Solving the Energy Crisis: Exploring the Dyson Sphere
Riker: A Dyson sphere?
Picard: A very old theory, Number One, I’m not surprised that you haven’t heard of it. In the twentieth century, a physicist called Freeman Dyson postulated the theory that an enormous hollow sphere could be constructed around a star.
-Star Trek
Originally proposed by the physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960, a Dyson Sphere is a hypothetical structure that an advanced civilization might build around a star to intercept all of the star’s light.
The basic idea behind a Dyson sphere is that it would be a massive artificial structure that encloses a star, capturing all of its energy output and converting it into usable energy. This energy could be used to power everything from cities to spaceships, providing a nearly unlimited source of power for a civilization. The implications of such a structure are staggering. With access to the full output of a star, a civilization could power unimaginable technological wonders, from artificial intelligence to terraforming to interstellar travel. The construction of a Dyson sphere would represent a civilization-level achievement, requiring the mastery of a wide range of scientific disciplines and the ability to harness vast amounts of energy and materials.
“The transition from a planetary species to an interstellar species is one of the most important steps in the evolution of a civilization. It requires a combination of technological innovation, social cooperation, and ethical responsibility.”
- Stephen Hawking
KARDASHEV CLASSIFICATION
The Kardashev Classification is a scale used to measure a civilization’s technological advancement based on their ability to harness and utilize energy, where a Type I civilization is able to harness all the energy resources of a planet, a Type II involves harnessing all the energy resources of a star and a Type III civilization will be capable of utilizing all the energy resources of a galaxy.
A Dyson Sphere represents a particular realization of the Kardashev Type II stage; it is an obvious way to ”capture” the power of a star in its entirety.
For the humans to make the journey from Type I to type II civilization, we would have to completely harness energy from the sun. theoretically there are research papers which show how one can build a dyson sphere around the sun to harness its energy. While the concept of a Dyson sphere is often discussed in science fiction, the actual construction of such a megastructure would be an enormous technical challenge. One of the most significant hurdles is the sheer scale of the structure. Building a dyson sphere around the sun will give us an ungodly amount of energy as the sun is a hundred quintillion times more powerful than our most efficient nuclear reactor.
So, how do we get this energy?
Not some of it, ALL OF IT!
DESIGN
The most realistic design for a Dyson sphere is that of a Dyson swarm.
A Dyson swarm consists of independent solar captors which are, basically devices that collect and/or concentrate solar radiation from the Sun, that orbit around the sun.
Although this design can have minor drawbacks, the advantages of Dyson swarms are not to be overlooked. They don’t require strong construction, as they will not be subject to major internal forces, and can be made with little and conventional material. The lightest design would be to have very large lightweight mirrors concentrating solar radiation down on focal points, where it would be transformed into useful work (and possibly beamed across space for use elsewhere).
- Although the Dyson swarm would be able to provide unlimited energy, constructing this megastructure would require enormous amounts of resources. If each satellite is of one square kilometer area, we would need around 30 quadrillion to surround the Sun. To collect such a vast amount of raw materials such as hydrogen, deuterium and graphene for our Dyson swarm, we will have to largely disassemble a whole planet.
Of all available planets, Mercury is the best candidate as it is closest to the sun and very rich in metal. It’s also close to the sun which means very less moving materials around. Mercury has no atmosphere and gravity on mercury is ⅓ of that of Earth, i.e., 3.7 m/s2, making it comparatively easier to launch material into space.
ENERGY CONSIDERATIONS
Imagine using all the fossil fuel on earth to launch satellites towards the sun. Do you think it’s possible? Indeed, it’s not. Even using nuclear reactors at full efficiency alongside this, it will not be possible to generate the amount of energy required to build the dyson swarm.
Well then, what shall we do?
- Miners: We’d need to automate as much as possible to increase the efficiency so these miners will strip mine the surface of the planet.
- Refiners: They extract valuable elements and fabricarte them into swarm satellites.
- Solar captors: As half of the planet’s material will be suitable to construct solar captors. The solar captors are going to give us the energy we need to disassemble the planet. To start, we deploy 1 km² of them as mirrors or traditional solar panels and then they’ll provide the energy to run our miners.
- Launch equipment: We will need some method for launching all these probes at their distant targets. Using rockets is highly inefficient, instead some form of fixed launch system, such as railguns, should be used. A railgun is a long electromagnetic track which launches satellites at high speeds.
From this point, we can take advantage of exponential growth as by using the energy from the existing parts of the swarm to build more infrastructure on mercury and launch new panels faster and faster.
“We are at the cusp of becoming an interstellar species, and we need to develop the technology and the mindset to make this transition. The challenges are immense, but the rewards are even greater.”
-Michio Kaku
POSSIBILITY OF ALIEN LIFE ?
Based on physics alone, this is not just possible but easy, as it’s a necessary step for any species to expand beyond their home planet. In fact, many astronomers believe that there are probably dyson spheres already out there in the milky way.
A star named KIC 8462852 (tabby’s star) has been showing a periodic dimming which, some hypothesize, can be caused by artificial megastructures in the orbit rather than a natural cause such as cometary fragments in a highly elliptical orbit. This brings up a lot of questions.
- If there exist dyson spheres in the universe, where are they?
- If there are millions of planets that can sustain life and are capable of building such megastructures, then where are all the aliens? Are we the only living things in the entire universe?
Well, this is THE FERMI PARADOX, we’ll get into this on my next blog!
REFERENCES
- Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox
- Dyson Spheres around White Dwarfs by Department of Physics Bebek, ̇Istanbul, TURKEY
- Hypothesis on existence of artificial megastructures
- Youtube-Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell How to Build a Dyson Sphere — The Ultimate Megastructure
