001: Introduction & reaching Tier 1 civilization
Life is an emergent property of the universe, in a constant battle with entropy. What can we do to ensure it can fight that fight longer and stronger? Here's one. Also, hi.
Hello.
This will be my first post on Substack. I decided to allocate time to write out my thoughts, studies, and observations, in a form of a public diary. Prior I would occasionally post on Twitter about something I learned or found fascinating but the consistency remained, well, inconsistent. Reddit had its own upsides and downsides as a public forum as well.
I would find that there is little in common between me and my peers and that the interests are more generalist than specialist in nature. 240 characters on Twitter is not enough to get a point across and more often than not it felt like a siphoning waste of time. Long-form “self-discussion” will allow me to look back at what I post through a reflective lens, learn from it and hopefully enable any readers to extract value out of it or come along for the journey.
Now it’s time to get into my first objective.
I have found myself between two long-term complex projects, the first of which I stumbled upon in pre-school at around 6 years old, the second in teens, and once again upon reaching the age of an adult.
In a red-covered student’s encyclopedia on page 269 at the bottom there was two images and a description stating:
“The sun will continue its life for billions of years. However, in five billion years it’ll expand to a red giant, boiling the waters and eradicating Life. The sun will grow in size, engulfing Mercury, Venus and the Earth will be within the Sun’s atmosphere.”
I was extremely unhappy and disturbed by that statement. Even as a 6-year-old, it was a notion that the statement of Life with a capital L dying out is an inevitability. 5 billion years is an inconceivably long time but it is still finite and by no means has it been obvious that if the existing civilization were to find a way to incapacitate or completely eradicate itself, there would be another shot at evolution to slowly build a being made of meat that is conscious and has the tool-making and sense-making capabilities adequate enough to ensure its survivability against the violent places the world and the universe are. So naturally, understanding what can be done to continue Extension of Life as we know it existing indefinitely or until it’s able to hack its own source code became a primary objective.
To give humans and/or the species transcendent of us more time to ensure the survivability of the lineage, a major energy source - the Sun - needs to be directly harnessed and in an explosive event (such as a solar flare) protected against as there is a lot of equipment that cannot handle massive CMEs (coronal mass ejections) which can be engineered to be more resilient but legacy systems that may or may not be useful as well as relics from the past should not be fried every time the Sun becomes more unstable. Therefore a continuously built structure approximating a multi-layered Dyson sphere is as much of a priority as the multiplanetarization of the civilization.
It enables energy harnessing in excess of what is required for reaching Type 1 civilization on the Kardashev scale.
Recently there have been papers in regards to “stellar engines” that in combination with the power of a Dyson sphere can be used to move the Sun at substantially higher speeds than a Dyson sphere alone and therefore all the heavenly bodies with it if there were to be an extinction-level event external from the solar system (e.g. rogue black hole; a direct gamma-ray burst from a quasar/blazar; travel through the inner solar system with lethal conditions for any form of Life).
Energy harnessing tool of such magnitude enables ease of spatial logistics as the abundance of energy allows for substantially lower reliance on chemical or enclosed nuclear propulsion, making interplanetary travel for Life or extensions of Life (robotics, drones, resource extractors, ships, etc.) cheap and straight-forward.
The best part of it is that from a physics point of view, this is relatively simple but from a human point of view, it is a herculean task. On par with ants used to constructing ant hills, now required to build a modern-day skyscraper. It is however possible with existing laws of physics for humans to build one in the sky and therefore a necessary precaution for the continuation of Life.
One cannot prepare for everything but one can improve the probabilities enough so that if something novel were to happen that cannot conceivably be accounted for with the existing amount of information in time up until that point, every other variable is taken care of.
And if that is not enough, then at the very least the dominant systems of Life have made the best effort possible.
The second project is to be discussed in the next post.