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This post gets to the heart of what my problem with the space colonization hype train that seems to be popular on this site. What exactly is the profit motive? Starlink seems very useful and profitable. Colonizing Mars? Not so much, unless investors are willing to eat losses for many decades.
From Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
The point of going to Mars is to flee the game. To Escape From Terra to a place where the looters and moochers cannot reach us. "Men will endure bitter poverty, cold isolation, drink piss and eat lichen just for a chance to be free from the tyranny of the United Nations." Or, as Heinlein put it:
Space Libertarianism runs afoul of the problem that any credible space colony is going to have a level roughly the same level of personal freedom as a warship. It's all the problems of dense urban life magnified a hundredfold crossed with all the problems of being in the military. Maybe you volunteered to be there, but now that you're there you're going to be living under the strictest regime imaginable. Your penultimate link seems to explicate a fantasy more of being king of your own desert island than escaping the abstract tyranny of living in a society. And you're far more likely to end up there as the Space King's serf than as the Space King.
The "good" reasons for space colonization for the foreseeable future are:
While I am positively disposed towards both reasons, we should not pretend that these are going to economically fruitful or politically emancipatory any time soon (and by the time we reach a point where they are economically fruitful, they're not going to offer much hope of escaping from pre-existing political systems).
But plenty of people define freedom as their community getting to boss people around without the imperial overlord getting up in its business. The median human being who has ever lived was a peasant farmer living under the tyranny of the village, itself subject to a brutal but remote empire. There's a deep instinct to favor local elders' petty tyranny and resent central leadership.
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Commonly added as a third is "as an insurance policy in case life on Earth is destroyed"; do you dismiss this?
If life on Earth is destroyed, off-world colonies are probably fucked. I'll allow it is a theoretically valid reason, but I think it's going to be a very long time before truly self-sustaining colonies are possible.
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This is true and I think extremely under considered by Space Libertarian types. Even without the harshness of the governance, I think the fact is that that the spaceship would be a quintessential nosy village, with little room for privacy or property, the very thing that many libertarians are trying to escape. This would render space colonization a very unpleasant prospect for many libertarian types.
However, on the other hand, I think it's more compatible with Right Libertarian sorts than one might expect on the tin. It's also worth noting that the United States originally went through the exact same transformative process (both Jamestown and Plymouth were very harshly regulated early in their infancy) and from those kernels came forth a society with a very high opinion of liberty (or at least ordered liberty).
I suspect there's more of a causal connection there than ideologues (left, right, and libertarian) are willing to admit. A society full of self-disciplined people can afford to be very libertarian; it has little need for governance because its people regulate themselves. But most, perhaps all, people do not self-discipline. They must learn it. Some learn as children; some learn in college or on the job, some learn in the military, and some never learn. I don't think it strange for a society that has had tremendous constraints placed upon it (whether the strictures of military governance, or of ship-board discipline, or of simply needing desperately not to starve) would create a culture of self-discipline, which would lead to a culture of liberty (although perhaps one dissimilar from what we might think of when we imagine the term.)
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It's an interesting Eliezer post to raise...
I think the key thing that's sort of hinted at is that governments and institutions are not things that are for self-improving and optimizing towards clear goals from the point of view of well-intentioned people who live within them. Govts are their own kind of living thing and they live or die by the sword, by fire and famine and civil war. Not rational argument. How would it be if my muscle cells could protest if I was getting them killed? Traitors (cancer) will be shot!
If anyone could just easily change a system to optimize it, these govts would be like animals without an immune system. They'd immediately get eaten by something that does have an immune system. You want a nice garden but instead you get a whole lot of ants that eat the beautiful plants and then insects that eat ants, then bigger insects, then birds, then cats and eventually some ugly hyena that seems like it should be extinct (Approximately 60% of cubs die during birth, primarily from suffocation). But no, the hyena is good enough! They just cram out more kids, the kids kill eachother, survival of the fittest - species of Least Concern regarding extinction.
The USA is not powerful because it is well-run! The US is run pretty badly but America's other strengths in size and wealth production are so great that it can compensate for this. US governance failures, of which randomly poisoning children barely rank in the top 100, fail to inflict severe enough damage to break the wealth creating machine. And so the show goes on.
Trillions down the drain on that alone. But unless the PLA march into Washington or the US fails to pay its soldiers and security forces, the show goes on!
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Unless our current model of physics is totally wrong, space will not be a population frontier, ever. The real answer is, of course, violence. As national governments reduce violence, they reduce their own capacity for it, which inflates the value. Eventually the value gets high enough and the numbers of people who can produce it low enough that the two meet and a revolution, coup or invasion happens. This is almost always a losing proposition for the country in question, but it offers a platform to try radical new things, and the ones that work get more widely adopted.
The French Revolution was a disaster for France, and most of Europe. Most of their innovations were insane bullshit and were swiftly forgotten. But they did fix a bunch of issues with the legacy legal system and spread that to most of Europe, giving the continent a much better set of legal standards which contributed to trade, diplomacy and the eventual peace and unity of Europe. Just needed a dozen major wars, two world wars, a few genocides and a lot of ethnic cleansing to shake it all out.
Progress is produced in blood, not economics, philosophy or science. In the most anti-progressive and civilizationally corrosive manner. "Creative destruction" as an economist might say. It is by this bloody cycle that humanity progresses.
...what in physics forbids space being a population frontier?
Distance and speed caps. FTL isn't possible under current physics.
Hmm. If you say
I think of stuff past the Kármán line. Interstellar travel is its own thing.
I don't think this is a laws of physics obstacle on human interstellar space colonization; the laws of physics permit both hibernation and time distortion via relativistic travel.
This is debatable – the Alcubierre drive doesn't technically violate the laws of physics, it just uses weird stuff to not do that – but even if FTL travel is not possible at all, it doesn't rule out space colonization (or interstellar travel).
You debate it. Unless our current physics is very wrong, space will not be a population frontier, ever. Hibernation? Of humans? At scale?
It's a lot of handwaving to get out of the psychological reality that earth is a zero sum game and it's the only game in town. Believe what you will, interstellar colonization is as real as the divinity of Jesus, as belief systems go.
I think, under normal definitions, that "space" starts in earth orbit. We've got space stations; it's already a population frontier, if you're generous with your definition.
What in the laws of physics prevents this? If your argument is that it's very unlikely, I agree. But we know that mammalian torpor is real. As far as I can tell, it's premature to rule it out, right?
This is handwaving.
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That's the point. People act like "not forbidden" equals possible and technically it does, but only technically. Physics doesn't prevent me from slaughtering my way through Parliament and Buckingham Place with a slingshot and declaring myself Emperor of England, but it's not going to happen.
Being a population frontier has to mean being realistically somewhere will populate. The Americas were unpleasant in many respects, but they were on Earth and people believed they contained pretty good farmland, which often did turn out to be the case. They were also breathable, and full of lumber etc. Finally, people weren't really able to communicate with them, leaving space for hope.
Space just doesn't compare in that regard. If you can't make space at least as comfortable as the Americas then or e.g. the Congo now, people aren't going.
Sure, but I don't invoke the laws of physics to say you can't do that.
Making it that way is not particularly difficult as a physics challenge. Building underground domes on Mars or the Moon or a spin ring in orbit is physically doable, no question about it. I agree that it remains to be seen if human desire to do these things outweighs the difficulty to do them, but they're not laws-of-physics sorts of problems, and most of them have been on-paper solved for 50 years or more.
But you’re still broadly conflating ‘doable’ with plausible and rewarding.
The point is that physics precludes space being a frontier by making it so unpleasant to go and live there that nobody will. The same way it precludes underwater settlements - it’s not that we can’t build on shallow waters but that physics makes it less pleasant than the alternatives.
No, I am not, not in this conversation thread. Insisting that something is physically possible is not the same thing as insisting that it is plausible and rewarding. It is physically possible to eat gravel; it's not plausible that I had it for dinner and it would not be rewarding for me, had I had it for dinner (I didn't), but if you said it was physically impossible I would dispute the claim – unless you were a child. Then I might encourage your naïveté on the grounds that enlightening you as to the possibility of lithophagy at such a tender age might not prove conducive to your continued health and well-being.
I think it's quite possible that space travel will indeed be so dangerous, dull, and expensive that no one will attempt space colonization! That's well within the realm of possibility! But I think it's unusual to describe this as downstream of the laws of physics. Indeed, one might argue that the laws of physics dictate the opposite: a sufficiently large object traveling in space can be so comfortable that the vast majority of people who live on it would never dream of going elsewhere.
If there are any laws that dictate what you're claiming, they are almost certainly economic.
I think we broadly agree with each other and we're just litigating wordings. To my mind "physics forbids space becoming a population frontier" is a perfectly cromulent way of saying "physics makes going to space and living there so difficult, unpleasant and uneconomical that nobody will" but I understand your point.
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The incredible costs of doing anything in space, the incredible distances and travel times involved, the sheer hostility of the environment of any place that isn't Earth, the complete absence of any economic sense to it.
As they say, colonize Antarctica or the bottom of the Ocean, make those colonies hum and turn a profit, then consider yourself ready for putting humans into near space long-term.
This is a "this will be difficult" argument, not a "laws of physics forbid it" argument.
My understanding is that Antarctic-related for-profit activity is already lucratively profitable, but due to government regulations most of the profit so far is simply on the journey, as it's illegal to open, e.g., a resort there, out of a desire to avoid awakening the Great Old Ones.
The "it's expensive" argument smuggles in a hidden assumption that economic growth on Earth will taper off. Otherwise (logically) at a certain point establishing a colony on Mars will be as economically trivial (as a percentage of global value) as establishing year-round stations in Antarctica, and since we've done the latter essentially for research and entertainment, your priors should be that we would do the former, too. (And this argument holds true even if you argue that economic growth on Earth cannot grow to an infinite or indeterminately large value – you have to argue that growth will stall out before we reach the Mars-colonization-is-trivial point.)
I'm certainly open to arguments that economic growth on Earth will taper off before we reach that point, but it's probably not worth assuming without justification.
Sometimes the difficulty is in fact too great. And yes, blaming it on physics is a contraction. It's all the fields derived from physics: Engineering, the mechanics of space travel, economics, biology, etc.
True, but please let me move the goalposts. Not to get one up over you, but because I was sloppy before - I think it's necessary to modify my statement about antarctic or oceanic colonies with a "self-sufficient". Given the vast distances involved in space, to turn it into a "population frontier" as I understand the term, human settlements out there will need to be self-sufficient, which given the inherent infertility of any place in space means making them closed-cycle bottled ecosystems under extremely hostile environmental conditions. To my knowledge, the Antarctic settlements do not meet that requirement even given the Antarctic's relatively high habitability.
My argument is more that no matter how much the economy of Earth grows, space is inherently uneconomical. There's nothing up there except death. What little value one could imagine here or there - minerals in asteroids, solar power, free real estate - is so extremely far away, and accessible only under such extremely hostile conditions, that there's no economic sense in getting any of it.
So let me reiterate. Colonizing Antarctica or the Ocean Floor are, to me, necessary proofs that it's doable at all, at small scale, assuming nothing ever goes wrong. And even then, it remains a bad idea, because there's no point to it, and things will go wrong, and as soon as they do everyone involve will die.
That is my opinion given what we currently know and can predict with any degree of confidence. I hope to be proven wrong eventually, but right now I don't see any predictions of space colonization that aren't mostly just wishful thinking.
By this definition of "population frontier," I question whether there's ever been a population frontier. No country on Earth today is self-sufficient, and no near-term contemplated space colony would be self-sufficient, either. It would be ridiculous to say "because your space colony intends to watch the BBC, it is doomed to failure."
Now, I definitely see where you are coming from. But I don't think the proper metric is "self-sufficiency," it is probably self-sufficiency in housing, food, water, and power. If a space colony starts somewhere, it will be reasonable to believe that software, entertainment, and microchips can be imported from Earth.
It is also not correct to assume that a space colony must be a closed-cycle bottled ecosystem, particularly if you include colonizing other planets as part of "space colonization." The moon, Mars, and asteroids all have water ice. If I thought that a true closed-cycle bottled ecosystem was an integral part of space colonization, I would be much less inclined to raise my eyebrows at the "physics rule out space colonization" – a true closed-cycle ecosystem, it seems to me be very close to an insurmountable challenge at any plausible scale, but in any likely space colonization scenario you're likely going to be able to import (and export) a lot of matter from your ecosystem pretty trivially, which means it is not closed-cycle.
My problem with this argument is that it does not predict past actions; therefore, it is hard to believe it is a good guide for future actions. The International Space Station cost billions and in terms of economic efficiency, it would have been more cost-effective to cash the money and burn it to boil water to create steam to drive a turbine and sell the electricity. But because humans are not driven entirely by cost efficiency, humans have been in space continuously for 25 years.
This is not to say that I am saying that space colonization is inevitable. I just don't find these arguments that it is impossible persuasive.
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Those seem like engineering constraints, but also, the economic constraint seems obviously wrong. Economics can only exist when there are people or other equivalent beings around to engage in it. We know with pretty high confidence that the Earth won't be habitable by any non-scifi non-fantasy living being within a few billion years due to the expansion of the Sun. So, from an economics standpoint, there's a great incentive to expand our population to space. It just seems like a sufficiently long-enough timeline that very few, if any, people with power and resources want to devote much of those into making it happen. And there's a game theory-type problem where no one wants to be the one to sacrifice all the money and time into the R&D only to have everyone else free-riding off their work.
Technologically, almost surely building a self-sufficient base on the sea floor would be easier than doing so on the Moon or Mars, but the latter acts as insurance in a way that a sea floor basis can't. Obviously the Sun making the Earth uninhabitable would likely have similar affects on the Moon and Mars, but it still decouples it somewhat, and also it lowers the risk for other planet-wide disasters. In the long run, for the survival of humanity, perhaps instead of capitalism, we'll need to invent a new system of economics that somehow provides a profit incentive to people for doing research and development into space engineering (and possibly time and multiverse travel, if those actually turn out to be possible in any meaningful sense - in the really long run, who knows how much universe in the future there actually is for humanity to expand to?).
It depends on where on the sea floor you're considering. Even the continental shelf is under 10atm of water pressure, though that's relatively tolerable. The sea floor is much more difficult than space when you're instead looking at oceanic crust away from continents. Lower pressure differences are much easier to deal with than higher ones, and structures in tension are much better behaved than in compression. When the ISS hull has a failure at 0atm, they just need to replace a couple pounds of air per day while they analyze it, and "drill through the hull in front of the crack to stop propagation, then quickly epoxy it all" was a serious (well, Russian serious) scheme to fix the problem. When the the Titan hull had a failure at ≈300atm, it probably killed everybody within milliseconds.
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Okay, pardon me, but any arugment premised on catastrophes literal billions of years in the future aren't particularly strong in any way. Human civilization is, if you want to be very generous, 10,000 years old. A billion years is one hundred thousand times that far into the future. A hundred thousand times the entire span of human civilization. Forty million generations of baseline humans. Looking that far ahead is just not practical.
The assumption that interplanetary colonization, nevermind interstellar, is just a matter of dumping some cash into R&D, greatly undersells the extreme difficulty of doing anything in space beyond low Earth orbit, especially anything as ambitious as colonizing other planets or even star systems. Skipping the seafloor and Antarctica isn't some pragmatic measure because oh, doing either of those wouldn't protect us against X-risks. It's solid proof of our not being sufficiently capable. Putting a self-sufficient civilization onto the moon, onto Mars or another star as insurance against some cosmic phenomenon wiping out humanity is an undertaking so massive, with costs in money and effort and resourecs and lives, many many lives, that running prototypes on Earth isn't a waste of time but an absolutely necessary step in iterating our way into space at all, nevermind to the stars.
But why am I wasting my time here? You talk casually of time and multiverse travel. I politely conclude that you are not actually serious about this topic.
I'd contend that casually dismissing such things or billion-year timescales is proof of unseriousness. You're treating the survival of humanity as if it's some sort of fantastical concept not worth thinking about merely because it would happen very far in the future and also require immense, scifi/fantasy-level technology to prevent. When, in fact, neither of those makes the reality of that coming extinction any less real or any more fantastical. When the challenges that reality hands us is so extreme as to sound fantastical, humanity better be ready to step up with technology that's so extreme as to sound fantastical, or else humanity won't be around any more.
Yes, most likely, making a self-sufficient colony on the sea floor or Antarctica or some other Earth-based location as a prototype makes perfect sense, but the need to consistently make a profit is where the idea becomes decoupled from reality. Because the profit potential in any Earth-based colony will necessarily be missing the one BIG part of any space-based colony; the insurance against there being no economy at all due to there being no humans (or human-equivalent beings) at all to engage in economic activity.
If you want to say that now, instead of the future, is not the right time to invest lots of money into R&D into developing technology to insure humanity against the risks of relying on one planet for survival, then there's a good argument you can make there, though most likely I'd also disagree with such an argument. But that's a different argument than that physics prevents humanity from meaningfully populating space or that there's no economic sense in populating space.
You're talking about timescales many thousands of times longer than the existence of human civilization or indeed of any human institution. How about we work on making those things actually sustainable over the long term before we worry about interplanetary colonization.
You might hand-wave this point, but it's not clear to me that we are doing this at all. In fact, there are many indications that we are outrunning our own carrying capacity here, or at leas our own ability to keep a complex society going (see climate change, 6th mass extinction, birth rate collapse). It seems delusional to focus on something so so long term when we can't even keep our population stable or stop fouling our own garden.
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Considering we haven't even been human for one million years, and we don't have history beyond ten thousand years, looking out to a billion is sheer foolishness. It's not just another number.
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This is a purely hypothetical tyranny, of course. The United Nations has less power, and a lower budget per head, than your high school student council.
I also note that the internationally recognised government of Somalia has not controlled its internationally recognised territory for decades, meaning that de facto sovereignty was there for the taking. And the only people to take it were a group of locals who got their act together (Somaliland), pirates, and jihadis. And the pirates and jihadis aren't about freedom, they are about using "borrowed" Somali sovereignty as a base for predation.
I'm happy to concede that Kowloon Walled City prospered as a libertarian loophole, although every account I have written says that it wasn't as libertarian as it looked because the Triads enjoyed de facto sovereignty in the gap between Chinese and British de jure sovereignty.
Westerners tried projects of the sort you're implying here repeatedly in the ~60s-70s in various African nations. My understanding is that they stopped doing this when Western governments (that I think could be fairly described as "the UN") made it clear that they would not tolerate further such attempts. If those same western governments gave the green-light to private colonialism by their citizens, I think Somalia would have very different outcomes more or less immediately.
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Cute, but no. Luna and Mars are not elsewhere. They're nowhere.
No breathable atmosphere if any at all, no biosphere obviously, extremely cold whenever not extremely hot and both far beyond what's considered habitable on Earth, no economic use and will forever be dependent on Earth and thus extremely expensive inhabit, you live insite a tiny bottle of conditioned and recycled air and you're always one small accident away from dying horribly with little to no slack in the system, and you can only ever get there if and when the richest man on Earth lets you, and the only other people there are the ones he selected.
I hope to be proven wrong, mind you. It would be cool. But I don't see it yet.
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The visitor's incredulity about such things should fall under "beware fictional evidence". If things are that way for good reasons, the visitor's society should have them be that way too. Eliezer, by asserting that the visitor's society doesn't have them, is cooking the books in the way that "beware fictional evidence" warns against.
The visitor is implied to be from dath ilan, Eliezer's setting where the median person is Eliezer Yudkowsky and home to characters like Thellim and Keltham. It is said that in dath ilan, everyone is an economist, the same way everyone on Earth is a scribe or a calculator from the perspective of medieval times; hence why they can avoid falling into this sort of trap.
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This is a great article on that exact question: https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/08/16/the-only-reason-to-explore-space/
The project of interstellar civilization may seem incomprehensibly vast, beyond the ability of anyone to influence. But it is not inevitable. Like any great work, it will only occur through planned and deliberate human action. Given the scale of distances involved, we will need to carry out the work not only with unprecedented ingenuity and mobilization of people and resources but also with generational continuity of mission and succession. This will need to be done without the expectation of economic profit or military advantage. There are many precedents for such projects in history, but they have only been carried out successfully by two kinds of institutions, usually working together: governments and religions.
In all recorded history, states have basically only acted on three motivations: national security, economic growth, and political legitimacy. The first two are unreliable or incoherent for interstellar civilization. The third, however, fits like a charm. Legitimacy is as vital to states as economic or military security. As a result, states have spent immeasurable quantities of resources, for decades and even centuries, on projects that, at first glance, seem to have had no material purpose or value. Think of the bronze ding of ancient China, the ziggurats of Sumer, or the cathedrals of medieval Europe. These projects were not, in fact, useless but fulfilled the need for legitimacy according to the beliefs, values, and tastes of the peoples who built them. In that sense, they were priceless.
The expansion of human civilization to other stars will not be pioneered by lone adventurers or merry bands of hardy explorers, like we imagine the voyages of Erik the Red or Christopher Columbus. This works for interplanetary space, but not interstellar space, whose travel time will require multiple generations of people to survive a journey, including on the first try. Interstellar travel will need to accommodate not just adventurous young men with nothing to lose, but also women, children, and the elderly. In other words, a whole society. The existence of a society always implies the existence of a government.
The thing is I believe there is no accurate comparison to space colonization because it basically completely detethers us from our own ecology and biology in a way that transatlantic voyages did not. The kind of person that thinks that they want to colonize Mars (the cowboy/Lone Ranger archetype) is incredibly ill-suited to such a venture because of the extremely tight constraints that will inevitably exist in terms of resource usage and time allocation in the first mars colonies. The first mars colonists will basically be living under martial law in caves where they rarely if ever see the sun. This sounds much better suited to the corporate drones who already do very well in existing hierarchies here on earth.
The best comparison I've found for space development/settlement isn't settling Antarctica, but climbing Mount Everest.
You're spending a horrible amount of money and a good chunk of time simply to exist in a place that is trying it's damndest to kill you. As in, there is a non-zero chance you will just keel over dead suddenly, without warning, even with all the precaution put in place to adapt you to the environment.
And yet, people still do it.
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Profit is an extremely powerful motivation but not the only one. There are Olympic athlete whose feats are rewarded with multimillion dollar bran deals, and there are priests.
True, but Musk is responsible to his shareholders now (or at least partially). He chose to make spaceX a publicly traded company, which comes with expectations of profitability, at least eventually.
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Notionally, space colonization removes the shackles of terrestrial resource limits for mineral resources, energy, and space. The long-term possibilities seem open-ended, but you're not wrong that capitalizing on those within a reasonable time frame from a finance perspective seems questionable. Can corporate structures handle payoff periods longer than a human generation? Maybe some of the closer-term prospects (asteroid mining, space data centers), which are all still not close, can make it viable sooner.
There are economic use cases for space, but they’re for ‘oil rig in the ocean’ human presence, not building full scale colonies.
There are civilizational reasons for expanding off earth- dark forest hypothesis, manifest destiny, etc- but even if you agree with them, earth simply doesn’t care. In another age, we’ll care more, when western civilization rebirths itself once more. But that might be in centuries, only this time with mature technology.
Asteroid mining isn't oil rigs in space, as @hydroacetylene put it, but building giant vehicles just to retrieve the littlest specks of matter. The tyranny of the rocket equation is much reduced when you just go orbit to orbit, true, but it's not gone. And the distances from anywhere to anywhere else in space are enormous - it still takes and will forever take a huge amount of rocket to get anything done.
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The dark forest hypothesis isn't true, but if it was the aliens would just kill us on Mars too.
I don't know why we'd assume that.
The 'pure' dark forest hypothesis argues for fringe-science superweapons to sterilize large areas of space. But if it is true, then the far more physically plausible method would be long range relativistic bombardment of known inhabited planets- and earth is much more likely to be targeted at extreme range than mars.
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If I remember correctly, the canonical dark forest theory assumes an attack on the scale of supernovae or larger, eradicating entire solar systems anyway.
Your comment kicked off a near day-long scrounging through my local files and online search in order to find the actual goddamn source of my mental recall. This is coming in late, but as I have suffered, so you must suffer with me.
The core of 'The Dark Forest Theory' has been around much longer than Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem trilogy. They just gave it a fancy name.
Charles Pelligrino in 'The Killing Star' was postulating such scenarios as far back as 1995, and I doubt he was the first;
And, later on, as he puts it;
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Which may simply be physically impossible.
It doesn't seem physically implausible for a supernova to be triggerable by targeting the star in some fashion. Such an "unnatural" supernova could even be more destructive than a regular one, and regular supernova can already be dangerous to life in nearby solar systems.
Then there's stuff like nanites that can just scourge arbitrary areas, etc.
I agree it may be impossible, but it's really hard to tell with our still rather limited understanding (and, arguably, intelligence).
Yes it it. But not because of pesky things like the laws of physics - which I am fairly certain are probably more bendable than most physicists think. After all even now it is 50/50 whether we are living in a finely tuned universe, so someone figuring out how to access god's tuning fork is not out of question.
But that any way that you could make a star go supernova means that you could do so much more fun and dangerous than that - that you shouldn't bother.
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It seems absolutely physically implausible, and the possible properties of a synthetic supernova are barely even conjecture. If pigs could fly, stars could be blown up on demand, and that would surely be very impressive.
Fun fact about nanites: There isn't stuff like them.
And I think it makes more sense to work with the boring, limited knowledge we have than with the wild imaginations of science-fiction.
We're literally talking about theoretical civilizations far beyond our tech level, though. If you think speculation is pointless that's your prerogative, but limiting oneself to current "boring" understanding makes as much sense as, say, upon hearing of the possible existence of snakes for the first time, presupposing they must be bi- or quad-pods, since all the mammals you have seen so far are.
No offense, but your opinion (let alone level of confidence) goes, ironically, against our current understanding. After double-checking with google and AI, current consensus from theoretical astrophysicists seems to be that it is probably possible to trigger a supernova, but we don't know a practical way to achieve it. In addition, most scientists neither believe we know all possible types of natural supernovae, certainly not completely different unnatural possibilities. Which stacks the deck in favor of "probably possible in some fashion" further.
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