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214 points SkyMarshal | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.247s | source
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ardit33 ◴[] No.28231727[source]
The whole concept of a Dyson sphere is kinda idiotic. Any civilization that is capable to build one, it is probably able to work out fusion energy very efficiently.

There is no point to go and harness energy around a star or a black hole, when you can just produce it locally with a lot less resources/waste and materials. The sun itself is actually very inefficient in producing energy.

There is no need to harness the sun million of km away, when you can recreate it in your home planet. The only way to produce a dyson like of sphere, is to tame an over-heated sun, and reflect away un-needed energy. But there is no point to build one to just harness it.

It makes great sci-fi stories, but that's about it. Scientifically, it just doesn't make sense.

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zaarn ◴[] No.28231799[source]
There is a point still, because a star is massively more efficient at fusion by way of "production at scale" effects.

The additional benefit is the amount of power. With the power of a star at your disposal, beaming your energy using lasers and microwaves, even if only 1% efficient, would instantly solve the energy needs of any planet in a solar system. If we did it, we could instantly colonize all planets in our solar system because things like "running an AC on Mercury" or "Hovercraft in Jupiter Atmosphere" becomes trivial when you have limitless power.

Heck, you could start projects like moving planets in orbits or collecting astroids to built a planet if you wanted.

Black holes are the stage after that since you can use a spinning black hole to convert a given mass into energy at >10% efficiency (given E=MC^2). That would allow a civilization to power multiple solar systems at the cost of a few planets per year.

Granted, the sphere is difficult to build, but that is what you have dyson swarms for.

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TheOtherHobbes ◴[] No.28232083[source]
The sphere isn't difficult to build. It's impossible to build.

It's unstable without active stabilisation. The stabilisation has to be perfect because otherwise you get massive distorting spherequakes propagating through it, which will make it a very uncomfortable ride for a short time and will soon tear it apart.

A perfect spherical stabilising solution with components and sensors that are light minutes - or possibly light hours - from each other is impossible because of the signalling delays.

Ringworlds have the same problem. Even if the ring is made of infinitely strong unobtanium, it won't stay in a useful orbit for long enough to be built, never mind inhabited.

Swarms have more potential, because you can build them with sparse shells and move things around to handle instabilities. But you still need massive computational effort to keep swarm units from colliding with each other, possibly at very high speed.

None of this matters, because the limiting factor for civs is collective intelligence, not energy.

We already have access to far more energy than we could possibly use on earth for any technology that's actually buildable. But we're not using it because we don't have the species IQ to make the right choices.

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1. raattgift ◴[] No.28234120[source]
> impossible to build

Yet there are actual dust rings and discs in the sky surrounding stars for long periods without falling into the star, being blown out of the gravitational influence of the star, or condensing into planets on life-evolving timescales.

Some of them are pretty occlusive and get hot (~ 1000 degC) and are consequentially observational targets for MATISSE at the European Southern Observatory. It's not at all my field, but I gather https://theskylive.com/sky/stars/kappa-tucanae-star is a principal hot dust belt target.

Retreating towards my islands of comfort, there are plenty of small rocky bodies ( flavour of "dust" in the sense of the previous paragraphs) in the solar system that are in no immediate danger of colliding, plunging inwards, or escaping to infinity in spite of ablation from solar radiation, differential radiation pressure and other effects that lead to the term "active asteroid". Most of them will be there, and have been there, for billions of years despite evil Jupiter trying to mess them up. Speculating a little away from my weak-gravity island, I would be surprised if there were no ongoing organic chemistry reactions in the more icy carbonaceous active asteroids in our solar system. It's not a huge leap from that to an asteroid-based power station that slowly produces some alcohol(s) at much denser concentrations than the wood alcohol molecular clouds like in W3(OH) astrophysical alcohol megamaser region. [1]

Icy-carbonaceous bodies in closer orbit and with sufficient spin angular momentum (perhaps supported by the Yarkovsky effect) for cheap thermal management could in principle host terrestrial photoautotrophs suitable for processing into biodiesel. Impractical at small scale, but maybe useful if one has many billions of such "power plants" around a single star. And of course, one could use the photoautotrophs to feed microbes more suitable for the production of more complicated molecules like, oh I dunno, oxycodone (for fun and profit).

(A sufficiently dense dust belt in the goldilocks zone could even make use of ideas from the panspermia hypothesis, so that one only has to populate an initial fraction of the bodies with economically useful microbes, and the little bugs will reproduce and spread throughout.)

One can easily imagine greater efficiencies from engineering non-organism power collectors and storage systems instead of adapting blue-green algae to output biological compounds, and one would probably want to do this for a dust that is in bulk much hotter than the vast majority of our solar system's asteroids tend to get, or if practically the entirety of the dust is manufactured rather than already in place ready for populating with mats or colonies of economically useful microbes.

Returning to the paper at the top, I think the only advantage a black hole gives is that a sufficiently large one might have a much larger localised "goldilocks" volume which one might seed with small icy-carbonaceous body light-powered power plants, compared to having many such belts around many many stars. However density of production could be an important advantage, even if one has to move a swarm of objects to it rather than adapt a swarm of substrate objects already in place.

Super-concisely: Earth has a lot of oil, inefficiently, seemingly by accident, after a long delay from initial "activation" of the biosphere, and with a fairly high collection cost because it below so much atmosphere (and water and rock) through which it would have to be lifted for off-world use. Sufficiently advanced aliens (and perhaps future humans), if they wanted oil, undoubtedly could do better than Earth.

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[1] http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/mark/w3oh.html but don't inhale it, the W is for Wood alcohol (hydroxymethane).