To not eat the sun is to throw away orders of magnitude more resources than anyone has ever thrown away before. Is it percentage-wise “a small fraction of the cosmos?”. Sure. But, (*quickly checks Claude, which wrote up a fermi code snippet before answering, I can share the work if you want to doublecheck yourself), *a two year delay would be… 0.00000004% of the unvierse lost beyond the lightcone horizon, which doesn’t sound like much except that’s 200 galaxies lost.
Why is this horrifying? Are we doing anything with those galaxies right now? What is this talk of “throwing away”, “lost”, etc.?
You speak as if we could be exploiting those galaxies at the extreme edge of the observable universe, like… tomorrow, or next week… if only we don’t carelessly lose them. Like we have these “resources” sitting around, at our disposal, as we speak. But of course nothing remotely like this is true. How long would it even take to reach any of these places? Billions of years, right? So the question is:
“Should we do something that might possibly somehow affect something that ‘we’, in some broad sense (because who even knows whether humanity will be around at the time, or in what form), will be doing several billion years from now, in order to avoid dismantling the Sun?”
Pretty obvious the answer is “duh, of course, this is a no-brainer, yes we should, are you even serious—billions of years, really?—clearly we should”.
I think you’re also maybe just not appreciating how much would change in 10,000 years? Like, there is no single culture that has survived 10,000 years.
You’re the one who’s talking about stuff billions of years from now, so this argument applies literally, like, a million times more to your position than to the one you’re arguing against!
In any case, “let’s not dismantle the Sun until and unless we all agree that it’s a good idea” seems reasonable. If the Amish (and people like me) come around to your view in 10 years, great, that’s when we’ll crank up the star-lifters. If we’re still opposed a million years from now, well, too bad—find another start to dismantle. (In fact, here’s an entire galaxy that probably won’t be missed.)
Why is this horrifying? Are we doing anything with those galaxies right now? What is this talk of “throwing away”, “lost”, etc.?
You speak as if we could be exploiting those galaxies at the extreme edge of the observable universe, like… tomorrow, or next week… if only we don’t carelessly lose them. Like we have these “resources” sitting around, at our disposal, as we speak. But of course nothing remotely like this is true. How long would it even take to reach any of these places? Billions of years, right? So the question is:
“Should we do something that might possibly somehow affect something that ‘we’, in some broad sense (because who even knows whether humanity will be around at the time, or in what form), will be doing several billion years from now, in order to avoid dismantling the Sun?”
Pretty obvious the answer is “duh, of course, this is a no-brainer, yes we should, are you even serious—billions of years, really?—clearly we should”.
You’re the one who’s talking about stuff billions of years from now, so this argument applies literally, like, a million times more to your position than to the one you’re arguing against!
In any case, “let’s not dismantle the Sun until and unless we all agree that it’s a good idea” seems reasonable. If the Amish (and people like me) come around to your view in 10 years, great, that’s when we’ll crank up the star-lifters. If we’re still opposed a million years from now, well, too bad—find another start to dismantle. (In fact, here’s an entire galaxy that probably won’t be missed.)
When personal life expectancy of these same people alive today is something like 1e34 years, billions of years is very little.
I don’t think that this is true.