Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/20/strange-starlight-patterns-could-be-evidence-of-alien-technology-according-to-two-new-scientific-studies.html
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It’s 99.9% likely, or more, that it’s not aliens and Dyson spheres. But there’s always the chance it’s something new and interesting anyways.
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OK, dumb question - how would you get resources and facilities to make any structure so insanely large? Seems like a few planets worth of material there, and then assembling it? With what energy source?
I seriously doubt that these things exist or will ever exist.
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Lego? 
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You build it bit by bit. Start by crunching up asteroids, create some self-replicating drone factories, which then churn up solar collectors to power up the expanding infrastructure. Move on to the unwanted moons next, getting more raw materials, more construction bots, more computing substrate and more solar collectors. (You can also use all the radioactives you find in the process for fission, and/or do fusion with all the unused ice.) Keep it up, and soon you can start demolishing the smaller planets, building up the habitats in the process, and preparing everything for going after the gas giants.
It’s a step-by-step-by-step process.
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So… lego…
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Stepping on a chunk of a planetoid is painful, I’ve heard.
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Indeed!
But of course, I mean that the lego method of building seems like it would be the way to go… bit by bit, as you say… The physics would be difficult, but seems like ti could work if and when the technology gets into place…
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So long as you’re effectively able to get things out of planetary gravity wells without too much energy input. Who am I kidding, such a thing would require ginormous amounts of energy input.
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As long as somebody else buys the set, I’m willing to help assemble it!
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Pretty much what i was thinking too, it’s likely it’s a natural phenomenon, but that in itself doesn’t mean it’s not interesting. It means that scientists are looking at the outliers of their data and learning from it instead of hand waving it as an error
It is resource intensive, at a scale that it’s hard to understand and it depends on how thoroughly one can or wants to cover a star and what distance it is feasible to stage the Dyson sphere from the star itself. I had been reading the novel We are Legion (We are Bob) and Dyson spheres come up, and without going into spoiler territory it basically involved strip mining an entire system of its usable metals. Reminds me i need to finish the series.
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I want to say it’s aliens, but it’s not aliens.
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True enough… it might be one of those sci-fi things that aren’t actually feasible, given the amount of energy required to make it…
I suspect you’re not the only one… lego are fun!
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one other idea that’s been put forth is not a solid sphere ( like in @bakaneko’s clip ) but a swarm or cloud. then, maybe you only have to dismantle your asteroid belt, and not necessarily all of your planets…
easy peasy.
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Well… if I can make it infinitely thin…
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To property think about the problem let’s first consider that you have a spherical cow in a perfect vacuum…
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