If they're harnessing and utilizing the entire energy output of every star in that galaxy (which is the definition of a Type III civilization), then their waste heat will be equal to the energy produced by those stars.
If they're really energy-efficient, then they're not using all that energy, and are just letting it radiate away naturally, and are then not a Type III civilization.
Honestly, it seems to me the whole Kardashev scale is too simplistic and short-sighted. What if a really advanced civilization figures out a way to travel FTL without using any more energy than a small nuclear reactor, and simply doesn't need that much energy? They could dominate an entire galaxy while not needing to actually consume all the energy produced by all the stars in it.
Why is that? It's rather useful for fusion. Citation needed.
and zero G manufactoring simply turned out to be unnecessary.
Citation needed. You can do things in zero-g that are much harder here, such as anything involving crystal growth.
In fact lunar bases and large space stations are pretty much the textbook example of negative ROI. Sad but true.
But for some reason, multiple billionaires are rushing to expand our space capabilities. I think Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are more credible than some random Slashdot poster.
The thing you're missing is that there's a lot of valuable resources in space: asteroids full of platinum and the like. Why tear down whole mountains here on Earth (and piss off the environmentalists, for good reason) when you can get far much higher-grade ores in space, without screwing up the environment and producing tons of pollution? Space stations or lunar bases would then be useful for refining operations. Same goes for He3, if we can ever figure out how to make fusion energy-positive: it's easier and better to just mine it there as fuel and return it to Earth and use that for power generation instead of nasty fossil fuels or uranium. Finally, there's surely all kind of other applications we haven't even thought of yet. Every time people have explored someplace new, lots of new economic activity resulted, including with the Apollo missions.
The problem is that videocalling looks cool in the movies but doesn't work very well in the real world. For proper perspective you need to keep your phone straight out in front of your face, if you do the natural thing and keep it at chest level you inevitably bend your head down, making your neck look twice normal size - and you also get excellent views of what might be hiding in your nose, teeth and beard.
These sound like problems when you use it on mobile phones. If you're sitting at your desk and your phone is on your desk (or is a computer on your desk), as depicted in 2001, this shouldn't be a problem (as you note). I've used Skype many times on my computers and never had this problem. We've had desk-bound phones for much longer than we've had decent mobile phones; we should have had video calling back in the 90s on those. So this is a red herring; 2001 never depicted mobile phones, only desk-bound videophones.
The people who really can afford to have kids without worrying about what happens if they lose their job etc. are the people who aren't having any kids. If everyone took your advice (and somehow, magically, birth control became 100% effective), we would quickly have a population collapse. A huge number of kids these days are being born to poor and lower-income people; they're keeping our numbers up. How that's going to play out long-term, I'm not sure, but it doesn't sound good. What the answer to this is, I don't know. Honestly, I think that if we don't want a societal collapse within 2 generations (because the more productive people in society aren't replacing themselves with kids, and the kids of the unproductive people aren't generally becoming productive to replace the older productive ones), we need to work really hard on life-extension therapies so people can live past 150.
It'd be interesting if some historians wrote some alternate-timeline novels about how things would be today if things had gone differently back then, perhaps with Hitler being deposed and replaced with someone smarter and more realistic, or a chancellor being elected who didn't start a war.
Yes, of course. But then they conclude (per TFS) that we're the only intelligent species around based on the lack of obvious Type-III civilizations in other galaxies nearby.
Nope, you're thinking of Indiana, a northern state.
Also, Mississippi (along with West Virginia) doesn't allow parents to refuse to vaccinate their kids. And Alabama just passed a law requiring the teaching of evolution, which was unanimously approved.
I'm really starting to think I need to use Texas as my standard example of "worst state", and not MS or AL. They're not great, but TX seems to be doing their best to grab this crown.
I disagree; I would think the exhausts of fission or fusion powered craft, unless they're flying around near Earth (or maybe near Mars or so), would simply be too insignificant to detect, compared to everything else out there, and given the distances you're talking about. Same thing with trying to detect atmospheric compositions; theoretically it's possible, but practically it's very difficult because of the distances and the tiny amounts of light filtering through such a planet's atmosphere from its star, then traveling dozens or more light-years to reach us here. We can barely detect planets that are 5 times the size of our own, much less determine what's in their atmospheres.
It's too bad we can't launch probes out past Pluto faster than we can now (about 10 years), and get large amounts of data from them in a timely manner; if we could, it might make sense to launch an automated space telescope out there, far away from our own Sun, to look at other systems from interstellar space and then report the data back to us.
Let's look at a Dyson Sphere for instance (so we're looking at a Type II civ instead of Type III), as this should be easy to understand. The Dyson Sphere, made of some magical material and forming a completely sealed shell around the star (we'll go with the Star Trek Relics type of sphere), emits no visible light. The star is fusing hydrogen into helium and releasing photonic energy we call "light". So the ETs have set up this shell, and on the inside of this shell they've covered it with solar panels all with 100% efficiency. Now suppose there's a second layer to this shell (just behind the solar panels), where they all live, and use this energy doing something, maybe just running a bunch of computers and calculating the ultimate answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything, or perhaps powering a bunch of sexbots. Whatever they do with the energy, this ends up creating waste heat, because that's what happens when you consume energy in the form of work. This waste heat is emitted in the form of infrared radiation.
So, from the outside of this Dyson Sphere, sitting in your starship, you might not see any visible light from this star, but you will see infrared energy being emitted from it, and quite a lot of it, a lot more than you would see from a normal star, or from a dead planetoid or other body. Now I'm not an astrophysicist, but my guess is there's a lot of IR out in space anyway from all the energetic bodies (stars and such), so there's a "noise floor", so some aliens burning wood, or with some small nuclear reactors, are not going to be visible at this distance. Even the Dyson Sphere described above probably won't be visible unless it's very close to us (like the nearest star system). But in looking for a Type III civilization, they're probably looking for a much larger amount of IR radiation than the regular background amount, along with a reduced amount of other types of radiation from that direction.
Someone more knowledgeable about astrophysics please correct me if I'm wrong.
First, a quibble about terminology: someone being "friendzoned" doesn't necessarily mean they've accepted this or claimed to. If a girl says, "I think we should just be friends", and you respond, "OK, I'll see you around" and never call her again, I think that can be said to be an instance of "friendzoning" even though you've basically blown her off and never pretended to be a friend.
Secondly, if someone does willingly accept this, they might think at that time that they're OK with that, and later realize they're not comfortable with that relationship. People aren't that simple, and do change their moods and minds a lot.
My contention isn't that "friendzoning" is wrong (I see nothing wrong with trying to be friends with someone), just that I don't think it works out very often in practice, unless perhaps the two people are simultaneously friendzoning each other.
I'm sure they already have. It's wrong for men to reject women because they're too fat or ugly, but it's entirely acceptable for women to reject men because they're too "boring"....
I think our only hope here is to develop better medical technology, which does two things: 1) increases our lifespan considerably, so we have more time to work on careers and building nest eggs, and then to have families including taking years off for this, and 2) increases our attractiveness, making it so everyone looks like they're always 25-30 and are in ideal physical shape without having to actually exercise; this would massively increase the pool of dateable people. Scientifically, both of these should be completely possible, it's just a matter of developing the medical knowledge and technology.
if you just talk to girls and find someone you're compatible with on a personality level but you don't want to have sex with because they're physically unattractive to you, the term for that is "friend"
Unfortunately, the frequent problem here is that if one person is highly interested in the other, but the other is not and wants to "friendzone" him/her, it usually doesn't go over too well. Sooner or later things fall apart and they're no longer friends, because the "friendzoned" person resents this. We hear about it mostly happening to men, but it can and does happen to women too (I've done it myself; the women aren't my friends any more).
Staying friends only works if both parties are OK with that, which really only happens if they both decide they're not interested in that kind of relationship with the other (for instance, they both determine for themselves that the other one just isn't a personality match, they have too many annoying habits, etc).
So you should go chat with people of the opposite (or I suppose "preferred") sex with the objective of seeing if you're both interested in exploring a relationship, even if you're completely repulsed by those people?
If you consume that energy, it doesn't matter how you transport it; even if it's 100% efficient, you're going to consume it somewhere, doing something, and then it'll be emitted as waste heat. This is basic entropy in physics.
The only way around this is if you find some unknown-to-us branch of physics that doesn't require entropy (maybe you divert the waste heat to a parallel universe or hyperspace or something).
It's kinda hard to have evidence of aliens if you never bother to leave your own planet, or send any probes beyond your own star system. Basically, such evidence would require the aliens to travel here to visit us. If there's any aliens out there in nuclear-powered generation ships or whatever, there's no way for us to see them until they're in orbit around our planet.
There's a whole galaxy out there we haven't explored, plus billions more galaxies beyond that. Just because we don't have reliable evidence of aliens visiting us here on Earth (aside from things like Roswell and cattle mutilations and claims of abductions) doesn't mean there aren't any out there anywhere; it's ridiculously arrogant and stupid to even think that. There could be aliens with a civilization similar to ours on one of the planets at our nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, and we wouldn't know it because we have no way of seeing them. Maybe they're technologically where we were in 1830 and haven't developed radio yet, or maybe they're 150 years ahead of us and have gone to spread-spectrum communication so their transmissions just look like noise to us and we missed all the detectable stuff.
You can't escape waste heat; it's part of entropy. Unless maybe you open a subspace portal or something like that, but obviously our understanding of physics doesn't allow for anything of that sort.
This is the problem with trying to understand hypothetical advanced civilizations; if any really exist, most likely they're figured out things in physics which we still have no clue about. We only started figuring out quantum mechanics about a century ago, and without that we wouldn't have semiconductors, including microchips and LEDs. We've barely even gotten off our own planet.
I don't think even the United Federation of Planets qualifies as Type II. They haven't harnessed the entire energy output of a star. The engineering implications of that are mind-boggling; we've dreamed up Dyson Spheres, but those really don't seem realistic, unless we can somehow invent "scrith".
Our current civilization doesn't even place on the scale. We're probably like a Type 0.5 at best.
This analysis seems to be completely lacking. They're looking at waste heat and saying "well, there don't appear to be any Type III civilizations around here". Then they say that humans are the only "advanced species" around here. Ok, even if we assume that Type III aliens are this inefficient with waste heat, this just doesn't make sense. On the Kardashev scale, humans don't even place! We are not an "advanced species", because we haven't even made it to Type I, let alone II or III. What about Type I or II civilizations? This analysis has no way of determining if any of those are nearby. Type I civilizations would be completely invisible to us from a distance, and even Type II civilizations would probably be very difficult to spot. A Type III would be easier, since that's a civilization that uses the entire energy output of a galaxy, but really that kind of civilization is rather difficult for us humans to even comprehend.
Just for reference, the civilization depicted in Star Trek: TNG, with warp drive and a Federation spanning a good chunk of this galaxy's quadrant, is still only a Type I civilization. The episode where they found an abandoned Dyson Sphere (the one with Scotty) showed a Type II civilization, but it's unlikely a real Dyson Sphere would even look like that; it probably wouldn't be able to hold itself together; a real one would be lots of separate pieces orbiting in formation.
No. Sorry, there is no right to sex. Absolutely not.
I'm pretty sure masturbation technically qualifies as "sex". So unless I'm mistaken about that, then yes, there IS a right to sex. Just not with other people.
Well, there was a study I read about that found that, on a college campus, 20% of the men were getting 80% of the sex. So it's not just him; women don't want sex with average-looking guys at all, they all just want to chase after the football stars and the like.
Slashdot Mirror
If they're harnessing and utilizing the entire energy output of every star in that galaxy (which is the definition of a Type III civilization), then their waste heat will be equal to the energy produced by those stars.
If they're really energy-efficient, then they're not using all that energy, and are just letting it radiate away naturally, and are then not a Type III civilization.
Honestly, it seems to me the whole Kardashev scale is too simplistic and short-sighted. What if a really advanced civilization figures out a way to travel FTL without using any more energy than a small nuclear reactor, and simply doesn't need that much energy? They could dominate an entire galaxy while not needing to actually consume all the energy produced by all the stars in it.
I think they've figured out that relying on the King James Version of the bible for science education is a trip to Stupidville.
Maybe Alabama needs to tell this to Texas....
It does seem like the stupidest state awards are moving west: Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Nebraska, etc.
He3 mining is a red herring,
Why is that? It's rather useful for fusion. Citation needed.
and zero G manufactoring simply turned out to be unnecessary.
Citation needed. You can do things in zero-g that are much harder here, such as anything involving crystal growth.
In fact lunar bases and large space stations are pretty much the textbook example of negative ROI. Sad but true.
But for some reason, multiple billionaires are rushing to expand our space capabilities. I think Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are more credible than some random Slashdot poster.
The thing you're missing is that there's a lot of valuable resources in space: asteroids full of platinum and the like. Why tear down whole mountains here on Earth (and piss off the environmentalists, for good reason) when you can get far much higher-grade ores in space, without screwing up the environment and producing tons of pollution? Space stations or lunar bases would then be useful for refining operations. Same goes for He3, if we can ever figure out how to make fusion energy-positive: it's easier and better to just mine it there as fuel and return it to Earth and use that for power generation instead of nasty fossil fuels or uranium. Finally, there's surely all kind of other applications we haven't even thought of yet. Every time people have explored someplace new, lots of new economic activity resulted, including with the Apollo missions.
The problem is that videocalling looks cool in the movies but doesn't work very well in the real world. For proper perspective you need to keep your phone straight out in front of your face, if you do the natural thing and keep it at chest level you inevitably bend your head down, making your neck look twice normal size - and you also get excellent views of what might be hiding in your nose, teeth and beard.
These sound like problems when you use it on mobile phones. If you're sitting at your desk and your phone is on your desk (or is a computer on your desk), as depicted in 2001, this shouldn't be a problem (as you note). I've used Skype many times on my computers and never had this problem. We've had desk-bound phones for much longer than we've had decent mobile phones; we should have had video calling back in the 90s on those. So this is a red herring; 2001 never depicted mobile phones, only desk-bound videophones.
The people who really can afford to have kids without worrying about what happens if they lose their job etc. are the people who aren't having any kids. If everyone took your advice (and somehow, magically, birth control became 100% effective), we would quickly have a population collapse. A huge number of kids these days are being born to poor and lower-income people; they're keeping our numbers up. How that's going to play out long-term, I'm not sure, but it doesn't sound good. What the answer to this is, I don't know. Honestly, I think that if we don't want a societal collapse within 2 generations (because the more productive people in society aren't replacing themselves with kids, and the kids of the unproductive people aren't generally becoming productive to replace the older productive ones), we need to work really hard on life-extension therapies so people can live past 150.
It'd be interesting if some historians wrote some alternate-timeline novels about how things would be today if things had gone differently back then, perhaps with Hitler being deposed and replaced with someone smarter and more realistic, or a chancellor being elected who didn't start a war.
Yes, of course. But then they conclude (per TFS) that we're the only intelligent species around based on the lack of obvious Type-III civilizations in other galaxies nearby.
Cruz's father is an infamous Dominionist. Go read about him.
And Cruz visited that Kentucky bimbo in jail (and I think Huckabee was with him). Santorum, Jindal, and Walker didn't.
Um, you're saying exactly the same things I said.
Nope, you're thinking of Indiana, a northern state.
Also, Mississippi (along with West Virginia) doesn't allow parents to refuse to vaccinate their kids. And Alabama just passed a law requiring the teaching of evolution, which was unanimously approved.
I'm really starting to think I need to use Texas as my standard example of "worst state", and not MS or AL. They're not great, but TX seems to be doing their best to grab this crown.
I disagree; I would think the exhausts of fission or fusion powered craft, unless they're flying around near Earth (or maybe near Mars or so), would simply be too insignificant to detect, compared to everything else out there, and given the distances you're talking about. Same thing with trying to detect atmospheric compositions; theoretically it's possible, but practically it's very difficult because of the distances and the tiny amounts of light filtering through such a planet's atmosphere from its star, then traveling dozens or more light-years to reach us here. We can barely detect planets that are 5 times the size of our own, much less determine what's in their atmospheres.
It's too bad we can't launch probes out past Pluto faster than we can now (about 10 years), and get large amounts of data from them in a timely manner; if we could, it might make sense to launch an automated space telescope out there, far away from our own Sun, to look at other systems from interstellar space and then report the data back to us.
You're not going to "outshine" a parent galaxy.
Let's look at a Dyson Sphere for instance (so we're looking at a Type II civ instead of Type III), as this should be easy to understand. The Dyson Sphere, made of some magical material and forming a completely sealed shell around the star (we'll go with the Star Trek Relics type of sphere), emits no visible light. The star is fusing hydrogen into helium and releasing photonic energy we call "light". So the ETs have set up this shell, and on the inside of this shell they've covered it with solar panels all with 100% efficiency. Now suppose there's a second layer to this shell (just behind the solar panels), where they all live, and use this energy doing something, maybe just running a bunch of computers and calculating the ultimate answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything, or perhaps powering a bunch of sexbots. Whatever they do with the energy, this ends up creating waste heat, because that's what happens when you consume energy in the form of work. This waste heat is emitted in the form of infrared radiation.
So, from the outside of this Dyson Sphere, sitting in your starship, you might not see any visible light from this star, but you will see infrared energy being emitted from it, and quite a lot of it, a lot more than you would see from a normal star, or from a dead planetoid or other body. Now I'm not an astrophysicist, but my guess is there's a lot of IR out in space anyway from all the energetic bodies (stars and such), so there's a "noise floor", so some aliens burning wood, or with some small nuclear reactors, are not going to be visible at this distance. Even the Dyson Sphere described above probably won't be visible unless it's very close to us (like the nearest star system). But in looking for a Type III civilization, they're probably looking for a much larger amount of IR radiation than the regular background amount, along with a reduced amount of other types of radiation from that direction.
Someone more knowledgeable about astrophysics please correct me if I'm wrong.
Maybe, maybe not.
First, a quibble about terminology: someone being "friendzoned" doesn't necessarily mean they've accepted this or claimed to. If a girl says, "I think we should just be friends", and you respond, "OK, I'll see you around" and never call her again, I think that can be said to be an instance of "friendzoning" even though you've basically blown her off and never pretended to be a friend.
Secondly, if someone does willingly accept this, they might think at that time that they're OK with that, and later realize they're not comfortable with that relationship. People aren't that simple, and do change their moods and minds a lot.
My contention isn't that "friendzoning" is wrong (I see nothing wrong with trying to be friends with someone), just that I don't think it works out very often in practice, unless perhaps the two people are simultaneously friendzoning each other.
I'm sure they already have. It's wrong for men to reject women because they're too fat or ugly, but it's entirely acceptable for women to reject men because they're too "boring"....
I think our only hope here is to develop better medical technology, which does two things: 1) increases our lifespan considerably, so we have more time to work on careers and building nest eggs, and then to have families including taking years off for this, and 2) increases our attractiveness, making it so everyone looks like they're always 25-30 and are in ideal physical shape without having to actually exercise; this would massively increase the pool of dateable people. Scientifically, both of these should be completely possible, it's just a matter of developing the medical knowledge and technology.
if you just talk to girls and find someone you're compatible with on a personality level but you don't want to have sex with because they're physically unattractive to you, the term for that is "friend"
Unfortunately, the frequent problem here is that if one person is highly interested in the other, but the other is not and wants to "friendzone" him/her, it usually doesn't go over too well. Sooner or later things fall apart and they're no longer friends, because the "friendzoned" person resents this. We hear about it mostly happening to men, but it can and does happen to women too (I've done it myself; the women aren't my friends any more).
Staying friends only works if both parties are OK with that, which really only happens if they both decide they're not interested in that kind of relationship with the other (for instance, they both determine for themselves that the other one just isn't a personality match, they have too many annoying habits, etc).
So you should go chat with people of the opposite (or I suppose "preferred") sex with the objective of seeing if you're both interested in exploring a relationship, even if you're completely repulsed by those people?
That makes no sense.
If you consume that energy, it doesn't matter how you transport it; even if it's 100% efficient, you're going to consume it somewhere, doing something, and then it'll be emitted as waste heat. This is basic entropy in physics.
The only way around this is if you find some unknown-to-us branch of physics that doesn't require entropy (maybe you divert the waste heat to a parallel universe or hyperspace or something).
Build a galaxy-sized Dyson Sphere?
It's kinda hard to have evidence of aliens if you never bother to leave your own planet, or send any probes beyond your own star system. Basically, such evidence would require the aliens to travel here to visit us. If there's any aliens out there in nuclear-powered generation ships or whatever, there's no way for us to see them until they're in orbit around our planet.
There's a whole galaxy out there we haven't explored, plus billions more galaxies beyond that. Just because we don't have reliable evidence of aliens visiting us here on Earth (aside from things like Roswell and cattle mutilations and claims of abductions) doesn't mean there aren't any out there anywhere; it's ridiculously arrogant and stupid to even think that. There could be aliens with a civilization similar to ours on one of the planets at our nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, and we wouldn't know it because we have no way of seeing them. Maybe they're technologically where we were in 1830 and haven't developed radio yet, or maybe they're 150 years ahead of us and have gone to spread-spectrum communication so their transmissions just look like noise to us and we missed all the detectable stuff.
You can't escape waste heat; it's part of entropy. Unless maybe you open a subspace portal or something like that, but obviously our understanding of physics doesn't allow for anything of that sort.
This is the problem with trying to understand hypothetical advanced civilizations; if any really exist, most likely they're figured out things in physics which we still have no clue about. We only started figuring out quantum mechanics about a century ago, and without that we wouldn't have semiconductors, including microchips and LEDs. We've barely even gotten off our own planet.
I don't think even the United Federation of Planets qualifies as Type II. They haven't harnessed the entire energy output of a star. The engineering implications of that are mind-boggling; we've dreamed up Dyson Spheres, but those really don't seem realistic, unless we can somehow invent "scrith".
Our current civilization doesn't even place on the scale. We're probably like a Type 0.5 at best.
This analysis seems to be completely lacking. They're looking at waste heat and saying "well, there don't appear to be any Type III civilizations around here". Then they say that humans are the only "advanced species" around here. Ok, even if we assume that Type III aliens are this inefficient with waste heat, this just doesn't make sense. On the Kardashev scale, humans don't even place! We are not an "advanced species", because we haven't even made it to Type I, let alone II or III. What about Type I or II civilizations? This analysis has no way of determining if any of those are nearby. Type I civilizations would be completely invisible to us from a distance, and even Type II civilizations would probably be very difficult to spot. A Type III would be easier, since that's a civilization that uses the entire energy output of a galaxy, but really that kind of civilization is rather difficult for us humans to even comprehend.
Just for reference, the civilization depicted in Star Trek: TNG, with warp drive and a Federation spanning a good chunk of this galaxy's quadrant, is still only a Type I civilization. The episode where they found an abandoned Dyson Sphere (the one with Scotty) showed a Type II civilization, but it's unlikely a real Dyson Sphere would even look like that; it probably wouldn't be able to hold itself together; a real one would be lots of separate pieces orbiting in formation.
It is illegal (in the US) to have sex with Non-humans, even if they are willing. (Dogs, horses, cows, goats, etc)
Actually (strangely), this is not true. Many states do not have any laws against this. There's also some European countries that don't.
No. Sorry, there is no right to sex. Absolutely not.
I'm pretty sure masturbation technically qualifies as "sex". So unless I'm mistaken about that, then yes, there IS a right to sex. Just not with other people.
Well, there was a study I read about that found that, on a college campus, 20% of the men were getting 80% of the sex. So it's not just him; women don't want sex with average-looking guys at all, they all just want to chase after the football stars and the like.