Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work?

Re:Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work? by ansible on Thursday January 19, 2017 @09:19PM (#13441295)

Well, at some point the local system will run out of unclaimed matter and energy (Dyson swarm consuming all output of the local sun, built using all available matter in the system). So if you want to expand, you will have to leave.

There would also be some astronomical phenomenon that aren't easily reproducible locally, so it might be useful to travel to them instead.

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Re:Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work? by jeff_petersen on Thursday January 19, 2017 @09:40PM (#13441395)

That is a fair point. Exploration for resources (including non-consumables like hard-to-reproduce phenomena) certainly would still make sense

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Re:Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work? by TeMPOraL on Friday January 20, 2017 @06:32AM (#13443061)

I wonder if such software civilization couldn't automate the exploration process away, so that the beings themselves don't care about it day to day. From the outside perspective, the whole thing will look like a weird blob of something, expanding in the direction of usable resources at speeds close to c. And beings inside may not even be aware they're consuming some "real world" around them.

I guess I've just sketched a sci-fi story. I wonder if someone wrote it already.

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Re:Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work? by krallja on Friday January 20, 2017 @08:14AM (#13443535)

_Accelerando_ by Charles Stross: one of the stories is about a civilization that grew so much in complexity that it couldn't afford the physical cost to leave its system, but its star was being consumed so it couldn't afford to stay either.

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