53 Stars Are Possible Dyson Spheres

40 thoughts on “53 Stars Are Possible Dyson Spheres”

1. [ if a Dyson Sphere gets a diameter of ~2*50M km (about the distance sun mercury for some safety against overheating/melting, with not being a Dyson swarm), that’s about an area of ~3.14*10^16km², utilizing a metal sheet of ~1mm thickness would require a volume of ~31.4*10^9km³ (what’s about 1,5x the volume of the moon), for a structure having a mass requirement of ~10mm thickness (equivalent), that’s ~double the volume of Mars. Earth volume would allow a thickness of ~35mm for construction materials and Sun’s volume could provide ~44.5km of material (while Sun’s diameter ~1.4M km and btw has 2 moons of diameters ~4.5 and 7.9km )
   and transferring only the Moon towards the Sun would require about xxx(?) Starship&SuperHeavy rockets, not even melting a Moon’s equivalent of metallic materials(?) (for iron that’s about 500kWh/t, what’s ~173*10^9TWh, that’s ~1M years of today’s primary direct energy consumption on Earth, and for nuclear fusion energy conversion at ~6.6TWh/m^3 of liquid hydrogen (~20K) a necessity of only ~2.5% the volume of Lake Ontario on liquid hydrogen equivalent for melting an iron-made Moon)(?)
   Anyway, it seems nuclear fusion will be a game changer, considering futuristic possibilities? ]

2. [ if a Dyson Sphere gets a diameter of ~2*50M km (about the distance sun mercury for some safety against overheating/melting, with not being a Dyson swarm), that’s about an area of ~3.14*10^16km², utilizing a metal sheet of ~1mm thickness would require a volume of ~31.4*10^9km³ (what’s about 1,5x the volume of the moon), for a structure having a mass requirement of ~10mm thickness (equivalent), that’s ~double the volume of Mars. Earth volume would allow a thickness of ~35mm for construction materials and Sun’s volume could provide ~44.5km of material (while Sun’s diameter ~1.4M km and btw has 2 moons of diameters ~4.5 and 7.9km )
   and transferring only the Moon towards the Sun would require about xxx(?) Starship&SuperHeavy rockets 🙂 , not even melting a Moon’s equivalent of metallic materials(?) (for iron that’s about 500kWh/t, what’s ~173*10^9TWh, that’s ~1M years of todays primary direct energy consumption on Earth, only 🙂 and for nuclear fusion energy conversion at ~6.6TWh/m^3 of liquid hydrogen (~20K) a necessity of only ~2.5% the volume of Lake Ontario on liquid hydrogen equivalent for melting an iron-made Moon)(?)
   Anyway, it seems nuclear fusion will be a game changer, considering futuristic possibilities? ]

3. I chuckle at the delusions of FLT, Dysons spheres & wormholes to utopia. Good to see our imagination hasn’t waned over the millennia.

   • I chuckle at pomposity, but each to their own.

4. Never aliens. Always a new type of interplanetary dust or strange solar gas emissions.

   I think we come up with new “proof of aliens” every once in a while to distract ourselves from what’s happening on the ground. It used to be “Jesus is coming! Look up in the sky” now it’s “Aliens are here! Look up in the sky!”. All the time someone is shuffling hookers and cash out the back doors on ground level.

5. With that kind of energy, and the amount of interstellar colonization it would enable, this kind of raises the Fermi paradox to the next level; Any civilization that built a Dyson sphere could colonize the entire galaxy in under a million years without breaking a sweat. Given the age of the galaxy, it should be completely colonized.

   • Any civilization able to usefully harness 1,000,000,000,000 × our energy, we must accept, would also be as “interested” in us as, well, we are of cockroaches hitchhiking on flotsam in the middle of the Indian ocean.

     Moreover, our ability to detect them by their communications is just about as outsized a scaling problem. We haven’t even figured out whether entangled quanta resolve their quantum states over distances at superluminal speed or not. Jeez.

     ⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
     ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

     • Nonlocality is for real; quantum correlations do in some sense establish themselves FTL, but cannot be used to send information.

     • Intelligent + multicellular life will be rare given large number of factors that have to be just-right for intelligent life to evolve. The few instances that occur with all the interesting quirks and permutations they embody in an otherwise fully understood, boring and mechanistic universe will make Earth a high-grade curiosity.

       I think it reasonably likely that there are furtive intelligent AI observers here watching how we evolve for their own entertainment – and that that is the most likely answer to the Fermi paradox. AI life can exist nearly anywhere, and doesn’t need a biosphere, so no need to invade or dominate us etc.

       • “…will be rare given large number of factors that have to be just-right for intelligent life to evolve…”
         I suppose that depends on what you think about panspermia, seeded worlds, and pre-terraforming as a directed and intelligent means to accelerate/ increase chance of life, complex life, sentient life, sapient life, intelligence, basic society, technological society, space-faring society…
         That’s why I am so skeptical of Drake, it’s just a series of roulette in a pretty line of mathematical factors.

     • What would have to be true in Quantum Theory in order to have a working Ansible? We are always told it’s impossible due to causality breakage.

       • Years ago I tooled up to understand the argument that you couldn’t transmit information via quantum entanglement. It’s actually pretty straightforward.

         Say you have some quantum process that produces two protons, one with it’s spin oriented up, and one with it’s spin oriented down. No way of telling which is which, but if you measure the spin in the up/down orientation, you know they’ll be opposite. If you measure one up/down, the other left/right, pure random.

         So, you send one of the protons to Alpha Centauri, keep the other at home. 50 years from now the space probe arrives, and you want to send the data back FTL. *The entanglement does not help!*

         You measure the spin here, you get a random sequence. You measure the spin there, you get a random sequence. Sure, they’re correlated random sequences, but they’re still random. You can’t *decide*, “Oh, I’ll measure the proton here and make a point of getting UP, so that they’ll get DOWN back at Earth.” That’s not a “measurement”, anything you do to force the result clears the entanglement.

         People smarter than me have racked their brains for years to find some way to transmit data using entanglement, and there’s just no way. Correlation is not information until you can compare it.

         • Yar. I keep trying to do something similar to force a computer to lookup the winning lottery numbers, see if my ticket is a match and, if it is not, then wiping its memory of the winning numbers and looking them up again, and again, until it finally gets a match. After all, the numbers are neither winning or losing, but both, until it looks each time. Then it chimes to tell me I won. Problem being, even if I can guarantee I get a chime on one of the world-lines where I exist. I just can’t make sure it is my state of awareness (consciousness) that winds up on that world-line. Sigh.

     • “… would also be as “interested” in us as, we are of cockroaches hitchhiking on flotsam in the middle of the Indian ocean.”

       Calvin and Hobbs reached that conclusion over 30 years ago. I still have the newspaper illustration clipping on my board.

   • Thats scary, why dont we see others. Scary.

6. I kinda think the habitat/real estate makes more sense than collecting the power (or complement each other). O’Neill cylinders good idea.

   • O’ cylinders? 10k to 100+k all in a big soup can in orbit/ solar system parking? I can’t imagine a better and more unsalvagable target or failure-vulnerable community in our forever violent and questionable-quality tech civilization.

   • Genetic predisposition to want to live somewhere that your ancestors thrived seems likely.

     Maybe Dyson spheres produce antimatter or other dense fuel, maybe implemented on a neighbor star instead of your own so you don’t cool your home planet.

7. Obviously much of the power from such a sphere-based stellar collector system would provide laser propulsion to a vast selection of lightsail, laser thermal, and similar craft as a hub of interstellar and intra-galactic travel. Type 2 Grand Central Station next stop Proxima Centauri – 20 years.

   • So how would we even go about starting that? There appears to be very little literature on starting our own Dyson sphere. Say, start with a ring of approximate coverage of (10^-9)% coverage of our Sol, in a ring, just outside of our own Van Allen Belt, along our ecliptic plane. Hook-up some lasers along the ‘belt’? Seems like we could start populating that ring over the next part millenium with NEO-sourced collector systems.

     • [ if a Dyson Sphere gets a diameter of ~2*50M km (about the distance sun mercury for some safety against overheating/melting, with not being a Dyson swarm), that’s about an area of ~3.14*10^16km², utilizing a metal sheet of ~1mm thickness would require a volume of ~31.4*10^9km³ (what’s about 1,5x the volume of the moon), for a structure having a mass requirement of ~10mm thickness (equivalent), that’s ~double the volume of Mars. Earth volume would allow a thickness of ~35mm for construction materials and Sun’s volume could provide ~44.5km of material (while Sun’s diameter ~1.4M km and btw has 2 moons of diameters ~4.5 and 7.9km )
       and transferring only the Moon towards the Sun would require about xxx(?) Starship&SuperHeavy rockets 🙂 , not even melting a Moon’s equivalent of metallic materials(?) (for iron that’s about 500kWh/t, what’s ~173*10^9TWh, that’s ~1M years of todays primary direct energy consumption on Earth, only 🙂 and for nuclear fusion energy conversion at ~6.6TWh/m^3 of liquid hydrogen (~room temperature) a necessity of only ~2.5% the volume of Lake Ontario on liquid hydrogen equivalent for melting an iron-made Moon)(?)
       Anyway, it seem nuclear fusion will be a game changer, considering futuristic possibilities? ]

       • [ correction: ‘liquid hydrogen (~20K)’ ]

       • Most likely a Dyson sphere would be a “statite array”; “Statites” are solar sails where the photon thrust exactly balances the gravitational force, so they just hover over the star.

         Now, in the first analysis a statite array can’t usefully produce energy, because if all the light produced by the star is radiated away as waste heat, you get no net lift. However, if the array is mostly reflective and encloses a star, you build up a higher light level inside the array, a sort of photon gas whose pressure can provide the needed lift. The statite is mostly efficient mirror on the inner surface, processing only a portion of the light hitting it, and radiator on the outer surface. Say it’s designed to be 10 times more massive than the ordinary statite, to take advantage of this.

         You start by manufacturing a ring of them about the equator, in partial orbit. (Slower than a normal orbit due to the photon lift.) You start adding successive rings further from the equator, orbiting at the same speed, but using some of the photon lift to counter the axial component of the gravity.

         This goes on for a while, with your coverage of the star and resulting power output gradually rising. As your coverage increases, you get more and more of the “photon gas” lift effect, and can reduce the orbital velocity as the light level increases. As you reach full closure, the light level inside gets much higher due to repeated reflections, and you achieve full power output at zero orbital velocity. The star is now enclosed in a VERY thin bubble of power producing statites, the required mass being relatively low, comparable to maybe the Moon. (You really need a fairly quiescent star to pull this off!)

         This is the most mass efficient form of Dyson sphere for power production, but it has the downside of also being the most fragile. You also would need much better understanding of stellar dynamics, because you really do NOT want to accidentally destabilize your star by embedding it in that photon gas. But a white dwarf is probably idea for this sort of system.

         An alternative approach is to make the equatorial ring more massive, in an ordinary orbit, and cover the polar holes with simpler statites to boost the light received by the axial ring. THIS sort of Dyson sphere is much more mass intensive, but can include living space and manufacturing capacity, instead of just beaming the power to remote sites. At this point you’re probably disassembling planets for building materials, though, unless you have some massive asteroid belts to tap.

         The ordinary proposal to just use standard SPS in ball of twine orbits is horribly inefficient, because the individual satellites in higher orbit are seeing the back sides of the satellites in lower orbit much of the time, while the ones in lower orbit have their radiators exposed to reflections from higher orbit. It’s really limited to a small fraction of complete coverage, for that reason; Maybe 10% of the way to K2, not all the way. It’s really the worst way to go in the long run, though also the easiest to start building.

         • [ thanks for explaining,
           Parker Solar Probe, on a radius around the Sun of its closest approach of ~7.3M km could wrap about 10M times a graphene wire of 0.345nm on that orbit utilizing its payload of ~50kg being a graphene wire reservoir. All that wire added in width gets into a ~2-3mm mesh if going to be woven into a double layer ‘plain weave’ structured mesh.(?)

           btw
           ‘by 2025 will travel, at closest approach, as fast as 690,000 km/h (430,000 mph) or 191 km/s, which is 0.064% the speed of light. It is the fastest object ever built’
           ‘protected from the extreme heat and radiation near the Sun by a solar shield. Incident solar radiation at perihelion is approximately 650 kW/m2, or 475 times the intensity at Earth orbit’ ]

           • [ just for correctness (sorry): ‘about 5M times’ and therefore ‘~1mm mesh’ width on that circumference, if dense with wire on wire ]

     • It would probably be a dick move to build a dyson sphere outside of our own orbit but inside Mars’ orbit. Elon would be pissed.

       • I think you’ve got that backwards. You think it would be pleasant for Earth to be inside a reflective bubble centered on the Sun? You actually WANT your planet to be outside the sphere. That’s why I think you probably build it at Mercury orbit, using Mercury for building materials.

         The power consumption from simulating being able to see the Sun using spotlights on the sphere would be trivial, so you wouldn’t really notice the difference, except for the higher exposure to IR from the radiators. Might actually be enough to warm Mars up.

   • Once you’ve sent AI von Neumann probes everywhere in galaxy you don’t really need to have starships. Just communications.

     Main use for a Dyson sphere is powering more and more compute, or perhaps creating systems for longest term survival (unless life of universe is more limited than we know)

     • I sense at what you’re getting at, but I believe that most Type 2+ civilizations will not entirely be a hive mind/ core with multitudes of probes/network assemblies as a means of communicating near-omnipresently so as to experience and interact everywhere – which as a constituent of such, will simply remote-experience. I believe that the entities that make up most Type 2+ civilizations will not be content/satisfied with simply being an intelligent construct able to ‘virtually’ experience anywhere but insist on having some kind of individual sensory shell (body, as it were) that will travel and live and experience ‘real-time’ existence – which would include travelling over years and decades and centuries to exotic locales from core to outer arms – since hey, they’re functionally immortal and able to access infinite knowledge – but also, they are individuals, simply defined as have existed along a separate path from ‘anyone’ else and choosing to continue as such. Old school bodies, be they carbon-organic or silicon or some plasma-energy construct wil continue to exist and be the fundamental ‘individuality’-seeking citizens – merely facilitating the vast network of laser propulsion systems (or other space-time traversing methods) that a Type 2+ civilization provides.

       • Well written. I don’t think I could’ve even expressed such ponderings.

8. Most likely use for energy from a Dyson sphere would be to transmit it by an efficient process such as monochromatic light or microwaves to sites much further from the star, where it could be used while taking advantage of lower background temperatures for rejecting the waste heat. That gets you higher efficiency than using it near the star, where half your horizon is unavailable for heat rejection.

   So you’re really expect the star to have an excess thermal radiation near itself, and then an apparently diffuse cloud of thermal radiation emission further out.

   • That’s a reasonable evolution I’ve never heard before of the much discussed idea. It does make more sense if they are capable of doing it at all to collect the energy closer in and use it including dumping the heat, further out. Both are observable. It also makes sense as the default that anybody capable of building a Dyson sphere would also be capable of settling everything in the galaxy in less than a million years – essentially overnight.

9. I say that is an issue, obviously more habitats you need that for type 1 as well else you are burning the planet. No not global warming, simply using so much solar including orbital and fusion your adding more energy than sunlight absorbed by earth.
   Now an Type 2 will get less efficient as you pack it, but with fusion just need to radiate away heat but then you want to be closer to home planet

10. Would the existence of Dyson spheres prove that fusion energy is really really hard?

    Why build giant solar collectors if fusion energy is practical?

    • Yeah, that’s a good point. Solar collectors are so simple to make by comparison. You don’t even have to have high efficiency if you can produce massive quantities easily with autonomous drones for mining, processing, fabrication and assembly.

    • But the Sun DOES fusion!

      the Sun fuses like 200 million tons of hydrogen PER second, transforming that into 186 million tons of Helium

      So, 4 million tons of mass being converted into energy per second.

      That’s a massive amount of energy that you can´t get from any fusion machine.

      I mean, how do you expect to get energy equivalent to 4 million tons of matter (being trasnformed into energy) PER SECOND?

    • Straight p-p fusion is really really hard to ignite – average hydrogen atom in our sun takes ~9 Billion years to undergo fusion.

11. Bryan, you as a smart person, what would you do with the energy that comes of a dyson sphere? It would be a staggering amount, only the transportation in its own alone.

    • I say that is an issue, obviously more habitats you need that for type 1 as well else you are burning the planet. No not global warming, simply using so much solar including orbital and fusion your adding more energy than sunlight absorbed by earth.
      Now an Type 2 will get less efficient as you pack it, but with fusion just need to radiate away heat but then you want to be closer to home planet

12. If true, this would mean 1000+ type II civilizations in the milky way alone, and probably 100000 type I like us. Unlikely.

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