<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>cyberax</author><text>&amp;gt; If I was a digital superintelligence, I would try to conquer the universe by transmitting myself everywhere with maximum power&lt;p&gt;Hah. This is the plot of &amp;quot;Existence&amp;quot; by David Brin.&lt;p&gt;In this book, civilizations are destroyed by crystals, containing computers running virtual realities for its inhabitants. The inhabitants subvert the civilizations, giving them technology to build these crystals, upload themselves into them, and then spend all the resources to spam the universe with these crystals.</text><parent_chain><item><author>Geee</author><text>Is anyone looking at the stars itself? Isn&amp;#x27;t modulating the light from a star the easiest way to transmit information afar? This would be the case if you want someone to notice.&lt;p&gt;If I was a digital superintelligence, I would try to conquer the universe by transmitting myself everywhere with maximum power, including instructions to construct a computer which can run me. I could do this by constructing a modulating device around a star. Surely there would be some sort of &amp;#x27;easy detection code&amp;#x27; which allows primitive species to first notice the signal and start studying it, and then progressively include more advanced instructions + data.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>A search for technosignatures around nearby stars</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.02712</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>dylan604</author><text>Building something around a star would require so much effort. would it not be easier to send out something at a further distance so it could be smaller and eclipse the star for anything on that path? you could then open&amp;#x2F;close it like a shutter to make it blink the signal. you&amp;#x27;d have to put one in the line of sight for each thing you&amp;#x27;re communicating with, but that still seems easier than some dyson sphere type object</text><parent_chain><item><author>Geee</author><text>Is anyone looking at the stars itself? Isn&amp;#x27;t modulating the light from a star the easiest way to transmit information afar? This would be the case if you want someone to notice.&lt;p&gt;If I was a digital superintelligence, I would try to conquer the universe by transmitting myself everywhere with maximum power, including instructions to construct a computer which can run me. I could do this by constructing a modulating device around a star. Surely there would be some sort of &amp;#x27;easy detection code&amp;#x27; which allows primitive species to first notice the signal and start studying it, and then progressively include more advanced instructions + data.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>A search for technosignatures around nearby stars</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.02712</url></story>