@cstross there is actually a sort of joke about this in the original Dyson Sphere paper.

The whole paper is tongue-in-cheek, a satire of the notion that we could find aliens by observing for radio frequencies (Dyson is making the argument that we know so little about potential alien intelligence that we might as well take all of that processing power and scan the infrared frequencies instead looking for invisible spheres around stars).

Why spheres around stars? Because clearly the only cultures to develop the technology to become space-faring would be their species version of the Nazis and would be compelled with a desire to maximize land for their progeny.

@mark @cstross The "problem" with Dyson's paper is that he tried to ridicule a perfectly reasonable scientific theory with a supposedly ridiculous scientific theory that ended up being also a perfectly reasonable scientific theory.

Both of these theories would be used for perfectly reasonable scientific experiments, which remain ongoing.

Sometimes this is how things go with science. The "big bang" theory was named by someone ridiculing the theory. Oops?

@isaackuo @cstross The problem is that both theories are equally likely.

... Dyson was trying to make the larger point of "... and that likelihood is so low we should stop wasting time on this" but the astronomy community responded with "But what if instead we consider both options?"

Honestly, it's one of my favorite self-owns in astronomy history. 😉

If memory serves, there's also a story about Einstein thinking black holes were unlikely because he'd made some solid progress on relativity with the thought-tool of "If this were possible, wouldn't we have seen it already?" Since nobody had noticed holes in space yet, he originally discounted gravitational singularities as a neat quirk of the math that was unlikely to be real.

... I think he lived long enough to bear witness to their discovery and changed his mind in light of new evidence.

(I think Dyson may also have discounted the secondary effect / "scientific head-fake": even if finding aliens is improbable, staring really hard at radio signals or infrared sources could lead to finding other cool stuff, so it's still worth doing. If the way we get there is "get folks hyped enough about ET to throw money at us," whatever works!)