/dsg/ - Dyson Sphere General

Redpill me about Dyson Spheres.

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It's a type II civ scam run by entities like Wylon Fusk.

You mean Melon Musketeer?

gordon freeman drives a boat into one at the end of episode 3

wew RIP

Any civilization capable of making a Dyson Sphere would have figured something else out

literal god tier tech in theory, civs that could build them probably wouldnt just build them willy nilly everywhere but rather a few for specific purposes requiring that level of retard energy

It's some sort of super-duper energy gathering device a future civilization could build assuming that they don't invent a better way to generate energy than to build solar panels.

>few for specific purposes requiring that level of retard energy
This. You're not going to waste millions of years building this thing if you don't have something specific in mind.

Especially since the solor system does not have enough mass for one, nor is the lifetime of our sun finite.
You could just have a bunch of ONeill cylinder in orbit around a star.

Would they though? The concept of the project itself isn't that "complicated" relativity speaking, it's just the SCALE of the project more than anything.

>Create swarms of smart-bots (through self-duplication or some kind of huge factory)
>Send them into solar systems rich in minerals/ and ores
>Convert the planets into materials required for one of the dyson sphere "energy collectors/solar panels/whatever"

Obviously it's a bit of a stretch for me to say "IT'S SIMPLE!!" given our current technology, but it's not like it requires too much fancy super sci-fi "zero point black hole energy harvesting singularity energy" kind of stuff.

To build a basic dyson sphere you don't need a lot of mass. You need around 1-3% of mercury's mass. You can build it out of statites(sattelites that hover over sun using sun's light to counteract the gravity) which shuld whey around 68g/m^2. You can do the math yourself.

>You need around 1-3% of mercury's mass.
Please inform us on how you derived that value.

I was wrong. Density of statites should be .78g/m^2. And it takes .005% of mass of mercury for dyson sphere made if statites at 1AU

Isn't just making a dyson swarm much more practical? Cover the upper poles of the sun with antimatter factories and solar energy transmitters, keep the equator clear to provide light for the planetary biospheres and boom, all the energy you'd ever need for anything without the logistical nightmare of a solid dyson sphere.

Wait wait. If a dyson sphere is so cheap that means massive terraforming projects using mirrors/space shades/magic is actually perfectly doable once at least some of the earth's industry becomes space based...
There might be hope for mars and venus after all.

Sure, sold dyson is bullshit if it's not made od statites. But you can make it non solid also nevermind. But you couldn't build a swarm and keep the equator open because orbit must pass over the equator or is at the equator itself. You can make your thing with statites. Fucking statites ftw.

Okay, so you end up with a 2D surface (?) with a density three-quarters that of water. I don't know how this is expected to have structural integrity. How think do you expect to make this to hold up?

I don't trust my own maths. So I use a spreadsheet. Here's my result. For a DS of radius equal to the distance of Mercury's orbit and 1 cm thick, using all the material available in the solar system (based on a weighted average of the combined density of all known mass), you would need 1,000 times the mass of the entire solar system (not including the Sun itself, because then why build the thing?).

>tfw civilisation has only reached Dyson vacuum cleaner level

how would you convert all that energy into air pressure on mars

You can send self replicating machines to do all the work but they need yo be very advanced ofc. An once you have acces to that much energy you can do everything that you can do with thath much energy

One statite can be just a small computer with some gyros to controll attitude. They can be made of some structural girders and thin foil that is solar panel

>Would they though? The concept of the project itself isn't that "complicated" relativity speaking, it's just the SCALE of the project more than anything.

not the same person, but I think this was kind of the point of the post to which you were replying

Do. the. math. What materials? Where do you get those elements? Most of the mass of the solar system is hydrogen and helium. Think! This is Veeky Forums. None of your /b/pol/tard opinion shit.

I think, mining Jupiter for hydrogen and burn it in fusion reactor would be much easier.

How strong should the sphere be to capture a black hole?

>self replicating construction

No

NO

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo

Unfeasible, waste of resources, inefficient, literally not necessary at all.
Need I go on?

Scale is important for how long the thing takes to make based on the current ability to produce. Given enough time, sure, at our current tech we could come close to achieve a giant structure where the resources required are plentiful, but that time frame is so long term that our human lives would stop it from coming to reality. We are incapable of thinking on that kind of time frame (like 1000s of years) because it goes beyond our children and grandchildren and grand grand children, and so on. So if another species that advances to our tech abilities somewhere in the universe, and they also live longer/think and value differently than us, than maybe it's possible.

>Convert the planets into materials required for

Wait so we are going to be destroying entire solar systems? What if one of those planets is habitated and/or would have developed life in the future?

Would we only send our autismbots to solar systems where there couldn't possibly be life? Seems like we'd accidentally into planetary genocide

Dyson spheres are impossible because of structural integrity issues and tidal forces would tear it apart.

Dyson Swarms would work, though. You just release an extremely large amount of individual satellites around the star at various heights, and set up their orbits so that there's no possible path from the star to space that doesn't pass through at least one satellite at any given time.

This method also has the advantage that you'll start producing energy the second you release the very first satellite

unrealistic bullshit that if you could build a Dyson sphere, you wouldn't want to.

It would be cheaper and more efficient to simply mine stars for use in magic-tech reactors.

>put a shitload of solar satellites around a star
>there is no purpose to any of it
megastructures are fucking stupid.

The dyson swarm approach sounds like kessler syndrome would come to bite you in the ass eventually.

t. alien from dyson swarm who doesn't want competition

Dyson spheres are not actual fucking solid spheres, they're swarms of small individual habitats and solar arrays in a foggy cloud around the star
because of this, we have the technology to build one right now, an O'Neil cylinder is not a very complex thing compared to the shit we routinely construct

Kessler syndrome isn't real. Not only does it fail to ever reach criticality but it rapidly degrades itself into safety of gentle sand.

>he doesn't know how fucking painful shit hitting an object at orbital speed is
flecks of paint frequently punch big ass fucking cracks into the windows of the ISS because they're going so god damn fast

Well you don't need a lot of mass. So you can choose what asteroids to mine and your choice can be dependant on the composition of asteroids. As you might know, asteroids can be rich with different elements, usualy metals, and there are a lot of them...lot more than you need for a basic dyson.

>1 gram projectile makes little spiderweb and reduces the amount of space junk through agglomeration
>this will somehow force every satellite to act like a fissile isotope
KE = 0.5mv2, If we assume inelastic collisions, as most kessler faggots must assume than you have a collision which results in 1 big chunk, 2 smaller chunks, 4 tiny chunks, 8 itty bitty chunks and 16 littler chunks. The big chunk has the smallest velocity change, the tiniest chunks have the largest velocity, so you get a few heavy chunks with almost no orbital change and a bunch of super fast paint flecks who waste all that kinetic energy into shit that doesn't do anything.

Paint flecks aren't dangerous and hyper-velocity collisions make paint flecks and smaller while leaving big chunks of whatever was hit in the same orbit it was before.

why not both?
It'll take a long ass time to harvest a star fully, so it makes perfect sense to make use of solar power while you mine it

most asteroids within Jupiter orbit are rocky or carbonaceous with plenty of ices. Lots of silicon, lots of carbon and lots of aluminum and calcium. Nickel Iron asteroids are more rare of the asteroid types.

My only point is that if you have so many orbital "space station" colonies to block out a significant amount of solar irradiation you've got some dumb shit overpopulation going on and you're a space-faring civilization dead end. Dyson swarms are about as dumb as you can be.

Depending on limitations inherent in your biology, it may be about the best you can do.

how in the bloody fuck would overpopulation be an issue
in a space habitat, absolutely everything would be recycled, the only thing you'd need additional amounts of are things that are ridiculously plentiful

You'd need some exponential population growth to even need to approach anything like a dyson swarm and you fucking run out of solar sytem mass building more orbital bullshit.

Think of it like Peak Oil, but its Peak Mass. There's only so much mass to build a dyson sphere and the more you asteroid and planetary mine the more work it is to extract the remaining.

If you're carving mass off a planet, why would it get harder to mine it, it would get easier because of the gravity gradually lessening
plus you have the ability to draw mass out of the gas giants and sun to continue having shit to use
and the amount of asteroids, planets, and moons allows us a population in the quintillions, we can mine and construct shit a lot faster than women can give birth, much faster when you bring 3D printing into the mix, so those habitats would be mostly unpopulated, or completely unpopulated

Yes it is easier to mine a planet that you've reduced the mass to almost nil, but planetary mass is the least available in the system next to solar mass. Planetary mass is like the Canadian oil sands or oil that requires expensive extracting techniques compared to main belt asteroids which is mass that is pretty much already where you want it to be.

This nigga gets it.

even with the difficulty, shit like 16 Psyche, Ceres, and the moon would give us all the resources we need to make many more habitats and ships than we actually need at that point, so we'd have lots of time to develop more sophisticated mining techniques while working to populate the habitats

>"dumb as you can be"
sums up your post nicely

Yeah, Dyson Swarms being a better alternative.

I just learned that the maximum diameter of a graphene O'neill Cylinder is 1000 km, more realistically closer to 500 km. That's flipping huge, as big as any country in the world.

Now we just need to figure out how to produce 15 million square kilometers of 2 meter thick graphene. The poster below me doesn't get a grant until he figures it out.

Dyson spheres WOULD NOT ACTUALLY BE COMPLETE SPHERES,

it's more of a dyson swarms.

picture this, some alien race keeps adding more and more satellites to capture the power of a sun, eventually they almost cover the whole diameter, but there will always be holes.


The key thing here is that its something that's possible, yes even with todays technology and we havent observed it anywhere, which is a good argument of the fermi paradox because

even if its incredibly rare, we should have observed at least one

Not worth it, you have to sink 80k minerals and several decades into it before it even starts producing energy, and you could have just spent that time colonizing new planets or even building habitats.

HOLY SHIT HOW RETARDED CAN YOU BE, it's not an actual huge sphere that civilizations spend a trillion years building then turn it on with a switch

its a swarm of solar panels in orbit around a star so big it blocks its light entirely from the outside, thats literally it

It's about maximum efficiency, but I don't see how anyone could find it aesthetic. But then when you reach the point of extremely large, extremely power hungry civilizations the former may outweigh anything else.

It's a joke about the game Stellaris, you idiot

>Dyson Swarm
Specifically half a million rings of O'Neill cylinders stretching around the Sun, each ring containing one million 500 km diameter, 10,000 km long cylinders. That's 500 billion cylinders total in the Solar System. If each cylinder has half of its living land area devoted to glass walls to let sunlight in, that's still as much living space as the land area of Russia.

If every ring contains one hundred million people then the total population of the Solar System would become 50 quintillion people.

...