Humanity will probably never build a Dyson Sphere/Swarm around our sun

The dyson sphere in Blame! is thousands, probably tens of thousands of years old, and is grown by out of control builders (bigass robots). No humans in the loop. It's pretty much the result having the materials, resources, and time, while nothing gets in your way.

Niggers, the materials to build a swarm of useful size could easily come from mining the moon or our own planet. A few city sized structures actually aren't that hard to build when you have no gravity.

From Earth, moon, asteroids, ect

youtube.com/watch?v=86JAU3w9mB8
youtube.com/watch?v=QfuK8la0y6s

Feasible or not, why would you do that in the first place.

Huge population
Different planet species are our friends
We are "inCorrectamundoterstellar" and it's a good place to hang out

*interstellar

they also can generate their building material basically out of thin air. some sort of energy to matter conversion, creating some concrete like material.

still, something that size would create such immense gravity, it would most likely collapse on itself

We don't even need it. If we needed to, I'm sure we could put centuries of our existence into it and get some kind of low-budent dyson swarm but what would be the point?

what the fuck, I don't think there is any material that can withstand that size and I don't mean that we are capable of producing, I mean that is capable of existing.

Blame! is great

Huge chunks of the city are in pocket dimensions.
It's super-science, nothing needs to be explained at that point.

It draws energy from dark matter and parallel universes to build the megastructure, and has gravity manipulation to prevent collapse.

A realistic Dyson swarm would require about half of Mercury for mass; and people would probably use it for living in simulations, not base reality.

I'd love to see a movie or read a book about something like a Dyson swarm being built and using hard science fiction. Just people designing and building shit, nothing more. It could be slice of life genre like Planetes for all it matters.

pretty sure there's stars bigger than that

>humanity will probably never
Lrn2probabilly fgt pls

the probability of humanity killing itself off is rather high.

And who evaluated that probability, and with what?

>humanity will probably never build a Dyson Sphere/Swarm around our sun

"Humans" per se, no...

Our plan is to initially construct a Dyson swarm of computronium subassemblies around a given star from all available materials, then continue that process with the star itself (stars are a very inefficient energy source), using Von Neumann probes to spread throughout the galaxy, and later, universe.

All inhabitants will be compound virtual entities...biological humans are also inefficient.

I did. With my own, reliable sources.

Biological entities are more efficient than machine-based entities; the latter of which are extremely limited in what they can do.

>No gravity
>Dyson sphere encompassing the sun

Fuck user, where do you wanna build that thing?

>stars are a very inefficient energy source

EXCEPT red dwarfs which are VERY efficient fusion reactors... a stable small red dwarf will burn for TRILLIONS of years
MOST stars in our galaxy are red dwarfs

yeh and they're about as far away from a solid as you can get

all those super large stars are basically a giant hot gas cloud barely held together by gravity surrounding a much smaller star that's desperately trying to keep it's fusion engine going with whatever material's at hand

their energy output is also drastically lower than other stars though
would probably be more efficient to try and build a swarm around a G-class

>their energy output is also drastically lower

How much energy is needed!

How much land does ONE person need for a home?
This is like telling ONE person that you will give them the ENTIRE continent of Australia for a home but then saying Africa is much bigger.

>tfw cautiously optimistc
arxiv.org/pdf/1510.04606.pdf

He's talking about a Dyson swarm. It is a bunch of individual space stations that orbit the sun independently. Like a shit load of O'Neil Cylinders for instance.

You would get the material for the swarm by harvesting the star you're building the swarm around
youtube.com/watch?v=pzuHxL5FD5U

also asteroids, the hundreds of trillions of tons worth of them, and all the planets and moons

It's a shame that if this were a pro-Trump post, people who be shitting themselves over how politics should stay in /pol/. And people wonder why /pol/ tries to shit up as many threads as possible.

>if this were a pro-Trump post

Are you saying Trump hates Dyson spheres?

>still blaming /pol/ for shit
>outright fabricating things to shitpost about /pol/

Trump is probably the most pro-space president since Kennedy
he's locked NASA to being pure space, and boosted their budget for space, and considering the interest he has in space engineering and mining, may possibly rev up their budget to rival the military if they get shit working and have profits in their grasp
no more 200,000 dollar research experiments on the effects of climate change on animal dick sizes

>may possibly rev up their budget to rival the military

Don't tease!

all relies on if they can get a return on investment very quickly
Asteroid mining could easily do this, but it has a very large startup cost you have to get around
the mars mission could be another method, if the mission is an actual mission to plant shit and people down permanently, and not some "lets go there, jack off for a couple days and leave" mission

So... seeing as how this is "sci," I thought it was time to at least use rough estimates on building this fantasy. So I built this spreadsheet. The simple data comes from
nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/

How big (blue). Let's make a small one - out to the orbit of Mercury. Talking in exponents, we get 28 m2, and let's make the shell 1m thick. So we get a volume of 28.

Something is a bit goofy on the site - the densities they give don't match a calculated density from the mass and volume. They calculate to about 20% more. In any case, both values are closer to describing water than rock. I'm going to use the larger value (pink) so we have something closer to gelatin than snot.

Multiplying the density of total known material available in the solar system (asteroids really don't add any significant mass), we end up with 31. That's a 1m thick shell of goo - not very useful. Even that flimsy bubble will require 1,000 times the mass of the available non-solar material in our system.

You can use the material from the Sun itself. It's still one-tenth that needed to build a small sphere, and then why would you - the heat source is gone?

For every factor of 10 you want to add to the thickness of the shell, the exponent of the required mass goes up by one. So a 10 m thick shell would require 32 mass.

So I ask again - where are you going to get the material to build this thing?

asteroid mining is a meme
there is nothing in space worth mining that can't be mined on earth

True. But it might be more plentiful, or easier to extract.

The quantity out there is insane compared to what we have on earth, having huge quantities of rare earth elements and platinum group metals freely available would very obviously do the world economy a lot of good.

>do the world economy a lot of good
How so?

Virtually unlimited supply vs limited demand and i'm not going to list the uses of each specific mineral i'll let you google them yourself.

So the prices of those materials collapses. How does that help the economy?

yes good idea lets completely cover up our own sun and block every planet from sunlight therefore freezing earth and everyone

>From Earth, moon, asteroids, ect

Really, you guys?
So... seeing as how this is "sci," I thought it was time to at least use rough estimates on building this fantasy. So I built this spreadsheet. The simple data comes from
nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/

How big (blue). Let's make a small one - out to the orbit of Mercury. Talking in exponents, we get 28 m^2, and let's make the shell 1 m thick. So we also get a volume (area x thickness) of 28 (dark blue).

Something is a bit goofy on the site - the densities they give don't match a calculated density from the mass and volume. They calculate to about 20% more. In any case, both total-averaged values are closer to describing water than rock. I'm going to use the larger value (dark pink) so assuming we are alchemists and can spread out the density amongst all the elements we have something closer to gelatin to work with.

Multiplying the averaged total density of total known material available in the solar system (asteroids really don't add any significant mass) with volume (dark blue), we end up with 31. That's a 1 m thick shell of goo - not very useful. But even that flimsy bubble will require 1,000 times the mass of the available planetary material in our system.

You can use the material from the Sun itself (mostly hydrogen and helium - how do you build with that?). It's still only one-twentieth that needed to build a small sphere, and then why would you - the sources of heat and inflationary pressure is gone, allowing the shell (more tar-like in terms of density now) to collapse in on itself.

And for every factor of 10 you want to add to the thickness of the shell, the exponent of the required mass goes up by one. So a 10 m thick shell would require 32 mass.

So I ask again - where are you going to get the material to build this thing?

Take platinum as an example which has industrial uses as a catalyst and for electrolysis but generally isn't used due to its high price. Crashing the price means it becomes commercially and economically viable to use industrially.

that's a good point, building a dyson sphere around a sun with a habitable planet would be a horrible waste

>he doesn't cut a hole in his dyson sphere

>opens a hole on the sphere
>oh but wait earth rotates around the sun
>earth rotates and ends up at the covered spot of the sun
>rip earth
genius!

Well thanks for that spoiler.

so we need a shit ton of money to build something that will probably diminish needs for energy
MONEY.

>seems legit

Well if we build the dyson sphere around earth, thermal control of the earth becomes a serious issue

Well, all we really care about is power. We can make solar cells that are VERY thin. As in microns thick.

What if we just, put a giant ring around the sun and colonized it with an artificial atmosphere and solar panels for days

wouldn't it just be separate parts connected together?

lmao just harvest my dick and you'll have all the matter you need to craft a Dyson sphere.

Most Dyson sphere sizes are actually 1AU in radius. Thus, Earth won't even be there. It will be replaced. Though, you can't make a Dyson sphere. You can make a Dyson swarm.

When it comes to military, economy doesn't really matter. Only resources matter. Be those resources humans or stuff to build/fuel military craft. A butt load of precious metals will tank the economies based on those things, but will make the military far more efficient/powerful.

Still, those resources are actually better used in space than on Earth for the most part. We have everything we need here to do what we want. The only difference is having more of some things to make a specific country less dependent on trade with other countries. Like the USA no longer needing blood minerals from Africa for making electronics.

Such a thing can also help bankrupt entire countries. Take China for instance. It is buying up as much gold as it can get its hands on. If you mine massive amounts of gold in space an bring it to Earth, you ruin the price of gold for China. That can cause major problems if they are banking on the fact gold is worth a lot of money.

>thermal control of the earth becomes a serious issue

I'm sure solar panels like that would have a double feature. 1 is the obvious PV cells but 2 is thermal difference. They'd heat up on the sunny side and cool off on the dark side. Put modules that use Seebeck and Peltier Effects to produce energy and you'll be able to cool things to some extent. Though, that's a shit load of thermal energy to move.

oh fuck no. The fact that the solar panels would be warmer than empty space would increase the temperature of the earth. Magical seebeck generators won't help with this.

>Well, all we really care about is power. We can make solar cells that are VERY thin. As in microns thick.

Still have a material problem. There are only a few elements that go into making solar panels, and they are not as plentiful. The vast majority of available material is hydrogen and helium, tied up in the four gas giants.

Next, you also need structural integrity, so you need material for that.

And why would you need that much surface area? How much power do you think you need?

This is simply not thought out. It's a child's musing, and nothing here is "science."

Nah you faggot, fuck off. That's stupid, forget about Dyson Spheres, Dyson Swarms is where it's at.

It's entirely possible and I see it happening in the next 100 to 200 years, even less if we are persistent enough to want it.

In terms of material, easy, you just leach and consume an entire planet. Literally disintegrating it.

>Make robots who replicate themselves and using the metallicity of a planet.
>Robots launch satellites in the process and orbit the sun.
>With this we can build a dyson swarm in just 10 years.
>When we get to the point where we want to be an actual ring, we can either take the satellites for resources, or simply throw them into the planet to make space.

This is going to happen to Mercury. We are going to destroy it. Seriously who gives a fuck about Mercury, worthy destruction for "FUCK YEAH HUMANITY" sake.

theodysseyonline.com/sure-lets-blow-up-mercury

forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/04/03/destroying-mercury-to-build-a-dyson-sphere-is-a-bad-idea/#51277f656fbe

Same reason the collapse of aluminum helped the economy
if shit is cheap, people will find uses for it
Gold is fucking magnificent for electronics, Platinum is great as a catalyst, etc.

>Gold is fucking magnificent for electronics
Not even better than Copper

>The most important industrial use of gold is in the manufacture of electronics. Solid state electronic devices use very low voltages and currents which are easily interrupted by corrosion or tarnish at the contact points. Gold is the highly efficient conductor that can carry these tiny currents and remain free of corrosion. Electronic components made with gold are highly reliable. Gold is used in connectors, switch and relay contacts, soldered joints, connecting wires and connection strips.
literally copy pasted, just for you

didn't they have some spherical inner shells made of even harder material?

I thought Dyson Spheres were also supposed to be habitats?

What I've never understood about Dyson swarms is how they transmit the energy back to the host society.

the swarm of space stations is the society

>Not even better than Copper

if it's not better than copper than why do all these profit driven companies use gold components, which are much more expensive than copper? are you saying they're just trying to bling out their electrical components? lul

>Biological entities are more efficient than machine-based entities

Future "machines" will be designed from the atom on up.

Imagine a form of matter that's akin to a hot-rodded living cell (that would actually be dwarfed by even the smallest biological cell), capable of feeding on practically all other matter (including stellar gas and plasma) and splitting via osmosis, while working in hierarchical coordination with many, many other such "cells" to form a single, planetary-system sized machine "organism" that's also a computing substrate inhabited by virtual beings and higher computing entities.

I imagine it traveling to another planetary system (we'll leave ours alone, for the sake of nostalgia) via a nanostarship package, where it will start it's "digestion" process on the inner planets, moons and asteroids, proceeding outwards after creating several Von Neumann probe nanostarships to "infect" more planetary systems. The original system will appear to dissolve into a Dyson Cloud in a reverse accretion disk, eventually converging on its parent star, which will also be digested.

Replacing a star with a vast baryon annihilation reactor to power the aforementioned Dyson Cloud would be a better utilization of its matter.

>machines

While that would be really neat, it can't be done due to the laws of thermodynamics. You are basically talking about fantasy magic technology.

Purely for the non-corrosive nature of Gold, in terms of electrical conductivity of metals, Silver is best, followed by Copper, then Gold. It's not worth wondering why Silver isn't used.

Silver is used in electronics. Lots and lots of electronics. Even the PCB traces are often times made of silver ink.

>You are basically talking about fantasy magic technology.

A Dyson Sphere *isn't* fantasy magic technology?

>it can't be done due to the laws of thermodynamics

Elaborate, plox.