Dyson and Kardashev

Why do Dyson spheres/swarms and the Kardashev scale get propped up and worshiped so much in sci-fi settings?

For one, I often see it winding up as "And then all of the energy from the star gets magically teleported into technology all over the civilization with 100% efficiency, mystically empowering everything into hyper-technology beyond the greatest of dreams."

For two, it implies that energy consumption is somehow the most reliable measure of technology level, and that nobody ever bothers making energy-efficient technology. Measuring a society's scientific advancement by energy consumption is like using a gaming PC's power supply unit, as opposed to its GPU and other pieces, as a benchmark of its quality, right?

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Its just obscure enough to be interpreted as a sign of expertise on the subject, but simple enough to explain that even the target audience of America's Got Talent can learn to remember them.

A Dyson sphere of any appreciable value is so enormously wasteful to construct that it defies any kind of reason. If you have the means to build a dyson sphere, tying such a large investment of your resources to something as volatile and temporary as a star is like trying to build your own over a volcano for the free heat.

I see nerds parroting it to seem intelligent as the 'hard scifi' fan equivalent of the fedora in real life: superficially associated with an idealized package that only actually works as part of a larger ensemble that most people don't even know enough about to realize they don't have it.

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A Dyson sphere of any appreciable value is so enormously wasteful to construct that it defies any kind of reason. If you have the means to build a dyson sphere, tying such a large investment of your resources to something as volatile and temporary as a star is like trying to build your own over a volcano for the free heat.
Agreed. Take the star apart for the hydrogen in it, use that in many smaller fusion reactors that would have better overall energy generation due to not having the massive inefficiencies of gravity-based fusion. I mean, no one even ever cleans out a star, it's accumulating all this nasty shit inside it. Gross.

Technology level goes hand in hand with the amount of energy required and how it's produced. So far energy requirements have gone up dramatically as our own technology increases. Yes, energy production methods are very reliable ways to judge the tech level of a civilization.

Realistically Fusion Reactors would be far, far more useful than a Dyson sphere. Compact fusion reactors should be the go-to for a realistic pinnacle of energy production.

For point one: efficiency is frankly unimportant at that scale, since even by modern-day standards of energy requirements the energy collected by a Dyson sphere/swarm would be orders of magnitude more than we could find uses for.

For point two: the capacity to collect and harness energy at that scale demands a certain degree of advancement in and of itself. Just like extracting all the energy from a river implies the ability to build a dam, extracting all the energy of a given region of space implies the ability to produce, maintain, and man enormous collection systems. Further, both examples imply the existence of a demand which justifies the creation of such systems. Damming a river means you've got a town to power; damming a cluster of stars means you've got impossibly taxing power requirements, and therefore technological advances on a scale incomparable to earth.

A strip of solar panels less than a mile wide across the moon's equator would meet all of Earth's current energy needs. If we ever build a Dyson swarm, it'll be because our energy demand has outstriped all other options.

>Realistically Fusion Reactors would be far, far more useful than a Dyson sphere. Compact fusion reactors should be the go-to for a realistic pinnacle of energy production.
Goddam are you stupid. Do you think we're even close to near finishing physics?

Fusion reactors would be as likely to be the endpoint of power generation as much as steam turbines.

It's also because people can see the star vanishing and may shoot an RKV at it.

That logic is faulty because it ignores too many contributing factors and expressions.

Lets posit that tomorrow, some guy in his garage cracks Room Temperature Superconductors. Suddenly, transfer of energy across distance just became tremendously more efficient. Miraculously, it only takes 15 years for that to become widespread in the power infrastructure. As a result, we only need half the powerplants we currently have to supply power to the same or greater number of people and all their stuff, because less of it is lost in transmission.

By your stated logic, the development of a new groundbreaking technology AND 15 years of other accumulated technological progress represents a massive DECLINE in the technological level of the civilization, because they are producing half as much power as they were 15 years ago.

See the problem?

That's also a flawed example, because as the switch from incandescent bulbs to LEDs has demonstrated, people don't step down usage or production to match new efficiencies; they just start using more bulbs. People don't want to hear "you can have the same for half as much," they want "you can have twice as much for the same."

>assuming no new ways of using the energy will be invented or utilized
>assuming room-temperature superconductors won't revolutionize computing or literally any other technology and cause much more such technology to be created

>energy consumption is somehow the most reliable measure of technology level, and that nobody ever bothers making energy-efficient technology

In terms of simple physics, the more energy is available, the more joules of work can be done. Because of thermodynamics, you cannot have work efficiency of over 100%. After a certain point, energy-efficiency hits a hard wall, and in order to perform more joules of work, the worker (civilization, etc) needs more energy.

I would some calculations to say how much energy the world uses versus how much solar power would be needed at 100% efficiency to equal it, but you don't sound like you've done a lot of thinking about the subject, so I don't see the point in trying to convince you.