of human pregnancies throughout history, and it would have been much more without all extreme countermeasure people had to take.
I roll my eyes at people who talk about American "rape culture". But we definitely are a rape species!
Hey,you sound like you know a lot about this topic. I'm really interested in learning about it, do you have any recommendations for resources (books, youtube channels, etc.)? Thanks!
There are many resources for game design. But I have to tell you honestly that I think it's questionable just to read about it. You can read books, podcasts and blogs about it for years, but that alone doesn't make you a game designer. Anyhow, here are some resources I enjoy: [1] [2] [3] [4]
Game Design is not a recognized science either; a lot depends on understanding what's fun and what's not. You'll get better the longer you play around.
What distinguishes a good game designer from a beginner is years of practice. To achieve that, you have to be able to try new things in a very short time. Learn a game engine, which is widespread and does a lot of work for you (create games and not a game engine). Unity or Godot for example. Start small. Games you can finish within 1-2 weeks. If you can do that, you can write dozens of small games a year. You get faster and maybe find your own style. Here's a great resources which shows you, how someone from the indie community can approach it: [5] [6]
Something I can't recommend enough are Game Jams. Take a look at Ludum Dare [7]. It really is fun to think up and implement a concept within a short time. And you learn a lot, through the process itself, through the feedback of the wonderful community and by playing other games. The next jam starts on October 4th.
Seems like the vast majority of those who make the 'we are a republic not a democracy' type have misunderstood both terms and conflate republic as representative democracy and democracy as only direct democracy.
Is there any prediction on the future of stand-alone gaming consoles with 5G and streaming games(e.g., Google Stadia) coming soon?
While I'm not really much of a gamer now I spent a lot of my childhood playing video games and the thought of dedicated home game consoles going the way of arcades makes me sad.
I think I'll finally pick up that Switch I've been planning on...
The thing is Stadia does nothing new, StreamOn comes to mind just like pretty much every major player in the industry running their own thing, even Nvidia.
Granted: If anybody can make it work, it's gonna be Google, but I'm still quite skeptical. For many consumers network bandwidth and traffic volume are still very real issues, and there's not that much Google can do about that on a global scale, at least in the short time-frame.
Long-term they would have to roll out Google fiber on a global scale and pretty much go into the ISP business with full commitment, which I just don't see happening because Google fiber is dead.
Just some casual observations from someone who doesn't know a lot about city planning, zoning laws, and other things like that but...
I have spent a lot of time in various cities in eastern Asia, namely Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, and Taipei.
I was always amazed at how much more efficiently space was utilized. Dense, high-rise housing. Smaller apartments for single occupants. Vending machines and convenience stores near ubiquitous so one did not have to go far for basic necessities.
Also, the public transportation was wonderful. Whether subway, taxi, or bus one could get around without any need for a car.
I always wonder why our cities can't be "denser". Perhaps we are too used to our cars and driving everywhere? I'm sure there are a myriad other reasons though.
I always wonder why our cities can't be "denser". Perhaps we are too used to our cars and driving everywhere?
It's cars. Designing for cars is mutually exclusive to designing for pedestrians. Cars require lots of space, wide roads, parking areas which immediately make it impossible to do quick, effective trips on foot. So, if you design for cars you have to use cars. And if you drive you want more of that space yourself while, if you design for walking, it's quite cumbersome to drive, even in small cars which Europeans like a lot.
There was something similar in the small town era of USA when cars weren't yet everywhere. And that is what people seem to instinctively long for: for example, in movies and TV series you see sets built to depict city squares, narrow streets, and people walking around. Of course, the more realistic picture would be a half-dead city centre while everyone keeps driving to that big box retail park around the nearest highway junction...
Ironically people seem to have a yearning for the time period two eras before where they are. Right as the suburbanized car era was getting started (1930s-1950s), there was a wave of nostalgia for the agrarian past, with homesteads on the prairie and wide open fields. Literature from that era: Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Little House on the Prairie, Gone with the Wind, Grapes of Wrath.
Now we seem to be nostalgic for the urbanized town square with walkable shops and residences above - basically the 1900-1930 time period. Maybe when we're old and feeble we'll get to see our kids pine for the suburbanized developments, green grass lawns, and big-box retailers as they live in their arcologies and have all consumer goods delivered to them through matter-compilers.
I live in Mt View, and I can tell you that a rallying cry of anti-development people is "Do you want Mt View to become Tokyo?"
There is a large contingent of people who own single family homes who want to keep things exactly as they are now. They vote in elections. The contingent of people who DO want development largely doesn't live here, so they don't vote. There is no constituency of people who will live here in 10 years when we have higher density!
Los Angeles sprawled before it became the center of gravity for the cult of the car. It was like that when people were getting around via street cars and on foot.
Its sprawl is rooted in the logistics of desert development. You had to develop large tracts to cover the costs of the water infrastructure. Without water infrastructure, you weren't going to develop anything.
There are myriad forces that shape given cities. I'm disinclined to accept the notion that our current car cult mentality is inevitable, irreversible, etc. and we can't do anything good anymore "like they used to do."
Seems like "becoming Tokyo" would be an improvement. (But I still find the comparison hyperbolic and ridiculous. It sounds like a deluded scare tactic, frankly.)
Hmm, I would be a bit skeptical of that figure without observing incorporated city limits and how far out they extend. Sometimes population figures include the "metro area" as well.
This is a very good point, as there are western regions of Tokyo that after much lower density than central Tokyo. A good measure may be to look at the density in Minato-ku.
Minato has a population density of 10850/km2, Shinjuku of 18500/km2, Meguro of 18900/km2, and Nakano wins out at 20,700/km2. (Nakano winning surprised me. It's pretty low-rise for Tokyo!)
You hit it right on the head. MV needs to be a lot denser. But the city council, much like other bay area councils, likes things just the way they are. After all its the supply constraints that have made existing residents rich, why would they want to fix the area's housing problem all by themselves?
> After all its the supply constraints that have made existing residents rich, why would they want to fix the area's housing problem all by themselves?
I hear this argument a lot, but I’m not sure I buy the financial angle. If MV became Tokyo, the land alone in which a single-family home sits would be worth vastly more than it is today.
I legitimately think that they want to continue to live in a detached house with a yard, in a low-density neighborhood, like they have for a long time (or recently bought into).
The ones who have been there for decades don’t feel the increased prices (thanks to prop 13) and the ones who recently moved in are clearly wealthy enough.
Is it that hard to believe that people just don’t want their neighborhoods to change?
I think once we acknowledge that, we can work to preserve that neighborhood feel without dismissing that desire as being a disguised financial interest.
I mean, I think we could probably conclude it's a mix of both. But one way to nearly know for sure would be to observe the turnover of housing supply in that area.
Like you look at what percentage of homes go up for sale in specific neighborhoods. If it's like 20% a year that would be pretty high. If it's 2-3% a year, that's a very stable neighborhood and would imply that folks are hunkering down for the long term there.
That’s not too telling. Introducing skyscrapers would mean units would be priced far less than single family homes are - which would enable large portions of people to enter the market who are locked out right now.
But building skyscrapers would mean more units could be sold, thereby greatly increasing the value of land - as long as demand is there in the lower price ranges.
I'm not sure what this has to do with turnover in specific neighborhoods for determining if folks are voting out expansion "to keep their neighborhoods the same" or "for profit expansion".
>The only change that's "needed" is increase in affordable housing to the lower- and middle-class which forms the support fabric without which the town can't exist.
and how are they going to do that without allowing the city to be denser?
Maybe I'm just in the HN bubble, but it seems AMP is pretty unpopular. I've found numerous requests online asking how to disable it from others, though again, only anecdotal.
Is it unpopular? Or are most users ambivalent?
And if it is unpopular why does Google continually try and push it?
>He contends that there likely isn't a sentient civilization within about a billion light years of us because the signature of Dyson spheres would be unmistabkable and unmissable.
How do we know an advanced technology would absolutely use Dyson spheres?
I'm not asking to challenge but in serious inquiry. Off the top of my head it just seems a highly advanced civilization might be able to come up with something completely different to meet their energy needs.
> How do we know an advanced technology would absolutely use Dyson spheres?
This depends on what question you're trying to answer.
The Fermi Paradox is a good one because you don't need to ask "would a civilization always use Dyson spheres?" It takes just one to use them within a billion years to be a sufficient counterexample. Would they be universally used? Who knows?
Dyson spheres are such an attractive idea because there's no new physics required here (like negative mass for wormholes and warp drives). It's largely just an engineering problem. Now it does require a fairly economical method of getting off-world but all of this seems relatively likely within the next 100-200 years.
So it's (relatively) low tech and attractive in terms of providing living area for unit mass (many, many orders of magnitudes better than living on planets).
It's worth noting that you don't even need nuclear fusion to make this all work (although that makes it much easier) and it's not a given that we'll have practical nuclear fusion.
If you don't have nuclear fusion, what is your energy source? The alternatives other than harnessing solar output are much, much higher technologies like using black holes (which is also theorized about as a starship drive).
If the goal is living area and capturing solar energy, wouldn't most civilisations start out with a dyson ring instead of a full sphere? Making a ring seems easier structurally (everything is in a very similar orbit, so less forces on the structure) and requires vastly less material, so it's much easier to get started. And once the ring is a few thousand kilometers wide the civilisation might not need more space (either because population and energy needs level off or because other solar systems are more enticing for expansion, or simply because the civilisation collapes eventually).
To me it seems that if you take an infinite number of civilisations, you should find a lot of rings and barely any full spheres. But a ring is a lot harder to detect: if it blocks the star from our point of view it's as obvious as a dyson sphere, but in most orientations it would be seen as a very thin band that radiates much less energy than the parent star, making it basically impossible to detect with current technology (none of our methods of finding exoplanets seems applicable, and emissions would be too low to be seen directly)
As I replied in another thread, a Dyson sphere in its original intent was a swarm of habitats, not a rigid shell. No known material is strong enough to support that.
What you're talking about I think is a ringworld, popularized by Larry Niven's "Ringworld" series. They have the same problem a Dyson shell does: the centrifugal force would tear the ring apart and there's no known material that could handle that.
A Dyson swarm has basically all the advantages of living area a shell or ring does with none of the material problems. It can also be built incrementally, one habitat at a time. And that too is important.
This is why a Dyson swarm is seen by many futurists as near inevitable:
- Can be built out of modern materials like stainless steel
- Can be built incrementally, one habitat at a time
- Is orders of magnitude more efficient in terms of living area per unit mass than planets
- It avoids large gravity wells, which are a problem for getting off planets
- It can take advantage of the full energy output of a star
At any fixed distance from the sun there's only one speed where you have a stable spherical orbit. Since actual spheres have poles that don't move much at all, any dyson swarm that approaches a sphere has to consist of parts in a number of different orbits. That's inconvinient for a whole host of reasons (sun often occluded as segments move below you, movement between segments is difficult etc.). In comparison a swarm that looks like a narrow ring has no such problem: everything is approximately at the same speed while traveling in the same direction. For that reason alone rings are the superior choice regardless if your structure is solid or a swarm of independend objects.
Maybe multiple rings would form for political reasons, but that just makes the individual rings proportionally thinner.
I was under the impression that Dyson sphere participants would be mainly heliostats, whose station would be kept by balancing their inward gravitational attraction against the outward pressure from reflected or decelerated solar wind.
Whenever an object would intersect the sphere, the nearest heliostats alter the angle of their mirrors/sails to drift away and make a hole. Then they drift back to close it after it passes.
There's nothing to say that they can't also have an orbital velocity component, as it takes quite a lot of delta-v to decelerate from a near-circular solar orbit, and orbital velocity can make up for lack of sail area.
Is this true? The mass required would generate forces that would rip apart any materials we've encountered. A Dyson belt could just be in some unstable sort of orbit, but a Dyson sphere has to be strong enough to hold itself in shape.
"Dyson sphere" is a misnomer in that at some point this was conflated to mean a shell than physically encompasses a star. That was never the original meaning or intent, which is why some people (including Isaac Arthur) prefer the term "Dyson swarm" as being true to the original idea and clear in intent.
A Dyson sphere/swarm is simple a sufficient cloud of habitats orbiting the star as to essentially block out the vast majority of its light, kind of like how droplets of water block light in a fog.
No, for one you can only orbit in an ellipse around the center of mass. You can only "comb" in a direction that takes you around the middle of the ball. The major difference though, is that you can have overlapping orbits. There is no way to cover the entire surface without overlapping because of this, but you can still cover everything if you're willing to pay a price in efficiency by having portions of the constellation shade one another.
Hmm, but it feels like a good tradeoff in marginal increase in total energy caught versus marginal decrease in efficiency would get you pretty far from 100% coverage.
They wouldn't be. We limit ourselves to current or near current technology for these analysis or you can easily get into the realms of hypotheticals very easily. If you say that the laws of thermodynamics don't apply to aliens because they have more advanced physics then the sky becomes the limit. So you have to stick by your own rule book when you imagine, so it'd be more appropriate to say that there is unlikely to be Dyson swarms near us that were built by aliens with a similar understanding of physics. For all we know the popular way that they gather energy is harvesting photons from within the star itself, stick a giant straw into a star and just drink away the photons.
I'm not suggesting that we speculate into high fantasy. What I'm getting at is that we can't come to a conclusion about whether advance civilizations exist or what they might look like to us. So quite the opposite of realms of hypotheticals really.
If a civilization has portable nuclear fusion (plug your spaceship into a suitcase for power), then there's no reason to hang out near a star. People living inland never think about how to obtain salt anymore.
Nuclear fusion is not magic infinite energy; the amount produced is limited by the amount of fuel being used. I mean how much power is generated from fusion anyway? Especially at the scale (suitcase) you mentioned?
I dunno where your remark about salt comes from either; a lot of salt intended for consumption is dug up from the ground (salt mines).
It would have to violate the laws of thermodynamics to not be visible. I’m not saying “no” (my brother has wondered if dark energy could be waste output of such civilisations, for example), but we have zero reason to treat the idea as anything more than the softest of science fiction.
Of course if we’re talking about an FTL-capable civilization then our understanding of physics is out of the window to begin with. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a civilization with FTL to make Dyson spheres or swarms, and it may be thst even if FTL is impossible it could be I desirable to build them. If the need to hide distinct technosignatures for some reason (Dark Forest perhaps) then any civilization would avoid Dyson structures.
FTL makes it worse. The only tech we need for us to Dyson up (95%?) of our entire visible light cone is self-replicating factories that work in a vacuum on (for example) Mercury: http://ukspace2015.co.uk/presentations/36
FTL makes that 100%, from beyond out cosmic horizons, even if it turns out that FTL isn’t automatically also a time machine like we currently think it is.
Pocket universes might help? I don’t know though, I’m saying that only because I’ve not seen them ruled out.
Ok, but the effect of the energy output of any civilisation is basically the same, and for the same reasons. It doesn’t matter if it’s a star or TARDIS whose inside is eternally expanding and you’re grabbing energy from its internal dark energy field, if you use that energy, you get hot, and that heat is visible.
Unless you can violate the laws of thermodynamics.
I wonder if advanced civilizations would use a lot of energy?
We always imagine they have very advanced physics and engineering, to do things like take apart planets to build mega-structures and things like that, but usually don't think about their other sciences.
My guess is that by the time they have gotten that far in physics, they have also gotten way ahead of us in biology. They'll have wiped out disease and illness, stopped aging, and only die by choice or accident. They'll have figured out geology and ecology and climatology and psychology.
I suspect that the final steady state for most civilizations that don't end up wiping themselves out by doing something stupid is a relatively small (by our standards) population of essentially immortal beings, living on a world they have restored to a largely pre-civilization state, using less energy by far that we are using but using it way more efficiently.
Maybe collect the heat and release it as a laser towards very sparsely populated parts of the sky? Perhaps that helps stabilize the sphere in the orbit of its star?
Also, a huge laser can certainly direct energy in a direction that nobody will notice. Unfortunately, creating the laser beam also creates waste heat, and that waste heat can be seen. Even collecting waste heat generates waste heat that you cannot collect.
On the other hand, if you want a huge laser for some other purpose (such as vaporizing distant planets), then a Dyson Sphere is the ideal way to create one.
> A Dyson Sphere is not a solid object. Instead, it's many small objects each of which is in a stable orbit.
Actually, we've never seen one so we have no idea how one might be engineered! It could for example be a "fog" of worlds that extends out past several local AU and to us would look nothing more like a dust cloud obscuring their local star. There wouldn't be a telltale signal of a Dyson Sphere, just another star with a big dust cloud.
Imagine a civilization like this, those closer to the star get more power literally, and those on the outskirts and in the shadows of the other worlds become dependent on the more inner worlds to re-radiate their absorbed energy, or to condense and lase the energy outwards to the shadow worlds...at some cost that limitless free energy can't pay for.
Beyond some distance the worlds become so cold that the inhabitants freeze to death and exile of your entire world at the whims of the inners becomes a real punishment. Dead worlds are recycled for mass for the growing population of the inners, or repurposed for other things.
There are billions of such worlds. Perhaps they are customarily shaped as small ringworlds and rotate in a complex manner to produce gravity and a daynight cycle. Dead or frozen worlds may have a reflective sail hoisted along the inner opening and expeditionary generation ships are sent out to nearby stars powered by lasers collected from hundreds of inner worlds.
Successful colonies may start to immediate transform the mass of nearby planetary systems into new "dust" clouds rather than settle on the planetary surfaces. Many adjacent Dyson spheres may look to us like just interstellar gases between several stars containing an unusual amount of organic molecules but could be the exchange of trillions of generation ships moving mass and energy back and forth between stars.
Such a civilization could eventually become nomadic in a way, moving from star to star as they burn out, leaving behind frozen husks of trillions of dead ringworlds.
He basically spends a week in VR, though allowing himself a passthrough - which is, from what I gather, a video stream from a camera within(?) the headset that allows him to "see" his room.
He does various games and activities and interacts with people through various chats. He has his peaceful moments and energetic ones, such as working out, but grows bored and lonely by the end of it.
Interesting to think if there were more immersive/interesting things to do within VR would he have felt the same way? Or at least not as quickly?
Any recommendations for newsletters pertaining to typical Hacker News interests, e.g. programming, start-up business, cybersecurity, technology, gaming, etc.?
> Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings [2] newsletter is arts/literature oriented, well produced, and full of insights - but often quite long.
I love Brain Picking, although unfortunately I feel that her articles have a certain sort of "sameness" to them.
I love long-form reading. Personally I feel that encouraging long-form reading is important. I disagree that reducing the attention of time required to read is the answer.
I just launched Digital Future Friday [0]. It’s a once a week roundup + analysis about AI, automated propaganda, synthetic influencers, AR/VR and internet culture. My wife forces me to keep it really short, and I just hired an awesome illustrator to add some visual love.
My perspective comes from being the CMO of a unicorn, curious about the underbelly of the internet and human mind.
google for „<topic> weekly newsletter“. i am subscribed to about 10 topics i am interested in at any time and do receive useful information. Sometimes they are in my inbox for weeks and i read them all at once when i am for example on the train
Surprised at Zuckerberg/Facebook's response to all this. The cynical part of me says it's only due to the negative PR all this has generated but I hope this works out for better privacy for all those who continue to use Facebook.
I wonder if other tech companies will be called on to testify, Dorsey, Page, et. al.
As tribal as our own species is I imagine we would have gone to war eventually and one exterminated the other (assuming no large difference in population, technology, etc.). I think that might have been what happened to Neanderthals?
But still, the thought of going about day-to-day business alongside, let's say homo floresiensis, has something intriguing to it. Perhaps it's the same reason we imagine interaction with extraterrestrial life - it's really just a reflection on us and our own humanity.