TIL: About Dyson Sphere. A hypothetical megastructure we would put around a star to absorb the energy being sent in space
TIL: About Dyson Sphere. A hypothetical megastructure we would put around a star to absorb the energy being sent in space
A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power output. The concept is a thought experiment that attempts to imagine how a spacefaring civilization would meet its energy requirements once those requirements exceed what can be generated from the home planet's resources alone. Because only a tiny fraction of a star's energy emissions reaches the surface of any orbiting planet, building structures encircling a star would enable a civilization to harvest far more energy.
Maybe make it a dyson fan since the sphere would only work during the daytime. In polar areas that means half a year without any energy production!
Whereas there is always solar wind.
wHaT aBoUt wHen iTs NoT WinDy!!??!?!?
Is dark matter just Dyson sphered stars?
My initial reaction: "What? No."
After thinking a little bit: "hmm I guess you could say that..."
Like I'm sure it's not but I don't know if it's a worse explanation than any of the other ideas being considered. But I don't know enough to even know how wrong I am.
Start with a dyson ring or swarm
Kind of looks like an atom
If you think it's cool, you should try the game :)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Program/
That's crazy that they made this hypothesis based on a steam game
I think freeman Dyson beat em to the punch by several decades :)
The game is truly great though.
Some TIL posts really surprise you, it's crazy to me that you have never heard about this. Not being degrading or anything like that, it's just surprising.
One of today's lucky 100000
That's definitely one of Randall's more wholesome ones. By the way, this is one of my favourite book quotes on that subject:
The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.
T.H. White, The Once and Future King
Yeah never heard about it, although I never watched Star Trek personally.
But did you know that we can extract Graphene by heating it up super high so that everything else gets destroyed except graphene?
Read the bobiverse and you'll come across a topopolis. The pictures on wiki suck so here's one from fiction.
I didn't know that! You keep sharing the hits! Keep it coming!
I don't think it's surprising at all that you've never heard of a Dyson sphere. It's not a very popular idea even in science fiction.
They only work during the day though.
This is what they said about solar panels too, maybe it'll work out.
I believe they were making a joke because if you wrap this thing around a star there really is no day night cycle because it’s all star. Our day night cycle comes because we are spinning.
we just need a bunch of batteries!
I don’t remember the math, but you lose return on investment after a certain percentage of coverage.
Dyson Grids are the future!!! 😜
The other "benefit" to the sphere is blacking out a star. Other life, should it exist, is less likely to find the structure. ITT people destroying my dreams of a big shelly boi
Ouh! Love me some "Dark Forest hypothesis" existential dread 😁
If you want to make one you can.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Program/
I pirated this to check it out and enjoyed it so much that I bought it even though it's in Early Access and that's very very rare for me. I still haven't played it more though as I'm still waiting for it to come out of EA, looking very much forward to play it again.
Same, purchased after pirating. You'll need cheats to convert your pirated save to legit if you want achievements, however.
I'm the same lol. I bought several books in print after pirating the ebooks.
Damn that looks cool
There is also the Matrioshka brain, a hypothetical supercomputer powered by a Dyson sphere
Ok this one's new to me!
Would recommend Orion's Arm for "theoretical" but fiction takes on structures like this:
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/5067d430e6021
That article is not comprehensive either, their universe is quite expansive.
Two of my favorites may be "W-brains," computing structures with very carefully arranged wormhole pairs serving as data buses to overcome the latency of communicating at such scale, and "neural stars," another take which is a computational structure inside a neutron star sized volume/mass (again, to overcome latency issues).
There are much smaller megastructures too, depending on where in the timeline you are looking.
Is this like the SCP foundation stories but for space opera science fiction?
Precisely.
And it's a "hard" sci fi universe rooted in theoretically possible physics. No FTL or causality violations.
Be carful with those. You may block the light of constellation aliens use and really piss then off.
excellent stellaris reference! ;)
Eh, they won't find out until a few centuries later anyway
"People of Earth, I am Lrrr of the planet Omicron Persei 8."
That's a good one i forgot about. I'm shocked they didn't go all in and think that was a sign to purge everyone born under that star but that's not that kind of show.
Or the slightly more achievable version - Ringworld.
Depends on what you mean by ringworld. The thing I think of is orders of magnitude more impossible than a Dyson sphere, which is already pretty impossible.
A pinnacle of science, a wonder of engineering, that we will never get to see in our lifetimes. Instead, we get to see Taiwan get nuked or something, I don't know. I don't follow the news much, I only know I'm disappointed.
If we could just speed up cryogenics or hibernation technology…
How about we just speed up ourselves? Build a human sized LHC and leave it running for a few millenia.
Gideon the 9th universe begins
Taiwan is too valuable to nuke. It will be squeezed with a lot of Navy to land attacks, destroying many of the places people live but not the places they work. Then urban warfare will be the rest and it will probably be death of millions.
You might like this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A about how to build one from Earth.
You need to watch more Star Trek, friend.
Specifically "The Next Generation", Season 6, Episode 4, " Relics".
Thank me later. 😁
No bloody A B C or D
Classic episode; one of my favorite
With a bottle of green.
We will be lucky to have Dyson vacuums at the end of this century
Came here to say that if you like this concept, Peter Hamilton has a book series called Commonwealth Saga in the science fiction category that is excellent. Lots of pseudoscience from early 2000s in that series.
Great author!
Okay but where does the invisible hand dryer go?
Wait! The same problem Larry Niven’s Ringworld have also applies to Dyson Spheres? Huh! Saving to read later.
Wait until you learn about the even bigger ones:
I've played that Stellaris mod, pretty sweet
It's a pretty cool concept, and I enjoyed building one in Dyson Sphere Program, but I don't really understand how you would transport that amount of energy to where you need it. Are they like mirrors that redirect and focus light to some point?
I think the main goal is to power structures around the star and stockpile energy. End end goal would be to create a stellar engine so you can move the solar system itself
Split into several laser beams targeting a bunch of big-ass converters in line around the equator. But it would have to be extremely accurate and route a fraction of total power unless you want to pulverize earth
I guess you would store it in chemicals like oil or create radioactive substances that are optimised for specific energy decay rates
Presumably superconductors are a given at that level of technology. But also at megastructure scale, we could easily talk about very exotic energy transfer methods. Mirrors, microwave transmission antennas, kilometer wide conduits of highly conductive "ground" material, large scale production of fusion fuel, maybe usable power from heat difference is such an efficient process at any scale that the sphere just has a hot side on the inside (towards the sun) and a cold side on the outside (towards cosmic background) and anyone who needs power just patches in a heat pipe to the inside surface.
Actually there's a lot there on that last one. Large efficient power plants could be built anywhere where people needed them hooked with big heat pumps into the inner surface and outer radiator surface, smaller applications could just hook into the inner surface and radiate heat passively and let the climate control deal with it. Rogue energy thieves could be tracked down by scanning for unregistered cold spots on the inner surface.
Most of them use Gap Transmission to get the power from the plants to the users. That's when they use microfolds in space to transmit power across large distances.
Some of them more exotic methods than that though. One of them uses neurotissue harvested from Chuck as a transmission medium.
Any civilization that needs that much energy would have long ago exhausted their planet's resources and gone extinct.