Here is a random thought... What if dark matter was a sign of intelligent extra-terrestrial life?
The idea is simply that a Type III civilization on the Kardashev scale would control the flows of energy escaping their galaxy. Many solar systems (the inhabitable or useful ones) would end up with mechanisms such as Dyson spheres, therefore lowering the amount of energy escaping these system, to the point where we would no longer be able to identify such systems as stars.
I don't know if the idea has any merit, but a quick Google search shows that I'm not the first one to have it...
Friday, April 30, 2010
Dark matter as a proof of E.T. intelligence?
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5 comments:
You've been reading Accelerando, haven't you?
No, I have not, but it looks interesting...
Thing is, it's not like a Dyson sphere is totally opaque: it just emits at a lower frequency than the original star.
Not to mention I doubt it would explain the actual structures we are seeing, both in the EM as well as gravitational data. It's just be weird if a civilization would expand like that <.<
I see you like Nottale, though, I wish I could manage to read him properly, but then, with only a Bachelors T.T
Dear Anonymous,
You are right, this is why I talk about lower amounts of energy that we wouldn't identify as stars. At the limit, it would be indistinguishable from background noise.
Regarding Nottale, I think we need to go even further than he did and accept the idea that none of our measurements ever returns a "continuous" result.
(Same anon, I should really sign in or something <.<)
On the other hand, given the amount of energy that is "missing," as it were, we ought to pick up some low-frequency signal at a quite substantial amplitude.
And I should probably expand on my "structures we are seeing" comment, since it was horribly cryptic and understandably not responded to. The idea is to take the distribution of stars and the inferred distribution of dark matter and figure out why colonization would lead to those structures, assuming Dyson sphere colonization is what accounts for all the dark matter. I mean, why would it leave such a nicely-distributed set of galaxies that look so incredibly gravitationally-formed rather than left-out-of-the-colonization-loop?
Although, I guess I have to admit that trying to predict the capacity of technologies in a Kardashev III civilization and its motivations is a little like trying to throw a dart into the centroid of a sunspot while blindfolded on Pluto... and if I recall correctly, what you're really suggesting is more like Kardashev IV, which makes it even worse to predict @.@
Though, now that I think about it, Dyson spheres (at least of the sort you contemplate here) are opaque, whereas dark matter is postulated as transparent. I suppose maybe they could have built active camouflage systems for their spheres, but then I think we're really stretching it.
And I have no idea where this is going to go, since I'm not at all very understanding of CMB analysis, but the presence today of that many Dyson spheres would show up in the CMB as indicative of lots and lots of baryonic matter. I'm not really confident, but I don't think that is borne out by the CMB analyses.
And since I've just used the word "today" in such a terribly abusive way above, here's another empirical test which I think isn't born out: we should be able to "watch" the development of these spheres as we look farther away from Earth. That is, the apparent large-scale organization of stars would change in clear ways, leading to a brightness anisotropy (one or both of more stars in a particular direction, or more stars at a given distance from Earth).
Although, opaqueness and the last paragraph could interact significantly, though I imagine it'd leave at least a subtle trace in galactic distributions.
I mean, I think its just too much of a stretch, with too many intricate, failure-prone parts, to really believe that the existence of aliens explains dark matter, and even more of a stretch that our observations of dark matter prove the existence of aliens.
Regardless, given the oddities (technological and sociological) that would have to occur, dark matter can hardly be proof of intelligent extraterrestrial life.
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