I like Dyson Spheres/Swarms in concept. Is it possible on paper, yes. Is if feasible to accomplish? No. Not even a little bit, imo.
Any Dyson sphere or even swarm would demand an unfathomable amount of resources, time, and manpower. It would be a mega project that would take thousands of years. You’d need to totally disassemble a cosmic body like Mercury or the Moon to even have enough materials. Even with wildly more advanced tech, you’d end up using an incredible amount of energy to build this, and the EROI would take hundreds more years to ever come to fruition after it’s completed.
I’m of the opinion that any civilization advanced enough to theoretically build such a megastructure has likely figured out a much more feasible energy source by that point.
Why do you need a more powerful energy source, while you have a star going that’s gonna release free energy anyway? A Dyson swarm need not be a single project, it can be assembled gradually by just adding solar power arrays until there’s eventually no place left to put one.
Well for starters, you have to put the satellites into orbit. It’s gonna be pretty hard to do that without an initial energy source.
Second, aforementioned effort +thousands of years.
Third, you are limited by your means to transmit this power, which diminishes as you get further away from the star. Photovoltaic capture abiliy and microwave power transmission capture abiliy drop the further you get away from the star as the energy gets dissipated into the cosmic background. At some point you won’t be able to rely on your Dyson structure and will need to rely on a different power source.
Fourth, these satellites have a continuous upkeep. So it’s not as simple as just putting them up there, they’ll need to be constantly replaced because they will burn out over time.
The traditional notion of a Dyson sphere/swarm isn’t using the thing to power earth, or launching the construction materials from earth for that matter. You would literally deliver enough power to overheat the planet that way.
The idea is that you mostly live in space habitats by that point, so a given solar array is just powering the habitat it’s attached to, or one nearby (or for one farther out, you can have some satellites that are just big, thin foil mirrors that focus sunlight from a wide area onto a solar array). You probably build these from asteroids and such, since again the energy cost to launch material from earth is prohibitive. A bit like how it would be cost prohibitive for a single city on an empty planet to engage in a project to colonize and build new farmland and cities across the entire world: they wouldn’t actively build with that goal in mind, so much as they expand a little bit, and a bit more with the surplus gained by that expansion as the population grows, until one day their descendants run out of empty land to expand to. A Dyson sphere is just the end state of this for a solar system rather than a planet.
It probably does take thousands of years, or more, and a corresponding level of effort, but that’s nothing compared to the life of a star, so if you have a species that’s got the technology to build a civilization in space, they have the time.
So Chris Columbus gets back to Spain and says, “And the whole point of this is to build a city on the west coast that will be populated by over 12 million people,” at which point he is laughed out of court.
LA would have been a ridiculous idea to the Europeans when America was first discovered, and no one would have said it was feasible at the time, yet there it is, just another achievement built on the successes of thousands of years of civilization. I don’t see why a Dyson swarm or other megasteuctures would be any different.
I like Dyson Spheres/Swarms in concept. Is it possible on paper, yes. Is if feasible to accomplish? No. Not even a little bit, imo.
Any Dyson sphere or even swarm would demand an unfathomable amount of resources, time, and manpower. It would be a mega project that would take thousands of years. You’d need to totally disassemble a cosmic body like Mercury or the Moon to even have enough materials. Even with wildly more advanced tech, you’d end up using an incredible amount of energy to build this, and the EROI would take hundreds more years to ever come to fruition after it’s completed.
I’m of the opinion that any civilization advanced enough to theoretically build such a megastructure has likely figured out a much more feasible energy source by that point.
Why do you need a more powerful energy source, while you have a star going that’s gonna release free energy anyway? A Dyson swarm need not be a single project, it can be assembled gradually by just adding solar power arrays until there’s eventually no place left to put one.
Well for starters, you have to put the satellites into orbit. It’s gonna be pretty hard to do that without an initial energy source.
Second, aforementioned effort +thousands of years.
Third, you are limited by your means to transmit this power, which diminishes as you get further away from the star. Photovoltaic capture abiliy and microwave power transmission capture abiliy drop the further you get away from the star as the energy gets dissipated into the cosmic background. At some point you won’t be able to rely on your Dyson structure and will need to rely on a different power source.
Fourth, these satellites have a continuous upkeep. So it’s not as simple as just putting them up there, they’ll need to be constantly replaced because they will burn out over time.
The traditional notion of a Dyson sphere/swarm isn’t using the thing to power earth, or launching the construction materials from earth for that matter. You would literally deliver enough power to overheat the planet that way.
The idea is that you mostly live in space habitats by that point, so a given solar array is just powering the habitat it’s attached to, or one nearby (or for one farther out, you can have some satellites that are just big, thin foil mirrors that focus sunlight from a wide area onto a solar array). You probably build these from asteroids and such, since again the energy cost to launch material from earth is prohibitive. A bit like how it would be cost prohibitive for a single city on an empty planet to engage in a project to colonize and build new farmland and cities across the entire world: they wouldn’t actively build with that goal in mind, so much as they expand a little bit, and a bit more with the surplus gained by that expansion as the population grows, until one day their descendants run out of empty land to expand to. A Dyson sphere is just the end state of this for a solar system rather than a planet.
It probably does take thousands of years, or more, and a corresponding level of effort, but that’s nothing compared to the life of a star, so if you have a species that’s got the technology to build a civilization in space, they have the time.
So Chris Columbus gets back to Spain and says, “And the whole point of this is to build a city on the west coast that will be populated by over 12 million people,” at which point he is laughed out of court.
LA would have been a ridiculous idea to the Europeans when America was first discovered, and no one would have said it was feasible at the time, yet there it is, just another achievement built on the successes of thousands of years of civilization. I don’t see why a Dyson swarm or other megasteuctures would be any different.
LA is hardly hundreds of years old.