How to Seriously Pimp Your Space Empire
Without setting even one foot outside of a single solar system
By MARTIN REZNY
Don’t you love it when you realize you’ve been extremely wrong about something you have obsessed over your whole life? That moment when your mind is completely blown by new understanding and expanded beyond what you thought possible? If that thing for you is scifi, or indeed real life space exploration, as it is for me, you need to start watching Isaac Arthur’s videos.
Even though you can find cool speculative scientific concepts in lots of shows, movies, or games backed by real life experts like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, and many more, not quite like this. The closest thing may be stuff from PBS Space Time, if you’re familiar with that, but the main point is that there’s a difference between someone explaining to you the basics vs. the specifics.
While you may have already heard or read what something like a Dyson sphere is, there’s no other place that I’m aware of where you can learn in detail just how much power it can harness; how it would compare to your standard galactic empire; what would it take exactly to build one; how much more technologically advanced would we need to get to be able to build ours.
And this is pretty much what I’d like to write about this time. If for no other reason, then to gather my own thoughts as a prospective scifi author regarding the implications of the real answers to the above listed questions on the usual scifi stories and tropes. If you’re a fellow scifi author, or fan, I invite you to join me in my musings, for there is much to think about. First, watch:
We’ve Got It All Wrong
Assuming you’ve just watched Isaac’s video, now you can’t unknow it. Pretty much every single famous fictional interstellar superpower as well as any galactic empire could be totally crushed by a race on pretty much our level of technology. What more, a race that never even left its home system. Some basic mind shattering facts derived from Isaac’s careful calculations include:
- A Dyson sphere, or more specifically a Dyson swarm, can be built within a thousand years with essentially the technology that we already have, or are very nearly about to develop. No new physics are required, just work.
- Even a partial Dyson swarm, a percent of a percent of one, can give us enough energy to propel spacecraft at relativistic speeds to nearby star systems. Newly developed technologies would just make it much easier.
- Dyson swarm has enough energy to destroy planets, if the energy output is properly focused. Yep, we could make a literal death star. Also, using a concept called Shkadov thruster, we can move and steer stars. Or galaxies.
- Solar system can house way beyond trillions of people, not just in the Dyson swarm, but also on every piece of rock. Moreover, space between solar systems and even galaxies is filled with rogue planets to inhabit.
- While galaxy spanning empires inhabiting only planets would have many orders of magnitude less power and construction material at their disposal than a single Dyson swarm, empire accessing multiverse could compare.
- Referencing the previous point, Dyson swarm is not just a source of energy, it’s a source of “starlifted” material, enough to make enough ships to colonize, or fight, the whole galaxy, also prolonging the star’s lifetime.
If It’s So Easy, Where Are Those Dyson Swarms?
Excellent question, that’s something that Isaac Arthur calls the Dyson Dilemma, a follow-up question to the well known Fermi Paradox (where the hell are all them aliens). Even before a single Dyson swarm gets completed, hundreds or thousands of solar systems could be colonized by any race that has reached approximately our level of scientific understanding and tech.
If you are or intend to become a scifi writer, this knowledge about how a true interstellar empire would form is now something that you have to deal with. And remember, if only a single alien race since the beginning of time have gone Dyson crazy, they would have been visible to us, unless the universe is truly infinite. Or unless something has prevented ABSOLUTELY ALL of them.
Maybe intelligent life is truly unique, either because this is a simulated universe (essentially god-created), or because there are many difficult “filters” (technologically induced inevitable apocalypses or natural disasters), Reapers from Mass Effect are a thing, or who knows what. But there’s gotta be something, and again Isaac has a video about that too that you need to watch.
Personally, I do like some of the weirder possibilities, like access to the multiverse, which would maybe make it more logical to expand onto infinite number of parallel Earths. Or the simulated universe, but that has been done a lot in scifi. Or entropy-defying technology, the perpetuum mobile, which is the only kind of tech that would allow a Dyson swarm to hide its heat from us, as far as we can imagine.
Some of My Puny Questions
Okay, so Dyson swarms kick ass, even we could make one soon, but there are none around as far as we can see. How does that impact scifi stories? The first thing that intrigues me now is how much does power mean in an encounter with far superior technology. I’d say that in a universe where faster than light technology is impossible, power must have a pretty strong advantage over better tech, because better tech means mainly greater efficiencies of stuff.
If I were making a sci-fi space “explormination” game (the best one word name for the 4X genre I’ve encountered so far), I guess I’d make one key part of the process of advancement to acquire more power while the tech tree would mainly open up new options of what can be done with that power and how much can be done with any fixed amount of power. Maybe technological advancement could even be measured by the efficiency of power usage alone.
Mathematically, there would have to be a point of equilibrium between our level of efficiency if we had a Dyson swarm, and a lesser amount of power wielded by a more advanced adversary that would compare in terms of work (as in W, the physical variable) that either space empire can make happen. Such as computation, or construction, or destruction, which covers the most basic, and common, strategies of “gameplay” in any science fiction setting.
My second question would be whether there’s any obvious connection between having more power and any sort of cultural superiority (or inferiority). If you tried something subtler than combat, construction, or sciencing the shit out of something in order to defeat a rival empire, like espionage or cultural influence, to what extent would size really matter?
To that end, are political units of quadrillions of people even governable? Can a singular unified political entity of that magnitude actually hold together in any but completely superficial respects? Given such huge numbers of individuals, maybe it’s just statistics that make a functional Dyson swarm impossible. How many terrorists would it really take to blow it up? Not many.
In quadrillions of people, whichever apocalyptic psychological, social, or biological pathogen you can think of must have a reasonably high chance of arising. In the vein of Isaac Asimov’s psychohistory, it could be simply the numbers that guarantee the odds of a catastrophic failure. In the Foundation’s Empire, which is smaller than a single Dyson swarm civilization by many orders of magnitude, by the way, a single telepathic mutant had major impact.
The Science of Defying the Odds
Of course, there is a “simple” way to defy such statistics, perfection. Maybe life is an ongoing experiment with the ultimate goal of producing an idiot-proof version of intelligent life. The kind of life that’s literally unkillable, and only such life can ultimately colonize the universe. To that end, it would make sense that a flawed sentient race would get ample opportunity to self-destruct before it ever leaves its home system, or before it manages to spread too far.
It would be similar with the better tech versus more power situation, I’d wager. What’s all the power in the universe when your adversary is impervious to any way in which you can try to cause them harm? Especially if some truly advanced technologies of faster than light travel, or multiverse travel, or time travel are possible, or the aforementioned entropy defying perpetuum mobile. The advantage can also be purely psychological or social.
In any case, the more likely real world explanations of our current situation in the universe are all pretty bleak, in my opinion. We may be some creator’s playthings, which seriously creeps me out now that I’m watching Westworld. Or truly alone in the cosmos, the best that the universe has been able to come up with so far, nay, the only functional intelligent technological life so far.
How depressing would that be? Or we must be nearing self-destruction any time now. Or we’re actually the dumbass of the class, since every other intelligent race out there is so far ahead of us that we can barely comprehend ways in which they could be making themselves invisible to us. Or there really are some kind of Reapers blowing up every single Dyson swarm in its infancy.
So, are we alone, or is the universe extremely incomprehensible/hostile? How do we prepare to face dangers we’re not aware of? I guess a little bit of near infinite power and spreading outside into multiple solar systems should help. But then, why is there such an absence of evidence that anyone has managed to accomplish even that yet? In any case, authors of science fiction are not allowed to complain anymore that there are no more ideas and everything has been done before, when such deep mysteries abound, and so much is possible.
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