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They always tell me it's best to speak from the heart - so what's your speciality?
 
Good idea short of I am a physical scientist.

Exotic propulsion technologies.
Quantised inertia hypothesis.
VLBI imaging of black holes.
Gravitational wave detection as a technique for astronomical observation.
Implications of the Frauchiger-Renner paradox in QM.
AI methods for proving mathematical theorems.
Programmable materials.
Graphene.
Latest prospects for building a space elevator.
Exploiting the Sabre engine.
Defeating adversarial attacks on AI systems.
 
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I suppose the elephant in the room would be M87 and black holes.
Another idea could be exoplanets, always a good one for sci-fi fans.
Current theories on wormholes and warp speed?
Good ideas, thanks.
Thinking about Dyson sphere due to "Relics"
 
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Good ideas, thanks.
Thinking about Dyson sphere due to "Relics"
If there were any Dyson spheres near us, would we already have detected them by their IR emission as proposed by Dyson? Also, the Dyson sphere in Relics was not as Dyson originally envisaged it. His sphere was an enveloping swarm of solar power collectors rather than a solid shell.
 
Good ideas, thanks.
Thinking about Dyson sphere due to "Relics"

That could be pretty cool. Kurzgesagt recently did a video on how to build a Dyson sphere which you could shamelessly rip off (ahem - embrace and extend) for your talk! (it's a good video either way!) :angel:

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If there were any Dyson spheres near us, would we already have detected them by their IR emission as proposed by Dyson? Also, the Dyson sphere in Relics was not as Dyson originally envisaged it. His sphere was an enveloping swarm of solar power collectors rather than a solid shell.

Doesn't mean we couldn't build one. If others have, they may just be too far away for us to detect, or hidden behind something else. It's also possible to hide a Dyson sphere to a certain extent - while the laws of thermodynamics say you'll need to emit radiation, it doesn't necessarily need to be produced from the whole sphere, you could emit it from small areas as 'beams' (which would spread, but would be much less obvious), or even aim the excess energy in to a black hole.
 
Doesn't mean we couldn't build one. If others have, they may just be too far away for us to detect, or hidden behind something else. It's also possible to hide a Dyson sphere to a certain extent - while the laws of thermodynamics say you'll need to emit radiation, it doesn't necessarily need to be produced from the whole sphere, you could emit it from small areas as 'beams' (which would spread, but would be much less obvious), or even aim the excess energy in to a black hole.
It'd be a bit worrying if we found Dyson swarms being operated in stealth mode. From whom are the aliens concealing themselves?
 
Or from us if they're close enough to have watched our recent TV broadcasts about The Kardashians.

A black hole bomb is one use only though. Feeding in matter to power axial radiation jets would be more effective tactically, except that changing the angular momentum vector to point the thing would be bloody difficult.

Returning to conventional Dyson swarms, if there is surplus energy available, it might be feasible to drain hydrogen off the central star to make it last many billions of years longer (luminosity is proportional to star mass to the power -2.5 approximately over much of the Main Sequence). The swarm wouldn't need to be as large either. If the mass is reduced to that of a red dwarf, the whole star becomes convective including its core and its lifespan can be several trillion years. The hydrogen extracted could be used to make a new star, perhaps by adding it to an existing gas giant planet.
 
You may not need something as big as a dyson sphere
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2013/08/statites-close-to-sun.html

The concept of the shipstar is interesting.

In terms of talks, this type of technology is something that could be tested in a lab:
https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/metamaterial-solves-complex-equations-at-the-speed-of-light

So help me, those shapes remind me of fingerprints, or the surface of a brain.

Scale that up to the huge statites, and maybe you don't just have a sun that powers--but one that thinks?

That would be a new one for Tabby's Star, now wouldn't it?

“This structure was calculated through a computational process known as inverse design, which can be used to find shapes that no human would think of trying,”

Now, we have computers that can do paintings:
https://www.latimes.com/entertainme...mbrandt-painting-computer-20160407-story.html

I want to see someone feed starship blueprints of say--the Refit Enterprise and the Excelsior--and have a computer draw us a hybrid, maybe using inverse design, deep dreaming, etc.
 
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