In billions of years, the expansion of the Universe will make the resources and energy of neighboring stars practically inaccessible: in order to provide for itself, a highly developed civilization will have to tow them closer.
Even if some civilization of intelligent beings manages to survive without destroying itself, achieve success and develop to an incredibly high level, sooner or later it will have to face an extremely serious challenge: the expansion of the Universe. In billions of years, the distances between the stars will become so great that they will make flights between them practically impossible, and their resources and energy inaccessible even for a highly developed civilization.
A solution to this seemingly hopeless situation was proposed by University of Chicago professor Dan Hooper, whose article is presented in the arXiv.org online preprint library. The scientist turns to the famous idea of the Dyson sphere - a colossal engineering structure that surrounds a star entirely or almost entirely, allowing all its energy to be used. It is possible that it is these "power plants" that will feed highly developed civilizations - and will help them withstand the expansion of the Universe for some time.
Hooper believes that some of the energy collected by the Dyson sphere can be directed to the movement of the star itself. Many of these stars, "towed" into an artificially created cluster, can be held together, giving sentient beings enough energy for quite a long time. Of course, the scientist does not even consider the question of what forms of energy and how the stars can move in this case (in his words, "it's like asking a caveman how a car drives"). However, he estimated which stars are optimal for such a project - medium-sized: small ones do not provide enough energy, and too large ones burn up their hydrogen reserves too quickly and cannot become suitable long-term energy sources.
Hooper's famous colleague, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, however, is skeptical about this reasoning. According to him, no towing of stars is needed: nature has already created very vast and massive star clusters for us, literally bathing in energy. They are held together by the natural force of gravity, requiring little energy and effort. Gravity will keep them together even when the expansion carries away the neighboring regions of the Universe over huge distances. Civilization will only have to move closer to one of these rich regions.
Sergey Vasiliev
