Comments on: What’s Really Out There?

By: Engineer-Poet

Engineer-Poet — Sat, 05 Feb 2005 09:53:01 +0000

They would certainly fit the description of MACHOs (Massive Compact Halo Objects).

I flashed on an image of a society capable of stellar engineering, which builds Dyson spheres using the material from entire planetary systems and pulls apart brown dwarves when the gas giants start getting skinny. Calculating the gravitational self-energy of a .05 solar mass dwarf requires more calculus than I’m willing to do at the moment, unfortunately; it would be interesting to be able to quantify the time required to perform such a disassembly given a star to power it.

(BTW, the preview function is broken. It neglects to do the translation of line breaks to
tags which is performed by the actual post operation.)

By: Stephen Gordon

Stephen Gordon — Fri, 28 Jan 2005 15:18:42 +0000

This is not a suggestion for a practical use, but could brown dwarves, if abundant enough, answer the dark matter mystery?

By: Phil Bowermaster

Phil Bowermaster — Fri, 28 Jan 2005 08:19:43 +0000

I offer this projection: the first non-trivial human use of brown dwarves will be something that would be considered wild speculation today. Which probably makes it good fodder for this site…

Why, thank you.

As my old Grandpappy used to say, “Why make red dwarves when you can make black holes?” But they may be pretty abundant, too, and (sadly) I don’t have an immediate practical use for black holes outside the obvious wormhole-generation or time-machine stuff.

In one of my science-fiction universes, brown dwarves are the eventual habitat for the human race. It’s a slightly different version of humanity, one that passes through several developmental stages at the species level in a single liftime. So you go from being a fish to an otter to a living balloon to a winged jungle cat to a six-limbed ape to a human being to an enormous walking stick to tree to a crystalline structure, and finally to a plasma being living on a brown dwarf. But I guess that’s a different story.

By: Engineer-Poet

Engineer-Poet — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 12:58:40 +0000

It’s hard to speculate about what we could do with them, because it’s hard to think about what we might actually need most.

Merge a few to get a red dwarf star? (Plenty of those hanging around, why would we run low anytime soon?)

Take one apart for the hydrogen, or for the rocks and ices to make structures or even Earth-like planets? (Mighty deep gravity well to pull stuff out of. Comets are much more convenient.)

Co-orbiting pairs near convenient star systems, to accelerate and brake interstellar slow-boats? (Hard to think that we wouldn’t have better transport technology before we got the ability to create co-orbiting brown dwarves.)

I offer this projection: the first non-trivial human use of brown dwarves will be something that would be considered wild speculation today. Which probably makes it good fodder for this site…