Sayonara

What, being stabbed with a venomous barb?

The bubble concept is an extension of the swarm concept, with the key difference that solar sails provide the thrust.

Each member or visitor who is online creates a session on the server, in which all manner of variables can be stored. "Last page viewed" could be one of them, then it's just a matter of collating that information. That would be quite inefficient though... the method you suggested would be much less resource-intensive and not unforgivably inaccurate.

Either technology will do. However if you are travelling to another star system you need a reason why, which (other than the death of the local star) has never been given - only assumed. It's fun going in circles like this.

It can, but this is beside the point, because I am not proposing solid shapes. There is enough mass in the system for a shell of 600Kg/m2. Exactly how useful this would be is not an issue since I am discussing the bubble model, which is an extension of Dyson's original swarm model, and not the solid shell that science fiction has turned it into. Using the same amount of mass, you will have less land space with cylinders than you would with the islands in the bubble. You also have greater complexity of design, which uses mass. However at this point we are essentially describing the same basic idea. The mass of most objects in the solar system is only useful if you turn it into something bigger. Well, theoretically it could trap it all, because a race sufficiently advanced enough to build such a contraption might be able to convert the energy into matter, which could even be part of the ongoing construction process. Anyway, you missed my point entirely. O'Neill Cylinders or their equivalent use more matter and energy in construction and maintenance than any given Dyson scenario, assuming equal maximum supported populations. I fail to see how this is bad. This introduction of fusion power is somewhat random and spurious. And I fail to see why it can't be exploited by a race that has constructed a Dyson bubble. That is a matter of technological ability. You said yourself a star could be taken apart and used more efficiently, which I read as being quite definitely "controlled". Yes, because you don't know what it is. Yes, aren't we just? Matters of motivation which, at every turn, you are extrapolating from unsteady assumptions. We are back at the numbers gap, which you have not addressed despite it being the crux of the issue. Maybe some, but that doesn't mean they will want to dominate the galaxy. Perhaps we have been so busy building our bubble that we haven't even bothered to develop interstellar technology yet. Life is good here - we have all the energy we can eat, 3 million islands in the network already, and enough resources in the system to build many millions more, a job which the robots are already getting on with. Our race can exist here for the next eight billion years, steadily expanding, and when our star begins to swell we will move to the next one, because we knew it was coming and devised propulsion systems for the entire flotilla. Why bother to go off looking for intense difficulty, when there is so much space?

Yes, but that's if you are talking about solid spheres, which I am not. I am going to switch to the term "Dyson Bubble" to remove all ambiguity. A Dyson Bubble is a Dyson Swarm that uses "statite" islands to prevent orbital conflicts. Not so. This is one of the two functions. The other function is to provide living space which can be expanded into and added to as and when required. A moderately populated Dyson Bubble requires only about as much mass as one of the larger asteroids in this system (so it is very easily expanded because there is plenty of raw material laying about the place), and represents living space for billions of people, which in turn represents a resource saving of many millions of your city vessels (which would be something along the lines of the O'Neill Cylinder) along with a time saving of their combined journey and colonisation stopover times, and without the massive risks of rapid changes in birth or mortality rates, encounters with unexpected phenomena, etc. Problems for solid spheres, not bubbles. I invite you to try living on any given Kuiper Belt object for a week. Your kit bag will include antiseptic cream, 2l bottle of water, packet of tomato seeds, bag of air. You would already need your artificial living space and alternative energy sources in place before you did this. Possible yes, but you are forgetting that effectively limitless energy and solar engineering means you don't really have to colonise anything. But less efficiently. O'Neill cylinders are all very well if you are transporting a large but stable population somewhere nicer over a long period of time, but in terms of resources per unit population supported you will be using more matter and energy than you would with a Dyson Bubble. Because you don't really need to. And even if you continued to build and breed quite rapidly, under those conditions your expansion into the local systems could progress at a very leisurely pace without sacrificing any comfort. That's a separate issue entirely, and will affect both colonists AND sit-at-homes. I think it might be helpful to remind you at this point that I am not making an argument for many or few intelligent species, or for previous intelligent species colonising or failing to colonise the galaxy. What I am trying to highlight is that the information we have is insufficient to allow confident conclusions to be drawn from our conjectures.

We have not had one of these threads for a while... The game is easy: find a pithy, funny quote from another forum member from waaay back when, one so old the person who said it forgot they ever posted something so funny.

The planets in the system would not be a problem, because you have already rendered them assunder and used their materials to build your new giant thingy. However this is not an issue, because the term "Dyson Sphere" is a misnomer. Dyson's paper discussed the possibility of a shell or swarm of energy collecting habitats; essentially what you describe here: The solid sphere idea has been popularised through science fiction, and is not a great idea for several reasons, not least of which are those you mentioned. However in the solid sphere's defence, it could quite easily be re-imagined as a spheroid of some sort, with an eliptical circumference, which could be relatively easily accelerated around the central vertical axis as required. The biggest problems I can see with this solid state design are: 1) Without artificial assistance, gravitational effects are non-uniform across the inner surface, 2) The spheroid shares its centre of mass with... er... the heart of its star. Could you even have "natural" gravity?

Not necessarily an entire enclosing sphere (although that would be the ultimate required product if population continued to rise). A ringworld or halo, or connected multiples of the same supporting "islands", would still give hundreds of times more landspace than a couple of habitable planets. On the subject of Dyson Sphere detection, Freeman Dyson himself discussed this idea in his 1959 paper Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infra-Red Radiation. The problem is that the Dyson Sphere (or to take it back to the original concept as discussed in the paper, the Dyson Shell) is specifically designed by a given Type II Kardashev Civilisation to harvest the maximum energy possible from a system's star. This produces several key assumptions: 1) Even heat energy may be collected and stored to some degree, 2) Excess heat energy may be buffered and vented, 3) Venting is unlikely to be omnidirectional, 4) Venting is unlikely to be continuous. The infra-red signs of a sphere are by no means "clear cut". Add to that the fact that we could be staring right at the infrared traces of a venting sphere and not recognise it as such, and detection suddenly becomes difficult enough that we should not be surprised to have no results yet. SETI has made a couple of attempts to look, and Fermilab started in 2005, but with such a vast expanse of sky to examine and analyse we should expect it to be a while before we find any tell-tale signs, even if the population of spheres is extremely large. However, let's assume that we have scanned the galaxy and there are NO Dyson Spheres. What does this definitely tell us? Well, a Dyson Sphere is just one of the various final products of a Type II Kardashev Civilisation, which may be preparing to become a Type III (your "galactic dominators", using all the energy in the galaxy). The proposed absence of this technology in the galaxy leads to two hypotheses: either they cannot be built, or they are not required to be built. "Cannot be built" can be explained by any number of possibilities: - The technology is beyond practical efforts, - No race survives long enough to reach the level of technology required, - The races that might benefit... are not there. "Not required" breaks down further too: - Population control in intelligent species precludes energy requirements from reaching Type II, - There are better and less detectable alternatives, such as an extensible mesh of ringworlds with modular islands, - Type II is not desirable. So even if we assume they are definitely not there, their absence doesn't really tell us anything concrete. Their presence would, but their absence does not. Anyway, this is somewhat moot, because I use the term Dyson Sphere in the sense that Freeman Dyson originally intended it - that of a shell or sphere of independent structures, which would not interfere significantly with heat escaping from the star.

I am not picking Bettina out, and it would hardly be appropriate to air any ongoing legal discussions in public. It clearly isn't, so I don't see any problem there.

Not to detract from Klaynos' advice, but I would recommend against using w3schools.com. Although you can learn a lot quickly, they have serious (and inexplicable) problems in that they teach for IE "standards" only, and use obsolete code. I strongly recommend you learn the following to start off with: Strict XHTML, CSS 2, PHP, JavaScript. The function of these is as follows: XHTML - the basic structure of the web page, in line with current standards and compatible with new and developing w3.org technologies. CSS 2 - the current standard for styling, decorating, and laying out HTML pages. PHP - scripts providing dynamic generation of content based on user input or other variables, and the capacity to carry out all manner of tasks on the server. JavaScript - a language allowing page or request tasks to be carried out by the client (i.e. the browser) instead of your server. If you want to use database interactivity, mySQL will be the easiest way to go, and it has massive support across the web. Later on you will probably want to learn Ajax with Ruby on Rails, as well as XML, although that rather depends on what kind of projects you are doing.

It's a discussion about our liability, not your censorship. I doubt you would be that interested tbh. This thread is generating some heat, so I'd like to add to Phi's comments by reminding all involved parties that we have strict policies on racial and prejudiced remarks. Please think before you type, and always use the "preview" button. If you think someone is feeding you "emotive BS", don't feed it right back. Identify it in your reply and ask for clarification.

True, however this does not change the fact that some problems cannot be negotiated away simply by controlling tendencies. Population dynamics and simple ecological principles such as resource partitioning forbid it. It doesn't matter how driven they are, they will still hit and exceed the cost:benefit balance point I described earlier. This is really very simple. You cannot support an accelerating rate of population expansion if you only have a finite number of possible sites the population can colonise. The only way around this for an intelligent species is to change strategy, i.e. create new and better sites, and this needs to begin long before the planetary sites run out, otherwise there would be massive and immediate suffering and loss of life, along with resource shortfalls that might endanger relief efforts, exacerbate the death and suffering, and certainly cripple any further expansion.

No, you are not confusing anyone, don't worry. I don't have a problem with most of your postulates. Some of your assumptions are poor though, or I should say "have better alternatives", and this is why I cannot agree with what you conclude from them (just as Lucaspa said earlier). I don't have any particular issues with your last post until: This is not true. Because population is expanding, and the rate of expansion increases as the number of populated planets increases, the benefit to be gained from colonising every planet in the available set will drop as vacant planets in the set run out. This is why species that rapidly multiply in finite habitats often follow the "boom and bust" pattern, driving themselves into a population crash. There will come a point where planetary colonisation becomes inefficient when compared to stationary, artificial biomes (which are the smart way of avoiding the "bust"). After this point the benefit to be gained from colonisation will plummet, and eventually it will be economically stupid. I am satisifed with the counter-arguments that have already been supplied for this. We have a hard enough time evidencing half the species that we KNOW were here. Here you have a large problem, because the point where the number of intelligent races is "small" and the point where the number of alien races is "massive" are highly unlikely to coincide. If small is 10-500 and massive is 500,000-20,000,000, you still have a minimum range of 450,000 species where the colonisation outcomes can only be considered "uncertain". By the way, when taking data for your calculations, bear in mind that "speeds of up to 0.2c" means the peak velocity during the trip between two points, not the average velocity for the whole trip. Most actually workable methods of reaching these speeds will require extremely long periods of acceleration and deceleration which will significantly affect the time taken for the journey.

The answer to this question was in the post you are replying to: It's not a matter of covering up, it's a matter of being frugal with what resources you have, and long-term ecological thinking. Not necessarily "always", and costs are not always economic in nature. As has been stated, there are plenty of reasons we might not have found any traces of a past civilisation. Perhaps they lived on the floor of the ocean. Perhaps the shattering of Pangea dragged their cities into the mantle. Who knows?

I lolled

Can I be arsed to write part two of "Sophisticated Propaganda is Still Propaganda"? The fate of free thought lies in your hands! Oh lordy.

Unless you are taking some sort of dimensional shortcut, using FTL technology, or hibernating, I would also expect cities rather than ships for interstellar travel. And I will continue to hark back to: a) They don't necessarily have to have visited every planet in the galaxy, and b) If they did they would not necessarily leave any traces that persist for vast time periods. I think it is quite likely that a race capable of interstellar travel might know a thing or two about non-intrusive technology, waste reclamation, and ecologically friendly materials. Just the fact that most of their time in space will be spent traversing barren void would seem to suggest a possible predisposition towards making the most of what resources they have. You really really need to consider that an intelligent race which is rapidly running out of planets in an entire galaxy will already have invested considerable planning, development time, and resources putting together a network of artificial biomes around the younger stars (i.e. Dyson Spheres or their equivalent), which would be far more efficient than colonisation and - in sufficient numbers - provide billions of times more land space. Terraforming would become redundant long before the last few thousand planets fell under the colonial flag, and due to the rubbish location of our star system it is not inconceivable that we might always have ended up on the "would be nice..." list, never to be trodden by alien feet.

lol, that was easy money.

Somehow I doubt they are getting energy from an unknown source.

In point of fact to the people who are discussing perpetual motion (nobody in particular), he says "free energy source", which could be water, air, or even junk mail. Can we only have positive replies to this thread from now everyone, pls k thx. [edit] Simultaneous posts! What I_A said. Yeah!

Or, seeing as they are an anti-counterfeit technology company, it could be a publicity stunt.

Heh heh

Gnerally when someone contacts the newspaper first, instead of the CDC, you know they haven't found anything interesting.

The thing with mammalian muscles is that they are like foreign language - on an individual level, it is quite literally a case of "use it or lose it". If you do a physically demanding job, or work out in the gym every day, you will see an increase in muscle mass and probabaly also in working endurance. This is because the muscle fibres grow to accomodate the level of demand that is placed on them (note that no new fibres are added - the number of fibres you are born with is the most you will ever have). Up until the age of about 25-30, when human growth hormone levels begin to decline, it is relatively easy to push your muscles from their current state, into a state that better reflects their maximum potential size and capacity. After this age it is much harder, but still possible. So it is perhaps not entirely accurate to say that we have "lost" our strength, because it is still there as a potentiality. It's more the case that our bodies allow a sort of controlled atrophy to conserve resources, because muscles are expensive to maintain and, by and large, people simply don't use them that much. Wipe out the labouring classes and slap a blanket ban on all forms of exercise, and after a good few generations we might see the maximum working capacity of muscles drop. But I don't think it's the case yet that we have necessarily lost much, if any, of our strength as a species. There are plenty of people who are stronger than chimps, and we can make more with relatively little effort, should they ever rebel. Conversely the lifestyle of chimps is such that they are more likely to be operating close to the maximum work potential of their muscle system, and even if they go to some kind of chimp gym I doubt they'd see significant increases in muscle size, strength, recovery speed, etc. I recently got a book about muscles - can you tell? It is all jolly interesting I realise this doesn't answer any of the questions pertaining to precision, but it may help to address the issue of sacrificing strength that was raised in the thread title and first paragraph of the O/P.