Random Thought About Why Stars are a Bad Thing to Live Near

I just realized that most science fiction stories and ideas about super-advanced civilizations have it completely wrong in focusing on stars and solar systems.

For example, the “Dyson Sphere” is hypothetical hollow shell built entirely around a star, capturing its entire energy output and harnessing it to run a society of incredible size. Another idea, the Kardashev Scale, defines three levels of civilization: Type I uses the energy available on one planet, Type II uses the energy output of a whole star (e.g. by using a Dyson sphere), and Type III uses the entire energy output of a galaxy.

But if you think about it, the Kardashev Scale makes about as much sense as the Kardashian Scale (which defines Type Kim, Khloe, and Kourtney civilizations). For heaven’s sake, why would any civilization able to build a ball entirely around a star want to build something that big and expensive around an unstable ongoing nuclear disaster prone to flares and guaranteed to explode within a few billion years? Why would anyone think that a STAR is the most sensible way of generating vast amounts of energy?

Running nuclear reactions in a star and then collecting the energy radiating from it is just plain stupid, given that you, without question, would have the ability to run those same reactions, or better ones, under controlled conditions and collect the energy directly.

Civilizations at that level must surely be thinking long-term, meaning millions or billions of years. Even being near a star, let alone surrounding one, would be far too dangerous, and largely pointless anyway. A sensible civilization would move itself far away from any stars and establish an entirely artificial structure in deep space, where it’s safe.

We only think of harnessing stars because we live next to one and enjoy it when we swing around to see it each morning. Living in the pitch black of deep space seems very bleak, right? But that’s not what it would be like at all, for a civilization advanced enough to pull it off. Instead of arbitrary amounts of light all coming from one place (and including all sorts of undesirable UV and X-ray energy that you have to shield against), you would have as much or as little light as you want, wherever you want it. The world, or worlds, or non-worlds you live on could be any size you like, in any sort of crazy arrangement you like, not limited to being in annoyingly different orbits around a crazy fireball gravity sink.

We’re spending a lot of time and effort finding habitable planets in orbit around stars, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Maybe we’ll need one some day, or maybe we’ll find a rudimentary civilization like ours. But mark my words, we’re not going to find any really advances beings there. Those guys will be out on their own, not anywhere near where we’re looking.

How would we find such civilizations? Could be tricky, since there’s no particular reason they would be emitting any appreciable amount of energy except some low-grade heat waste. Maybe they would look like a brown dwarf from the outside? They wouldn’t periodically occlude a host star, or have recognizable chemicals in their planetary atmospheres, because there would be no star or planets. They could be not only in interstellar space, but even in the space between galaxies. They could be anywhere, except in the places we’re looking.