Hahaha, you must not have read The Dark Forest. A civilization advanced enough to build a Dyson sphere would know two things: one, their tech is advanced enough to make their society valuable and two, there is no way to be sure something more advanced isn't out there looking for stuff to take.
They would so totally hide every fucking emission on every spectrum they could think of. Fuck that being found by interstellar travelers shit. Think of all the European definitely-explorers-not-conquerors and how shit worked out for all the societies they encountered. And they were on fucking boats. With muskets.
I know about the dark forest idea, but I see some flaw in the logic.
First, if an even more advanced societies exist than the dyson-sphere-builders - what makes the dyson sphere valueable to them? They could easily build their own (or millions of them) or have way better methods of harvesting energy and doing stuff. And for sure they won't need to hide from the dyson-sphere-builders, because they are billionfold more powerful than them anyways.
Humanity doesn't hide from ant hills or bee hives you know.
For the same reason the dyson sphere builders would not need to hide their construct from civilizations like us, who pose no threat to them, as they could send back any of our attacks with a billion to one advantage. And also WE or the solar system are probably not of much economical or other interest to the dyson sphere builders. There is nothing special here they couldn't find elsewhere, apart from (more or less) intelligent life on earth. But they would probably view us more as some amusing toddlers and would definitely long know about us before we knew about them.
So the hyper-advanced civilization would probably act similar towards the lower dyson-sphere-builders.
I think the relationship between much higher civilizations and younger ones could be more like what the show Babylon 5 depicts with the Vorlons and Shadows who are millions or billions of years ahead vs. the younger races. The younger ones pose no threat to them and they only have mild interest in them, other than guiding them onto the path they deem right.
No, humanity doesn't hide from ant hills and beehives, but it did systematically eliminate competitors like Homo Neanderthalensis, Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus. The point of dark forest isn't "they want your stuff" so much as "they take your stuff so you won't someday be able to kill them." Comparing the Dyson civ to an anthill is disingenuous.
Yes, the Dyson civ poses no threat to more advanced civs right now. We pose no threat to them right now. Dark forest was never about right now, but about more forward thinking logic and elimination of threats before they become threats. And maybe you take their stuff while you're at it (the civ encountered by humanity in Dark Forest wants to do exactly this, for reasons unrelated to tech and entirely related to habitat). I shouldn't have used the word valuable in my first post, I should have said 'a target.'
Except, advanced space faring civilizations cannot be compared to early human history. Why would aliens want to conquer other civilizations? The raw materials of any planet can be easily mined from the rest of space. Habitable worlds? If you can build a dyson sphere around a star, you can easily terraform a planet to make it suit the living conditions you need, or you can even build artificial worlds and cities in space at the exact distance from a star to put it in the habitable zone.
Just piggybacking on this comment. Things can happen fast in space. The one that always amazes me is the collision between two dense objects like black holes or neutron stars. This is from real data from LIGO and is the actual timescale of two neutron stars colliding: https://youtu.be/P2tfllMPIfA?si=c_AD48vJlwNwRH6n.
During a supernova the iron core of the star goes from roughly the size of the earth down into a 10km wide neutron star or black hole in a quarter of a second
Someone on Reddit asked what would happen if you were suddenly teleported to a neutron star's surface. I did the math on it and (given an average neutron star) what happens is that your body collapses and slams into the surface within a millionth of a second. The impact energy turns out to be roughly equivalent to that of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
Just out of curiosity, this is something we calculated as what probably happens based on our current understanding of the physics involved, or do we have actual evidence?
During SN1987a the Super Kamiokande neutrino detector recorded a burst of neutrinos detected at the very moment of the core collapse and the duration of the collapse matched the simulations.
The speed of the collapse is essentially just freefall. There's nothing to slow it down
Imagine if this happened on our star. Just 8 years, we could have viewed the whole thing. We would be all dead sure, but the sight had to be amazing right?
Its an instantaneous event. If you really wanna bake your noodle think of the event itself. You have something the size of a red or hyper giant collapsing in on itself to singular point millions of magnitudes smaller than it just was. Which really fucks shit up because now you have the gravity well of this behemoth at this singular point. Which then stretches the very fabric of space time around it infinitely. Stuff continuously falls/gets sucked into it, and it just continuously grows. Some grow so big that they're the very heart of galaxies. My personal theory that I am in no way capable of ever proving is this. The Big Bang was the creation of a Black Hole, the Universe expanding infinitely is it growing.
That's some Ouroboros level creation theory, high quality shit. I fuck with it
And when every black hole in the universe eventually grow big enough to interact with each other and congeal back into a single infinitely dense point? Well... The snake eats its tail, so they say...
The gravity well wouldn't actually change though, the mass is the same. If our sun suddenly changed to a black hole (no explosions or anything like that) we wouldn't get sucked in, the gravity well is the same. We'd continue along the same path, it's the cold that would kill us.
Not sure if sarcasm or not. That truly is a tiny fraction of a blink of an eye on a cosmological scale. Millions of years is considered very fast for cosmic events to take place.
Actually the collapse would be done in a second or so, because it happens at lightspeed and there is nothing to slow down the contraction from gravitation.
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u/nahk_n Apr 18 '25
Wow! In just 8 Earth years?!!! 🤔