Ever heard of a Dyson Sphere?

Buckle up friend, let's do some learning! 🚀

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I first heard of a Dyson Sphere when I was browsing YouTube (as I often do) and I saw that one of my favorite channels - Kurzgesagt - uploaded a new video: "How to Build a Dyson Sphere - The Ultimate Megastructure"
The following 9 minutes and 22 seconds blew my mind.

Basically, a Dyson Sphere is a "hypothetical megastructure" - meaning it's a thought experiment about a gigantic construction which completely encompasses a star to harness its solar power output. Imagine plugging your laptop directly into the Sun from the comfort of your own home.

Okay... but what is a Dyson Sphere? 🤨

Let me explain!

But first, disclaimer: I'm using a very specific version of the Dyson Sphere for this explanation! For more information, please check out the links above. Thank you!

A Dyson Sphere does essentially the same thing as our conventional photovoltaic systems, except right at the source. You wouldn't be able to use our generic solar panels for that though, they are way too rigid. Same with any type of fixed dome structure. One little asteroid and *poof*, the whole thing collapses into itself and gets absorbed into our Sun.

A Dyson Swarm would be a great alternative to that. Instead of prone-to-breaking, far-too-intricate, and short-lived solar panels, most likely it will be enormous mirrors which can be used to refocus sunlight to central collecting stations; like in concentrated solar power on earth. To keep them cost-effective and be able to be launched efficiently, they would have to be incredibly light, made of little more than polished metal foil (similar to solar sails on the ISS) bound to some supports.

That sounds pretty cool. Where do we start? 🤔

Here's where it gets tricky.

To acquire the necessary materials used to create our Dyson Swarm, we will most likely have to deconstruct an entire planet. Yes, really.
(This is prooobably why this whole thing is still just a thought experiment and not already in construction.)

For now let's keep this thought experiment going: If we are going to deconstruct an entire planet, which one should we pick? Why, Mercury, of course! Not only is it the closest planet to our Sun, it's also rich in minerals.

Solar power? Check ✅
Raw materials? Check ✅
Workforce? Well... ❌

Ugh, what is it now? 🙄

Humans are kind of squishy.

We're not really made for interplanetary travel, let alone working in a hostile alien environment. So ideally, we would have a lot of automation (robots) that are supervised by a small team of humans.

What we need:

Solar panels and collectors for power generation on-site
Mining facilities to strip-mine the surface
Refiners that extract resources from the mined materials and refine them into the swarm satellites
Electromagnetic rail-gun to launch the satellites into space (much more effective than traditional rockets)

Alright, we got all of that. Now what? 😎

This is my favorite part!

Now that the base system has been set up, we can expect exponential growth! One swarm panel provides power to build the next one. Those two work together to build the next two. Four become eight, eight become sixteen. You see where this is going, don't you? Within about sixty cycles of this, the Sun would be completely surrounded by solar panels.

Now we're finally getting to the good stuff. Even just 1% of the Sun's energy is an incredible change in our species' energy budget. We could create the infrastructure to beam basically unlimited amounts of energy around our solar system for all sorts of projects! Colonies on other worlds, terraforming entire planets, constructing more megastructures, or even traveling to other stars... It could be our start to interstellar civilization.

If we manage to do this, the only limitation left will be our own imagination.

That's it. I'm done. Thank you for listening and take care, friend!

Coded by Stephanie Zbinden / October 2022
What I listened to while coding: Subnautica OST & Subnautica: Below Zero OST