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.
You need to watch more Star Trek, friend.
Specifically “The Next Generation”, Season 6, Episode 4, " Relics".
Thank me later. 😁
With a bottle of green.
No bloody A B C or D
Classic episode; one of my favorite
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?
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.
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
I guess you would store it in chemicals like oil or create radioactive substances that are optimised for specific energy decay rates
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
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
Well unless they are monitoring or are relatively close. The issue was they got annoyed cause their decedendants won’t see their “holy constellation”. Something like a north star to them I guess. So anyway I started a purification campaign In response.
…no, they won’t know for a few hundred years due to the actual speed of light and vast distances of space.
You’re assuming they are not part of the deep state already!
Unless they have some fancy alien sensor with quantum entangled particles so they get an alert instantly
It’s a Stellaris reference. Once you can build Dyson spheres there’s a chance your (also FTL capable) neighbors complain about you blocking their sacred star.
I usually just give them money and they forgive me.
Just put them in the Synaptic Lathe and forget about them.
Certainly humane than livestock.
“People of Earth, I am Lrrr of the planet Omicron Persei 8.”
We will be lucky to have Dyson vacuums at the end of this century
Kind of looks like an atom
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.
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.
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?
I didn’t know that! You keep sharing the hits! Keep it coming!
Eh, there’s only one in all of Star Trek, and they forgot about it after one episode. Should have a whole series.
There was a star trek novel dealing with it. I read it but don’t remember any details. My favorite along those lines was the ringworld books.
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.
Read the bobiverse and you’ll come across a topopolis. The pictures on wiki suck so here’s one from fiction.
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
Wait! The same problem Larry Niven’s Ringworld have also applies to Dyson Spheres? Huh! Saving to read later.
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!
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.
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.
There is also the Matrioshka brain, a hypothetical supercomputer powered by a Dyson sphere
Ok this one’s new to me!
Start with a dyson ring or swarm
You might like this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A about how to build one from Earth.
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.
I’m the same lol. I bought several books in print after pirating the ebooks.
$20 is the perfect price IMO
edit: pirating this game is kinda funny to me, its a Chinese Dev. team so who knows if there are assets in the game that are not legit. I will probably buy it but I wouldn’t shame anyone who did find another way to get it without purchasing it
It’s a i think 5man dev team and they’ve poured their souls into it, I think they deserve the money
I bought the bundle with Shapez 2
both are really good
Same, purchased after pirating. You’ll need cheats to convert your pirated save to legit if you want achievements, however.
Damn that looks cool
this looks like it will suck 500 hours out of my life the moment i press play
it’s basically factorio, but it allows 3D belt placement and interplanetary/interstellar transports!
it’s excellent!
factorio latest update added interplanetary stuff! its actually quite cool.
please send help!
oh yeah, i know!
but there’s like 5 planets in factorio…there’s upwards of 16 entire solar systems in DSP ;)
please don’t tempt me
Help me. Factorio has me.
i cant. tell me if you find a way to escape. please.
That’s correct.
