Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/20/explainer-video-on-how-to-buil.html
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I was hoping that Dyson had come up with a Roomba-killer, BB-8 inspired vacuum cleaner.
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I wholeheartedly believe that any civilization advanced enough to build a Dyson Sphere, would be advanced enough to not have to.
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Seems like a lot of work. You guys handle it.
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Larry Niven’s Ringworld concept makes more sense.
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Regrettably, physics students several years later determined that the Ringworld concept, cool as it was, was unstable.
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Video says that building a swarm could lead to interstellar expansion. That’s cool, but unlikely. Mastering nuclear fusion is really all you need to get to alpha centauri. Sure, it will take a century or two, but all it needs is a captured comet with an engine and some living space attached.
Is there a kit?
The video never addresses out loud that you can’t have a swarm orbiting in a sphere—each orbit is only planar, and they travel at different speeds, intersect, interact (the swarm is massive enough that its own gravity matters, not even counting collisions), are behind each other as often as exposed, and all need stationkeeping. But then the later parts of the video depict a toroidal swarm and imply it’s only getting 1% of the energy. Which is great, but then don’t call it a sphere?
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Completely agree. I doubt very much there’s much more space travel beyond this even. We probably dissipate into some quantum, computational ether (maybe a completely reversable computing system).
It’s not energy: it’s efficiency.
Could you guys contribute to my Patreon plan to build a Dyson Sphere?
I’m collaborating with the Dyson vacuum guy and we only need a kajillionty googleplex dollars.
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Some pretty smart people think that harnessing a star’s energy is the next step in our evolution towards being a galactic civilization. Even if we are trying to develop other technologies to produce energy, having more than one idea on the go is probably wise.
A Dyson sphere is at least plausible, and other technologies we’ve experimented with have turned out to be less likely to work. I don’t think we have equally plausible ways to get a comparable amount of energy.
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I built one in my basement, but then I couldn’t get it up the stairs.
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Will this galactic civilization still be building walls to keep the Mexicans out?
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IKEA has a prototype.
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I’d love to, but not if you’re doing this with the Dyson vacuum guy.
His stuff just isn’t up to scratch.
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Unless someone has a truly exotic option in mind (‘truly exotic’ in the sense of doing mass->energy conversions at rates well beyond the ones we think the laws of physics allow, or building pet wormholes into the universe next door to extract their energy or something; ‘reliable fusion generators now available at harbor freight prices’ would count as mundane in this context); you pretty much have to go to the sun if you want to keep up with the Kardashevs.
It’s simply where the mass is. The fact that it’s also already functioning as a gravity contained fusion device is a nice plus; but even if you had the technology to sidestep that requirement there would still be no getting around the fact that nothing else remotely nearby is nearly as massive.
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If only we could harness the power of stupidity…
Why, Individual-1 alone could power a star drive.
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