I feel like Dyson spheres aren’t common because it’s easier to go smaller. Aka zero point energy and such. Mega structures are the human brains concept of future tech. When I think it’s the opposite in reality
Honestly that’s a very good point. Technology has always downsized. If we can find a better way to produce consistent energy, why on earth would we use all those resources on a Dyson Sphere. Same concept goes for Fusion. If we crack fusion and can essentially get the energy of a small star why would we go this extra step? It seems almost pointless.
Dyson spheres the more you think about it are definitely one of those things that should be used more as literary images for Sci-FI books (I.e to show scale of a new civilization) more so than practicality.
If a civ is advanced enough to make a star as a power source, you still need to collect the heat for energy. I guess you could build infrastructure into the star and siphon heat that way, or a dyson sphere to collect the solar energy.
I can't get my head around the sheer amount of construction materials that would be required to build a structure that was large enough to encompass a star? I'd assume it would need to be placed at a distance far enough away so the heat/radiation wouldn't damage it, meaning a circumference much larger than the star itself. Where would all of the raw materials required be harvested from? Wouldn't it take the consumption of 1,000's if not 100,000's of planets worth of raw materials to create something so big?
Imagine self-replicating construction machines let loose on an asteroid belt or demolished planets. Exponential growth would make short work of available resources, probably within the span of a few hundred years.
Now imagine humans building self-replicating machines and go play Horizon Zero Dawn, because that’s exactly what our dumbass species would do with such a wonder.
Not gonna lie would be crazy if that’s how things played out and it was just future humans. Or humans that escaped from some wild extinction shit that happened on earth.
Depends on how thin it would be. Guessing you would want it as thin as possible but still strong enough to withstand the gravity from the star. But it would definitely consume numerous planets in material.
Absolutely 💯 And the thinner it is, the more susceptible it would be to those gravitational forces, solar storms, asteroids, etc. Unless it was constructed from some highly exotic, super strong conductive materials I guess? Maybe that's where ASI will checkmate us all. It'll be so far ahead of the curve we'll never catch up...
It seems like when it comes to scale like this, this is where a lot of us have a hard time wrapping their heads around it. Spitballing, but here is my theory:
There’s trillions of planets out there. Knowledge of where they are and if they do/can host life. Let’s say there’s criteria for planetary bodies that make them fair game to be strip mined or just blown to bits to construct things like this. To us, the thought of blowing up a planet to build something is just absolutely nuts but maybe to a civilization that can do this it’s no crazier than draining a lake or cutting down a forrest.
I mean I can only guess at this kind of stuff. If whatever these entities are can do this, they surely are able to make calculated decisions about where and how to get the materials and the impact of doing so. As for what Dyson sphere ultimately accomplishes? Man who knows. That’s way too big. Unless they can just “beam” that energy somewhere to power something?
[This paper](https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/intergalactic-spreading.pdf) uses Mercury as an example, with a mass of 3.3 x 10^23 kg.
So, a small planet. Or a lot of large asteroids if one has them available.
Most likely what they would be, and what would be far more practical than a true Dyson Sphere, is a Dyson *Swarm*. A massive number of orbiting satellites in a three dimensional shell around a star. This would require exponentially less construction material and still be almost as efficient at collecting energy.
But it wouldn’t really matter anyways because the main way anyone would ever build a Dyson Swarm or Sphere is via AI and robotic automation. You’d have to choose a few moons or a terrestrial world in your star system to destroy though, in order to create a swarm. I’d choose Mercury. Small price to pay.
It’s also worth noting that a Dyson Swarm could develop naturally just from a terrestrial civilization expanding into space. For example, I think that we will very likely preferentially choose to build and live inside rotating space habitats rather than extensively colonize planets and moons and attempt terraforming…because it is so much simpler, so much more efficient, so much cheaper and we could perfectly replicate an Earthlike environment inside. As we expand into space, we’d build more and more until you’ve got millions of O’Neill cylinders and Stanford Torus stations up there. The optimum location to put such stations would be around 1 astronomical unit - earth’s orbit, so that we could collect and use sunlight both for energy and natural lighting of the habitat enclosure. So over time, a Dyson Swarm would naturally develop at 1 AU from the sun just from a civilization living in space even if their goal was not necessarily to build one in the first place.
Super easy with ASI and self-replicating robots. I'm am very concerned for our space faring possibilities at this point. If they confirm dyson spheres within our galaxy then we are pretty much fucked because they are already here and will 100% not allow us to become a technological rival. The end game of intelligence is to horde as much energy as possible to postpone entropy as long as possible. An ASI would understand this and have no inclination to share anything with us, even space-time.
Thats my pessimistic perspective at least. I have an optimistic one as well but im to tired to share.
I think intelligence is also keen to preserve information. Since DNA degrades rather fast I'd think an advanced civ would probably at least keep a few of us around for cataloguing.
This is one of my more optimistic views if there really is an interstellar “Federation” out there that keep tabs on us. One of our desired products could simply be thoughts and arts at their point of civilization.
DNA might be the best way to store information. Self replicating, little degradation for some parts such as 'junk DNA', lots of different combinations available, and can last over billions of years.
Much better than anything else humans have come up with e.g. floppy disks are somewhat obsolete, not even half a century after they came out.
It would be kind of funny if earth was just one big data storage centre. Would kind of explain the issue with nukes I guess. Don't want to corrupt the code.
I, for one, would gladly masturbate to entertain our new kardeshev level 2 minimum overlords. I can also play several instruments, and I have experience with music production, art, and radio broadcasting. And I can juggle really good too.
Earth contains the current state of a planetary scale genetic algorithm running for over 4 billion years. That is interesting. The DNA of a few (or all humans) is not.
Absolutely agree with you, and I fear ASI plus self-replicating robots is likely to become the end of the human race, or the 'wetware', as we know it. I just can't understand where all the resources would come from to build a Dyson Sphere in the first place? Potentially if one was constructed in an asteroid rich solar system with numerous super-sized rocky planets available, then yeah, maybe? But my understanding is the denser the celestial bodies within one area the greater the gravitational pull, right? Surely this would lead to an increase in asteroid impacts, planet collisions, and the overall chaotic nature of the solar system? You'd postulate before any ASI arose it risked being wiped out way before the required technological level was reached? 🤔 There is an interesting article on The Debrief that explores these questions around ASI and human extinction on their site right now actually! But anyways, I'd be very interested to hear about your optimistic perspective once you have a chance to share it!
Absolutely! Harvesting the host stars ejecta to seed the Sphere 🤔💯🌏 Like refining the plasma, radiaton and energy into the required raw materials, it's totally possible!!! 🙌🏻✨️💥✨️🙌🏻
A Dyson swarm confers complete monitoring and control over a significant volume of space, with a heck of a lot of energy to back it up. It is completely engineered and there is no chaos.
You’re so right. If a form of life could outlive the head death of the universe then the collection of energy is the final goal. Continued survival. Why have I never heard this before?
I am always thinking about nucleosynthesis through plasma engineering ( see Ken Shoulders's work to grasp the idea). An advanced civilization with plasma engineering capabilities and atom scale manufacturing knowledge would use Energy to create matter with the right properties . In the vacuum of space plasma physics Is known to create funny structures ( experiments have been made on the ISS ) https://youtu.be/R4Z_-WbDs4U?feature=shared . Plasmoids and Exotic vacuum objects )
Presumably, a civ who got to this level of tech would have zero point or something similar sorted out. Why would you even need a Dyson sphere at that point?
Tangentially, Dyson really missed an easy score by naming their one vacuum the “ball” instead of the Dyson Sphere
I feel like, if this is a civilization that can get power from the quantum vacuum or antimatter reactions, isn't it silly to build a star-sized structure around a star to harvest its energy? Wouldn't it block out a lot of light and radiation for the planets in the star system? If it's system of planets doesn't have life, then they would be producing enough energy to go interstellar, just to get energy from a sun. The only thing I can think of is that perhaps red or blue stars have special properties that help them make meta materials or something like that. I really don't think a type 3 civilization needs to create a Dyson sphere for power.
The innermost orbit of a Dyson swarm is one of the best places in the universe to make antimatter, and the most practical.
The end result of a Dyson swarm is no planets, comets, asteroids. The entire system is a controlled and monitored volume of space consisting entirely of intelligent matter and its support & defense infrastructure.
I guess if we accept that UAPs are piloted by aliens then you can infer that they might have a lot in common with humans. To build a flying craft requires so many, what we would consider, human qualities. And perhaps we can then say, if humans have at least thought of it, then probably aliens have as well. I think i always had the idea that aliens would be so alien as to be incomprehensible. Maybe that's not the case
You'd be hard pressed to find more energy in a solar system than the perpetual thermonuclear explosion that makes up 99% of the solar system's mass. That should be apparent to any civilization.
We have no idea if the "Dyson spheres" are connected to UAP's. Any "life", no matter how weird is a battle against entropy. Energy helps that battle and stars have lots of energy
it also seems reasonable to me that if we were to find life out there that there are more than two civilizations, us and them as the alternative would be even more strange. As such, some civilizations may use something akin to a dyson sphere and others may not. It also helps that dyson spheres are probably one of the more noticeable sources of power from our perspective
Nothing in that article suggests that there is more potential energy in a vacuum than in a star. Any energy they extracted had to be spent somewhere else.
I'm no scientist, but doesn't this article basically say they transferred or 'teleported' energy? Their end goal is to create energy out of nothing, essentially, but my understanding of the article is that they are not there yet. Maybe in the future vacuums could produce loads of energy, but I think that is still beyond us.
Either way, really cool article. Thanks for sharing!
It takes a lot more work to capture vacuum energy than simply harvest the output of a massive pre-existing fusion reactor.
What you're proposing makes about as much sense current human energy infrastructure, which is very little.
Maybe there are tons of decent energy generation methods, but we can only conceivably detect the ones that somehow interrupt starlight enough to be noticed.
We already sustain billions on a few billionths of the sun's overall output. The sheer size of a civilization harnessing all that power is unimaginable.
The civilization wouldn't even have to be huge. Some of the things they do could are just so far out of a frame of reference to us that we could never understand.
Advanced enough, they could create objects directly from energy.
But it takes a BUTTLOAD of energy to make an object directly from energy. For 1 gram of matter, it takes around 9 ×10¹³ joules of energy to make. The same energy as 2.2 megatons of TNT.
The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was around 15 kilotons.
To make one gram of matter directly from energy, it takes about the equivalent of 147 Hiroshima Bombs.
You bet they'll be making use of all the energy they can!
3D printer at atomic level. Our concept of "harvesting" resources from planets seems too primitive to me.
The last machine you have to build is the one that only needs energy as input and gets whatever you want as output, a new rug for your bed or a new copy of the latest design of an intergalactic cruiser.
Make space-time your bitch, open up a wormhole to the next nearest star and repeat the process. Scale this up to attain enough energy and computation to simulate your own universe with your own rules.
Use it to do work, in the physics sense, or store it for future work. That is all anyone does with energy. The scale of work is just much larger than you're used to imagining.
Thinking highly advanced interstellar civilizations would build Dyson spheres is like people in the 1800s seeing a nuclear sub and thinking it runs on steam, they didnt know what nuclear even was, interstellar civs have tech that work on physics we havent even thought of yet
Nuclear subs and aircraft carriers do run on steam though. What do you think the nuclear power is there to do? What do you think is turning the screws of the sub or ship?
The nuclear reactors heat water into super heated and then pressurized steam that turns the screws.
The reason for building a Dyson sphere or swarm could be just to maximize living conditions in one system to avoid ruining too many others in the galaxy.
If you're that powerful, then you might do it for the hell of it. Or so some distant aliens can tell you exist(ed)... through detecting your dyson sphere.
I agree, but at the this time we can only go off our own model of existence and logic - from our current understanding it makes the most sense that living beings on planets that orbit the sun would get their energy in some way from it (the same way we do, in a roundabout way).
The concept of a Dyson sphere is that it would be the most efficient way to extract that energy. Instead of a sun powering plants and animals, waiting millions of years, and then setting it on fire, the idea is skipping all those transducers and harvesting energy directly. Totally possible that there’s some even more efficient way than some sort of structure, but it’s a very likely building block on the way to that.
So a civ that’s not so advanced that they’ve somehow moved past the idea of harvesting energy from stars would likely be using something like that.
If you were born on another planet, WE would be aliens, and we have not figured anything else out which could compete with a Dyson sphere. So your comment is paradoxical.
That said, I agree with you that it also seems pretty crazy. Also leads to questions like how would they transport the energy, and how would one construct it.
Cold fusion seems pretty pessimistic at this time and from cursory research and fact checking, I find myself doubtful that would be worked out.
Eh, “could be” is doing a lot of work there. If you look for a pattern, eventually you’ll find it. Also, while the concept of a Dyson Sphere is cool and all, it’s still unclear whether it is a great use of resources, given the massive outlays for setup and maintenance, or whether there are better options for energy harvesting.
Better is a relative term. Not capturing the output of a readily available massive fusion reactor is wasteful. As is leaving planets, asteroids and comets lying around as dumb matter.
If the world you live on were a desk sized globe, your entire ecosystem, including the atmosphere and oceans, is like the layer of paint on it. So much potentially useful matter in the interior volume going to waste.
I find the idea of Dyson spheres very... over the top its far more fantastic than people being abducted by aliens by light years and its strange this is an "accepted" possibility..absurd even. I feel there is far more and way less destructive and efficient ways to gather large amounts of energy.
What's interesting that I learned from JMG on youtube is that many of these are clustered, and only a few of them are particularly isolated.
That is certainly an intriguing detail.
Link to the video for those who are curious,: https://youtu.be/VkEGvmfd8dI?feature=shared
JMG?
John Michael Godier https://www.youtube.com/@JohnMichaelGodier
The man responsible for me accidentally sleeping in my damn chair so much!
I feel like Dyson spheres aren’t common because it’s easier to go smaller. Aka zero point energy and such. Mega structures are the human brains concept of future tech. When I think it’s the opposite in reality
Honestly that’s a very good point. Technology has always downsized. If we can find a better way to produce consistent energy, why on earth would we use all those resources on a Dyson Sphere. Same concept goes for Fusion. If we crack fusion and can essentially get the energy of a small star why would we go this extra step? It seems almost pointless. Dyson spheres the more you think about it are definitely one of those things that should be used more as literary images for Sci-FI books (I.e to show scale of a new civilization) more so than practicality.
If a civ is advanced enough to make a star as a power source, you still need to collect the heat for energy. I guess you could build infrastructure into the star and siphon heat that way, or a dyson sphere to collect the solar energy.
I think you’re missing my underlying point entirely.
I can't get my head around the sheer amount of construction materials that would be required to build a structure that was large enough to encompass a star? I'd assume it would need to be placed at a distance far enough away so the heat/radiation wouldn't damage it, meaning a circumference much larger than the star itself. Where would all of the raw materials required be harvested from? Wouldn't it take the consumption of 1,000's if not 100,000's of planets worth of raw materials to create something so big?
Imagine self-replicating construction machines let loose on an asteroid belt or demolished planets. Exponential growth would make short work of available resources, probably within the span of a few hundred years.
Without a doubt! 💯
Now imagine humans building self-replicating machines and go play Horizon Zero Dawn, because that’s exactly what our dumbass species would do with such a wonder.
Humanity’s first response to any new technology: 90% can I kill shit with it? 10% can I use it to jerk off?
Not gonna lie would be crazy if that’s how things played out and it was just future humans. Or humans that escaped from some wild extinction shit that happened on earth.
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"Grey goo" is an evocative term to describe runaway replicators. From an impartial perspective, you are grey goo. Noodle that one a bit.
Ok Prince Charles
Depends on how thin it would be. Guessing you would want it as thin as possible but still strong enough to withstand the gravity from the star. But it would definitely consume numerous planets in material.
Absolutely 💯 And the thinner it is, the more susceptible it would be to those gravitational forces, solar storms, asteroids, etc. Unless it was constructed from some highly exotic, super strong conductive materials I guess? Maybe that's where ASI will checkmate us all. It'll be so far ahead of the curve we'll never catch up...
I think it's usually imagined as a swarm of independent objects, and not one unified shell.
It seems like when it comes to scale like this, this is where a lot of us have a hard time wrapping their heads around it. Spitballing, but here is my theory: There’s trillions of planets out there. Knowledge of where they are and if they do/can host life. Let’s say there’s criteria for planetary bodies that make them fair game to be strip mined or just blown to bits to construct things like this. To us, the thought of blowing up a planet to build something is just absolutely nuts but maybe to a civilization that can do this it’s no crazier than draining a lake or cutting down a forrest. I mean I can only guess at this kind of stuff. If whatever these entities are can do this, they surely are able to make calculated decisions about where and how to get the materials and the impact of doing so. As for what Dyson sphere ultimately accomplishes? Man who knows. That’s way too big. Unless they can just “beam” that energy somewhere to power something?
[This paper](https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/intergalactic-spreading.pdf) uses Mercury as an example, with a mass of 3.3 x 10^23 kg. So, a small planet. Or a lot of large asteroids if one has them available.
It doesn't have to be encompassing the whole star tho.
Most likely what they would be, and what would be far more practical than a true Dyson Sphere, is a Dyson *Swarm*. A massive number of orbiting satellites in a three dimensional shell around a star. This would require exponentially less construction material and still be almost as efficient at collecting energy. But it wouldn’t really matter anyways because the main way anyone would ever build a Dyson Swarm or Sphere is via AI and robotic automation. You’d have to choose a few moons or a terrestrial world in your star system to destroy though, in order to create a swarm. I’d choose Mercury. Small price to pay. It’s also worth noting that a Dyson Swarm could develop naturally just from a terrestrial civilization expanding into space. For example, I think that we will very likely preferentially choose to build and live inside rotating space habitats rather than extensively colonize planets and moons and attempt terraforming…because it is so much simpler, so much more efficient, so much cheaper and we could perfectly replicate an Earthlike environment inside. As we expand into space, we’d build more and more until you’ve got millions of O’Neill cylinders and Stanford Torus stations up there. The optimum location to put such stations would be around 1 astronomical unit - earth’s orbit, so that we could collect and use sunlight both for energy and natural lighting of the habitat enclosure. So over time, a Dyson Swarm would naturally develop at 1 AU from the sun just from a civilization living in space even if their goal was not necessarily to build one in the first place.
Super easy with ASI and self-replicating robots. I'm am very concerned for our space faring possibilities at this point. If they confirm dyson spheres within our galaxy then we are pretty much fucked because they are already here and will 100% not allow us to become a technological rival. The end game of intelligence is to horde as much energy as possible to postpone entropy as long as possible. An ASI would understand this and have no inclination to share anything with us, even space-time. Thats my pessimistic perspective at least. I have an optimistic one as well but im to tired to share.
I think intelligence is also keen to preserve information. Since DNA degrades rather fast I'd think an advanced civ would probably at least keep a few of us around for cataloguing.
This is one of my more optimistic views if there really is an interstellar “Federation” out there that keep tabs on us. One of our desired products could simply be thoughts and arts at their point of civilization.
> One of our desired products could simply be thoughts and arts I've wondered about this too.
DNA might be the best way to store information. Self replicating, little degradation for some parts such as 'junk DNA', lots of different combinations available, and can last over billions of years. Much better than anything else humans have come up with e.g. floppy disks are somewhat obsolete, not even half a century after they came out. It would be kind of funny if earth was just one big data storage centre. Would kind of explain the issue with nukes I guess. Don't want to corrupt the code.
I think I read a book once where humanity kept all their data storage in *e. coli* on Mars since it would last so long
Thats true. If biological life is rare, we may offer valuable observational data to them.
I, for one, would gladly masturbate to entertain our new kardeshev level 2 minimum overlords. I can also play several instruments, and I have experience with music production, art, and radio broadcasting. And I can juggle really good too.
Earth contains the current state of a planetary scale genetic algorithm running for over 4 billion years. That is interesting. The DNA of a few (or all humans) is not.
Me. Pick me!
You've used the phrase Super Easy in a way that we are not yet ready for.
Absolutely agree with you, and I fear ASI plus self-replicating robots is likely to become the end of the human race, or the 'wetware', as we know it. I just can't understand where all the resources would come from to build a Dyson Sphere in the first place? Potentially if one was constructed in an asteroid rich solar system with numerous super-sized rocky planets available, then yeah, maybe? But my understanding is the denser the celestial bodies within one area the greater the gravitational pull, right? Surely this would lead to an increase in asteroid impacts, planet collisions, and the overall chaotic nature of the solar system? You'd postulate before any ASI arose it risked being wiped out way before the required technological level was reached? 🤔 There is an interesting article on The Debrief that explores these questions around ASI and human extinction on their site right now actually! But anyways, I'd be very interested to hear about your optimistic perspective once you have a chance to share it!
Maybe they’re able to somehow turn energy harnessed from the star into mass, which could then be used to expand. Etc etc.
Absolutely! Harvesting the host stars ejecta to seed the Sphere 🤔💯🌏 Like refining the plasma, radiaton and energy into the required raw materials, it's totally possible!!! 🙌🏻✨️💥✨️🙌🏻
A Dyson swarm confers complete monitoring and control over a significant volume of space, with a heck of a lot of energy to back it up. It is completely engineered and there is no chaos.
You’re so right. If a form of life could outlive the head death of the universe then the collection of energy is the final goal. Continued survival. Why have I never heard this before?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson%27s_eternal_intelligence
I think nanobots could/can reorganize atoms in molecules? I can confirm once I get to work. Still need a lot of atoms though.
I am always thinking about nucleosynthesis through plasma engineering ( see Ken Shoulders's work to grasp the idea). An advanced civilization with plasma engineering capabilities and atom scale manufacturing knowledge would use Energy to create matter with the right properties . In the vacuum of space plasma physics Is known to create funny structures ( experiments have been made on the ISS ) https://youtu.be/R4Z_-WbDs4U?feature=shared . Plasmoids and Exotic vacuum objects )
Yeah . My guess .. is not practical in any sense . .. unless they have the ability to create matter without having to mine it.
Time to suit up. We got planets to crack! Ooh what's this monolith?!
E = m \* c^2
Presumably, a civ who got to this level of tech would have zero point or something similar sorted out. Why would you even need a Dyson sphere at that point? Tangentially, Dyson really missed an easy score by naming their one vacuum the “ball” instead of the Dyson Sphere
I feel like, if this is a civilization that can get power from the quantum vacuum or antimatter reactions, isn't it silly to build a star-sized structure around a star to harvest its energy? Wouldn't it block out a lot of light and radiation for the planets in the star system? If it's system of planets doesn't have life, then they would be producing enough energy to go interstellar, just to get energy from a sun. The only thing I can think of is that perhaps red or blue stars have special properties that help them make meta materials or something like that. I really don't think a type 3 civilization needs to create a Dyson sphere for power.
The innermost orbit of a Dyson swarm is one of the best places in the universe to make antimatter, and the most practical. The end result of a Dyson swarm is no planets, comets, asteroids. The entire system is a controlled and monitored volume of space consisting entirely of intelligent matter and its support & defense infrastructure.
What are the chances that some guy accurately predicted the exact method that alien civilizations would harvest their energy?
It seems pretty reasonable to me that a civilization might try to harness the energy that's at the center of every solar system.
I guess if we accept that UAPs are piloted by aliens then you can infer that they might have a lot in common with humans. To build a flying craft requires so many, what we would consider, human qualities. And perhaps we can then say, if humans have at least thought of it, then probably aliens have as well. I think i always had the idea that aliens would be so alien as to be incomprehensible. Maybe that's not the case
You'd be hard pressed to find more energy in a solar system than the perpetual thermonuclear explosion that makes up 99% of the solar system's mass. That should be apparent to any civilization.
We have no idea if the "Dyson spheres" are connected to UAP's. Any "life", no matter how weird is a battle against entropy. Energy helps that battle and stars have lots of energy
it also seems reasonable to me that if we were to find life out there that there are more than two civilizations, us and them as the alternative would be even more strange. As such, some civilizations may use something akin to a dyson sphere and others may not. It also helps that dyson spheres are probably one of the more noticeable sources of power from our perspective
I'm no scientist, but isn't there much more potential energy available in just a vacuum?
I'm also no scientist, but that doesn't seem right. Where did you hear that?
[https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-use-quantum-mechanics-to-pull-energy-out-of-nothing-20230222/](https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-use-quantum-mechanics-to-pull-energy-out-of-nothing-20230222/)
Nothing in that article suggests that there is more potential energy in a vacuum than in a star. Any energy they extracted had to be spent somewhere else.
I'm no scientist, but doesn't this article basically say they transferred or 'teleported' energy? Their end goal is to create energy out of nothing, essentially, but my understanding of the article is that they are not there yet. Maybe in the future vacuums could produce loads of energy, but I think that is still beyond us. Either way, really cool article. Thanks for sharing!
On a side note, this is how Professor Michio Kaku believes a type 3 civilisation would power their autonomous drones
It takes a lot more work to capture vacuum energy than simply harvest the output of a massive pre-existing fusion reactor. What you're proposing makes about as much sense current human energy infrastructure, which is very little.
Maybe there are tons of decent energy generation methods, but we can only conceivably detect the ones that somehow interrupt starlight enough to be noticed.
Good point
Why do you assume all alien species throughout the galaxy would use the same tech?
What does one do with all that energy?
Sustain a society of billions? Trillions? Big ass CERN? Big ass s’mores?
We already sustain billions on a few billionths of the sun's overall output. The sheer size of a civilization harnessing all that power is unimaginable.
The civilization wouldn't even have to be huge. Some of the things they do could are just so far out of a frame of reference to us that we could never understand.
Advanced enough, they could create objects directly from energy. But it takes a BUTTLOAD of energy to make an object directly from energy. For 1 gram of matter, it takes around 9 ×10¹³ joules of energy to make. The same energy as 2.2 megatons of TNT. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was around 15 kilotons. To make one gram of matter directly from energy, it takes about the equivalent of 147 Hiroshima Bombs. You bet they'll be making use of all the energy they can!
3D printer at atomic level. Our concept of "harvesting" resources from planets seems too primitive to me. The last machine you have to build is the one that only needs energy as input and gets whatever you want as output, a new rug for your bed or a new copy of the latest design of an intergalactic cruiser.
Standard Template Construct.
Video game/VR rendering engines we can only dream of...
Bigg ass AI training.
Gotta be enough power for at least a few Bitcoin mining rigs...
Make space-time your bitch, open up a wormhole to the next nearest star and repeat the process. Scale this up to attain enough energy and computation to simulate your own universe with your own rules.
Create miki black holes and use them as a source of energy for interstellar expeditions.
Mine bitcoin
Use it to do work, in the physics sense, or store it for future work. That is all anyone does with energy. The scale of work is just much larger than you're used to imagining.
The best video game you’ve ever played.
Manipulate gravity and time would be my guess
Thinking highly advanced interstellar civilizations would build Dyson spheres is like people in the 1800s seeing a nuclear sub and thinking it runs on steam, they didnt know what nuclear even was, interstellar civs have tech that work on physics we havent even thought of yet
Nuclear subs and aircraft carriers do run on steam though. What do you think the nuclear power is there to do? What do you think is turning the screws of the sub or ship? The nuclear reactors heat water into super heated and then pressurized steam that turns the screws.
Yeah that was pretty hilarious and cringe to read. Glad someone pointed it out.
I’m confused, you mean it’s not powered by a sideways mushroom cloud? Preposterous!
Big oof
The reason for building a Dyson sphere or swarm could be just to maximize living conditions in one system to avoid ruining too many others in the galaxy.
The reasons are efficiency, monitoring and control. You could think of it as comfort, safety and defense.
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If you're that powerful, then you might do it for the hell of it. Or so some distant aliens can tell you exist(ed)... through detecting your dyson sphere.
I agree, but at the this time we can only go off our own model of existence and logic - from our current understanding it makes the most sense that living beings on planets that orbit the sun would get their energy in some way from it (the same way we do, in a roundabout way). The concept of a Dyson sphere is that it would be the most efficient way to extract that energy. Instead of a sun powering plants and animals, waiting millions of years, and then setting it on fire, the idea is skipping all those transducers and harvesting energy directly. Totally possible that there’s some even more efficient way than some sort of structure, but it’s a very likely building block on the way to that. So a civ that’s not so advanced that they’ve somehow moved past the idea of harvesting energy from stars would likely be using something like that.
If there's a way to harvest zero point energy, Dyson spheres are simply a waste of time and resources.
>seeing a nuclear sub and thinking it runs on steam They do.
I find it so dumb to look for this hypothetical tech that humans would may use. Same thinking behind fermi « paradox ».
Aliens wouldn’t also want to harness the energy of the most massive energy producing object for light years in any direction?
I think the idea is they may discover another source of energy that is more advanced
Idk man stars are pretty comon, it seems smart to use a giant ball of natural furry to power your civ
Yea but it’s hard to see what could beat free nuclear fusion with zero waste, no? I think our current inefficiencies are in the capture.
Imagine finding another source like zpe halfway through building the Dyson sphere lol.
lol if I was the leader of a civilization that this happened to, I would still finish the sphere for my own ego
They might build it for reasons other than energy-generation. Preserving other star systems’s ecosystems, for one.
So this idea is kinda incompatible with the existence of zero point energy right? It wouldn't make sense such a construction.
The dyson sphere is a non starter for me. Aliens would have figured something else out.
If you were born on another planet, WE would be aliens, and we have not figured anything else out which could compete with a Dyson sphere. So your comment is paradoxical. That said, I agree with you that it also seems pretty crazy. Also leads to questions like how would they transport the energy, and how would one construct it. Cold fusion seems pretty pessimistic at this time and from cursory research and fact checking, I find myself doubtful that would be worked out.
Eh, “could be” is doing a lot of work there. If you look for a pattern, eventually you’ll find it. Also, while the concept of a Dyson Sphere is cool and all, it’s still unclear whether it is a great use of resources, given the massive outlays for setup and maintenance, or whether there are better options for energy harvesting.
Better is a relative term. Not capturing the output of a readily available massive fusion reactor is wasteful. As is leaving planets, asteroids and comets lying around as dumb matter. If the world you live on were a desk sized globe, your entire ecosystem, including the atmosphere and oceans, is like the layer of paint on it. So much potentially useful matter in the interior volume going to waste.
“Potentially. may, could, possibly”. If these words are in a headline it’s meaningless.
I find the idea of Dyson spheres very... over the top its far more fantastic than people being abducted by aliens by light years and its strange this is an "accepted" possibility..absurd even. I feel there is far more and way less destructive and efficient ways to gather large amounts of energy.