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.
Any civilization that needs that much energy would have long ago exhausted their planet’s resources and gone extinct.
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.
Kind of looks like an atom
You need to watch more Star Trek, friend.
Specifically “The Next Generation”, Season 6, Episode 4, " Relics".
Thank me later. 😁
Classic episode; one of my favorite
With a bottle of green.
No bloody A B C or D
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!
Okay but where does the invisible hand dryer go?
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.
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
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/
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 ;)
.
Help me. Factorio has me.
i cant. tell me if you find a way to escape. please.
That’s correct.
Damn that looks cool
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.
$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
Be carful with those. You may block the light of constellation aliens use and really piss then off.
“People of Earth, I am Lrrr of the planet Omicron Persei 8.”
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.
Just put them in the Synaptic Lathe and forget about them.
…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.
excellent stellaris reference! ;)
Wait! The same problem Larry Niven’s Ringworld have also applies to Dyson Spheres? Huh! Saving to read later.
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.
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.
If we could just speed up cryogenics or hibernation technology…
There is also the Matrioshka brain, a hypothetical supercomputer powered by a Dyson sphere
Ok this one’s new to me!
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wHaT aBoUt wHen iTs NoT WinDy!!??!?!?
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
