{"id":28268,"date":"2016-07-25T11:48:01","date_gmt":"2016-07-25T18:48:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/07\/making-jupiter-into-a-star"},"modified":"2017-06-04T14:30:50","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T21:30:50","slug":"making-jupiter-into-a-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/07\/making-jupiter-into-a-star","title":{"rendered":"Making Jupiter into a Star"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Interesting\u2026<\/p>\n

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The SETI concepts now called \u2018Dysonian\u2019 are to my mind some of the most exhilarating ideas in the field. Dysonian SETI gets its name from the \u2018Dyson spheres\u2019 and \u2018Dyson swarms\u2019 analyzed by Freeman Dyson in a 1960 paper. This is a technology that an advanced civilization might use to harvest the energy of its star. You can see how this plays off Nikolai Kardashev\u2019s classification of civilizations; Kardashev suggested that energy use is a way to describe civilizations at the broadest level. A Type II society is one that can use all the energy of its star.<\/p>\n

In the film 2010<\/em>, director Peter Hyams\u2019 1984 adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke\u2019s novel 2010: Odyssey Two<\/em><\/a> (Del Rey, 1982), we see an instance of this kind of technology at work, though it has nothing to do with a Dyson sphere. In the film, a dark patch appearing on Jupiter signals the onset of what Martyn Fogg has called \u2018stellification,\u2019 the conversion of a gas giant into a small star. Rapidly replicating von Neumann machines \u2014 the famous monoliths \u2014 increase Jupiter\u2019s density enroute to triggering nuclear fusion.<\/p>\n

A new star is born, with consequences entertainingly explored in the novel\u2019s epilogue. Without monoliths to work with, Fogg described another way of triggering a gas giant\u2019s fusion reaction in a 1989 paper. A small black hole could be put into orbit around the planet, its orbit gradually sinking toward the planetary center. Accretion will eventually cause the new star to shine like a red dwarf, its brightness steadily increasing over a 50 million year period. Parts of the Jovian satellite system could be rendered continuously habitable over a period of about 100 million years, even as the star-builders exploit its energies via orbiting power stations.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Interesting\u2026 The SETI concepts now called \u2018Dysonian\u2019 are to my mind some of the most exhilarating ideas in the field. Dysonian SETI gets its name from the \u2018Dyson spheres\u2019 and \u2018Dyson swarms\u2019 analyzed by Freeman Dyson in a 1960 paper. This is a technology that an advanced civilization might use to harvest the energy of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":387,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527,1509,873],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life","category-entertainment","category-nuclear-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/387"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28268"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66790,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28268\/revisions\/66790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}