"Dyson sphere? Boooring. Every type 1 baby species always comes up with the same idea, ‘hey lets just surround a star with mirrors and directly harvest the energy! What could possibly go wrong?’ Besides the fact your 80% of the way towards turning the star into a fucking bomb (don’t ask how we found that out), its basic ass vanilla shit.
Look, you don’t progress to a type three civilization by being uncreative hacks. Screw efficiency, the universe is our canvas and this is our art. No, we translocate entire water world planets and ice comets bigger than most moons using manufactured wormholes, hurl them into a designated star and use the steam produced to turn billions of giant turbines locked in orbit around the star. We then convert the mechanical energy to electromagnetic radiation pulses more powerful than neutron star pulsars and reflect them to nearby populated systems with mirrors. Take notes, monkeys."
I put together a thing for a Starfinder session where this one civilization needed a stupid amount of power in order to save their planet from a coming catastrophe. I based it on a laser propulsion method with black holes:
In short, you shoot a laser at a black hole, and it whips around and picks up energy (blue shifting it). When it comes back at you, you get more energy than you put into the original beam (the extra coming from the black hole itself, of course). The original proposal was for propulsion, but you should be able to do it for power, as well.
I guess the only thing missing was making it heat up water to turn a turbine.
When writing the “turning the star into a fucking bomb” bit I was actually thinking about the black hole bomb same process as you describe but instead of extracting the energy or momentum it gets fed back into the system forming a runaway feedback loop leading to super nova level explosion. I doubted that a fellow science nerd on lemmy would see this comment and notice the slight error, but I could also see a real scenario where you completely cover a star with mirrors to the point its own energy is radiated back into itself forming a similar feedback loop causing it to explode.
You can also use a variation on this effect to move star systems around. Surround a start with mirrors but instead focusing the light back to the star you make it focus it to a single point on the star. That single point becomes highly excited and erupts plasma at that location.
Because this is an extremely energetic plasma eruption and it’s only on one side you get movement in the opposite direction. The stars gravity field will pull the rest of the system with it.
You could only move it in the direction of the stars poles as unless you got really clever with timed pulsing (and I feel like that would be unreliable), you would vaporize any planets in the system.
A type three civilization capable of generating wormholes and changing universal constants within a bubble of localized space light-years in diameter when a type 1er ask them how they do anything:
I like to imagine there are infinite universes with slightly different starting conditions/cosmic constant values. Lots of them are non-starters for living observers because their fundimental forces didnt match up right to condense matter into stars after the big bang. Some universes like ours turn out to be goldilocks that balance the forces just right to for matter to assemble into structure and complexity.
Then for each particular universe theres an almost infinite amount of possible spacetime trajectories for matter to structure itself into from beginning big bang to ending heat death. Each unique possible state the universe could choose to become through probability as it progresses in time becomes its own branching divergent timeline, so like many worlds interpretation.
So no I don’t think they are the same thing. There are infinite universes with different seed values, and each one of them contains their own set of infinite possible timelines acting out all possible states that universe could experience given its constraints.
Now what about two separate universes with almost identical starting conditions that happen to share an almost identical timeline that leads to your birth? Are your near-copies the same you experiencing different universes, or just seperate clones?
"Dyson sphere? Boooring. Every type 1 baby species always comes up with the same idea, ‘hey lets just surround a star with mirrors and directly harvest the energy! What could possibly go wrong?’ Besides the fact your 80% of the way towards turning the star into a fucking bomb (don’t ask how we found that out), its basic ass vanilla shit.
Look, you don’t progress to a type three civilization by being uncreative hacks. Screw efficiency, the universe is our canvas and this is our art. No, we translocate entire water world planets and ice comets bigger than most moons using manufactured wormholes, hurl them into a designated star and use the steam produced to turn billions of giant turbines locked in orbit around the star. We then convert the mechanical energy to electromagnetic radiation pulses more powerful than neutron star pulsars and reflect them to nearby populated systems with mirrors. Take notes, monkeys."
I put together a thing for a Starfinder session where this one civilization needed a stupid amount of power in order to save their planet from a coming catastrophe. I based it on a laser propulsion method with black holes:
https://www.livescience.com/65005-black-hole-halo-drive-laser.html
In short, you shoot a laser at a black hole, and it whips around and picks up energy (blue shifting it). When it comes back at you, you get more energy than you put into the original beam (the extra coming from the black hole itself, of course). The original proposal was for propulsion, but you should be able to do it for power, as well.
I guess the only thing missing was making it heat up water to turn a turbine.
When writing the “turning the star into a fucking bomb” bit I was actually thinking about the black hole bomb same process as you describe but instead of extracting the energy or momentum it gets fed back into the system forming a runaway feedback loop leading to super nova level explosion. I doubted that a fellow science nerd on lemmy would see this comment and notice the slight error, but I could also see a real scenario where you completely cover a star with mirrors to the point its own energy is radiated back into itself forming a similar feedback loop causing it to explode.
You can also use a variation on this effect to move star systems around. Surround a start with mirrors but instead focusing the light back to the star you make it focus it to a single point on the star. That single point becomes highly excited and erupts plasma at that location.
Because this is an extremely energetic plasma eruption and it’s only on one side you get movement in the opposite direction. The stars gravity field will pull the rest of the system with it.
You could only move it in the direction of the stars poles as unless you got really clever with timed pulsing (and I feel like that would be unreliable), you would vaporize any planets in the system.
This almost gave me conniptions
How would you not move the turbine by hitting it with a jet of million-degree steam?
A type three civilization capable of generating wormholes and changing universal constants within a bubble of localized space light-years in diameter when a type 1er ask them how they do anything:
"Graviton stabilizers, tethers, oh and
Any other questions?"
What. Did. You. Do‽
“We did your mom, in every timeline and parallel universe where you were born too just to flex.”
Aren’t alternate timelines and parallel universes not the same thing?
I like to imagine there are infinite universes with slightly different starting conditions/cosmic constant values. Lots of them are non-starters for living observers because their fundimental forces didnt match up right to condense matter into stars after the big bang. Some universes like ours turn out to be goldilocks that balance the forces just right to for matter to assemble into structure and complexity.
Then for each particular universe theres an almost infinite amount of possible spacetime trajectories for matter to structure itself into from beginning big bang to ending heat death. Each unique possible state the universe could choose to become through probability as it progresses in time becomes its own branching divergent timeline, so like many worlds interpretation.
So no I don’t think they are the same thing. There are infinite universes with different seed values, and each one of them contains their own set of infinite possible timelines acting out all possible states that universe could experience given its constraints.
Now what about two separate universes with almost identical starting conditions that happen to share an almost identical timeline that leads to your birth? Are your near-copies the same you experiencing different universes, or just seperate clones?