As someone who went to college with sweaty pete, I expect that his alcoholism and stimulant addiction may have resulted in certain limitations once they stopped spurring on his well-publicized dalliances.

I always thought Ecuadoran would make more sense than the usual “Ecuadorean”. The country isn’t named “Ecuadorea” after all.

Ecuador suffers a similar fate.

Agreed. In a past dream, I had wanted to follow in the research footsteps of Davis and Lineweaver, but I couldn’t convince any cosmology mentors that this was a worthy direction to pursue. I had to settle for sprinkling references to their work liberally through Wikipedia.

I think that inconsequential debates where the stakes are low are good for science comm. People are often surprised when I say that I will take either side of the “Is Pluto a planet?” debate… but that is mostly because the stakes are so low.

It was Peacocke’s diatribe that convinced me that the expanding space view was misleading in part. David Hogg also once gave a great popular science lecture that explained the expanding universe starting from the Doppler effect, and that went so well that it is the approach I now take in Astro 101.

He may not live long enough to get it.

For sure extravagance is the whole point for Dyson, but it sometimes has knock off effects that I find uncomfortable to the point of being nearly disconfirming. It was not for nothing that Dyson was a climate change denier. I do see these as being related peccadillos.

I suspect he was speaking with hand waving gestures to the concept of “solar system”. Indeed “inner solar system” is the scale Dyson first envisioned in what *I*, for one, consider to be a hellish nightmare concept.

Book recommendation: press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

*happen to

But I think he is, sadly, acting out of the technoutopian hyperbole that did happen envision reprocessing stellar output at a 1 AU bubble.

For sure, the guy is riffing on subjects which he thought about for almost no time, and putting junk in space is likely the goal, but it is a *classic* goal and likely not out of place from Dyson’s imagination, sadly.

Yeah, enveloping a star is a waste and unstable (thus swarms… even more scary).

I blame the Star Trek TNG episode which snatched this obscure also-ran concept and brought it into the mainstream… I kinda wish it would stay in science fiction since, like many of Dyson’s proposals, it sits in my uncanny valley of the imagination to extravagance progression.

I think Altman is referencing Dyson spheres (obscure technosignature fever dreams of Freeman Dyson popularized by a Star Trek episode) which envelope an inner solar system in what I would describe as a pretty hellish fashion. All for “Type II Kardashev” energy extraction. What is misunderstood?

I am going to start by contacting Mothership Strategies to see whether they can help remove my phone number from the spam text database: mothershipstrategies.com/contact/