George Dvorsky

Dismantling Mercury, just to start, will take 2 x 10 joules, or an amount of energy 100 billion times the US annual energy consumption ... [Dvorsky] kinda glosses over that point. And how long until his solar collectors gather that much energy back, and we’re in the black?

At one AU – which is the distance of the orbit of the Earth, the Sun emits 1.4 x 10 J/sec per square meter. That’s 1.4 x 10 J/sec per square kilometer. At one-third efficiency, that’s 4.67 x 10 J/sec for the entire Dyson sphere. That sounds like a lot, right? But here’s the thing – if you work it out, it will take 4.28 x 10 seconds [1.35 sextillion years] for the solar collectors to obtain the energy needed to dismantle Mercury. That’s about 120 trillion years.

Dvorsky, along with Milan M. Ćirković and Robert Bradbury, published a critique of SETI in the May 2012 Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (JBIS) arguing that SETI techniques and practices have become outdated. In its place, Dvorsky, Ćirković, and Bradbury advocated for what they called Dysonian SETI, namely the search for those signatures and artefacts indicative of highly advanced extraterrestrial life.

Dvorsky gained some notoriety in 2012 after writing about Dyson spheres, hypothetical structures intended to collect the entire energetic output of a star with solar power collectors. While Dvorsky presented it as a solution to humanity's resource needs including power and living space, Forbes blogger Alex Knapp and astronomer Phil Plait, among others, have criticized Dvorsky's article.

Dvorsky also presented an argument warning of the decline of democratic values and institutions in the face of existential and catastrophic risks at the Global Catastrophic Risks: Building a Resilient Civilization conference in November 2008.

Dvorsky presented an argument for non-human animal biological uplift at the IEET Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights conference at Stanford University in May 2006; and wrote the first published article in defence of the Ashley Treatment in November 2006, and subsequently the only bioethicist cited by Ashley X's parents in their defense.

George P. Dvorsky (born May 11, 1970) is a Canadian bioethicist, transhumanist and futurist. He is a contributing editor at io9 and producer of the Sentient Developments blog and podcast. He was Chair of the Board for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) and is the founder and chair of the IEET's Rights of Non-Human Persons Program, a group that is working to secure human-equivalent rights and protections for highly sapient animals. He also serves on the Advisory Council of METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence).