David Kipping

But if we had the ability to detect those higher elevated activity cycles in advance,

The problem is they travel obviously pretty fast, and so it's hard to get ahead of them.

But you could have a station which is basically sampling solar flares very close to the surface of the Earth, and as soon as it detects anything suspicious magnetically, it could then send that information straight back at the speed of light to your Earth and give you maybe a half an hour warning or something that something bad was coming.

You should shut off all your systems or get in your Faraday cage now and protect yourself.

And so these quasites are kind of a cool trick of, again, kind of hacking the laws of physics.

It's like another one of these exploits that the universe seems to allow us to do to potentially manifest these artificial systems that would otherwise be difficult to produce.

So leveraging natural phenomena.

Yeah.

That's always the key.

In my mind, it's to work with nature.

That's how I see astroengineering, rather than against it.

You're not trying to force it to do something.

That's why I always think solar energy is so powerful, because in the battle against nuclear fusion, you're really fighting a battle where you're trying to confine plasma into this extremely tight space.

The Sun does this for free.

It has gravitation.

And so

That's in essence what a solar panel does.

It is a nuclear fusion reactor-fueled energy system, but it's just using gravitation for the confinement and having a huge standoff distance for its energy collection.

And so there are tricks like that, it's a very naive, simple trick in that case, where rather than having to reinvent the wheel, we can use the space infrastructure, if you like, the astrophysical infrastructure that's already there to our benefit.

Yeah, it's depressing to think about AI in the search for life because I've been thinking about it a lot over the last few weeks with playing around with chat GPT-3 like many of us and being astonished with its capabilities.