A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power output. The concept is a thought experiment that attempts to imagine how a spacefaring civilization would meet its energy requirements once those requirements exceed what can be generated from the home planet's resources alone. Because only a tiny fraction of a star's energy emissions reaches the surface of any orbiting planet, building structures encircling a star would enable a civilization to harvest far more energy.
TIL: About Dyson Sphere. A hypothetical megastructure we would put around a star to absorb the energy being sent in space
2 years ago by Kyoyeou (Ki jəʊ juː) to c/til
dependencyinjection 2 points 2 years ago
I believe they were making a joke because if you wrap this thing around a star there really is no day night cycle because it’s all star. Our day night cycle comes because we are spinning.
slazer2au 67 points 2 years ago
If you want to make one you can.
murmelade 23 points 2 years ago
I pirated this to check it out and enjoyed it so much that I bought it even though it's in Early Access and that's very very rare for me. I still haven't played it more though as I'm still waiting for it to come out of EA, looking very much forward to play it again.
SubArcticTundra 6 points 2 years ago
I'm the same lol. I bought several books in print after pirating the ebooks.
thisbenzingring 2 points 2 years ago
$20 is the perfect price IMO
edit: pirating this game is kinda funny to me, its a Chinese Dev. team so who knows if there are assets in the game that are not legit. I will probably buy it but I wouldn't shame anyone who did find another way to get it without purchasing it
KyuubiNoKitsune 6 points 2 years ago
It's a i think 5man dev team and they've poured their souls into it, I think they deserve the money
thisbenzingring 2 points 2 years ago
I bought the bundle with Shapez 2
both are really good
dependencyinjection 6 points 2 years ago
Help me. Factorio has me.
Spacehooks 44 points 2 years ago
Be carful with those. You may block the light of constellation aliens use and really piss then off.
rockerface 24 points 2 years ago
Eh, they won't find out until a few centuries later anyway
Spacehooks 8 points 2 years ago
Well unless they are monitoring or are relatively close. The issue was they got annoyed cause their decedendants won't see their "holy constellation". Something like a north star to them I guess. So anyway I started a purification campaign In response.
neatobuilds 8 points 2 years ago
Unless they have some fancy alien sensor with quantum entangled particles so they get an alert instantly
Spacehooks 4 points 2 years ago
You're assuming they are not part of the deep state already!
DragonTypeWyvern 2 points 2 years ago
It's a Stellaris reference. Once you can build Dyson spheres there's a chance your (also FTL capable) neighbors complain about you blocking their sacred star.
I usually just give them money and they forgive me.
Spacehooks 1 point 2 years ago
Certainly humane than livestock.
TheTechnician27 13 points 2 years ago
"People of Earth, I am Lrrr of the planet Omicron Persei 8."
AtariDump 2 points 2 years ago
You don’t want a baby being born with the “giliac” Star sign.
Spacehooks 1 point 2 years ago
That's a good one i forgot about. I'm shocked they didn't go all in and think that was a sign to purge everyone born under that star but that's not that kind of show.
original_reader 26 points 2 years ago
You need to watch more Star Trek, friend.
Specifically "The Next Generation", Season 6, Episode 4, " Relics".
Thank me later. 😁
OpticalMoose 6 points 2 years ago path: 0 15144908 15145211, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 0
FlyingSquid 3 points 2 years ago
With a bottle of green.
BowtiesAreCool 2 points 2 years ago
No bloody A B C or D
halykthered 23 points 2 years ago
A pinnacle of science, a wonder of engineering, that we will never get to see in our lifetimes. Instead, we get to see Taiwan get nuked or something, I don't know. I don't follow the news much, I only know I'm disappointed.
QuantumSparkles 3 points 2 years ago
If we could just speed up cryogenics or hibernation technology…
DragonTypeWyvern 1 point 2 years ago
Gideon the 9th universe begins
thisbenzingring 2 points 2 years ago
Taiwan is too valuable to nuke. It will be squeezed with a lot of Navy to land attacks, destroying many of the places people live but not the places they work. Then urban warfare will be the rest and it will probably be death of millions.
batcheck 14 points 2 years ago
Came here to say that if you like this concept, Peter Hamilton has a book series called Commonwealth Saga in the science fiction category that is excellent. Lots of pseudoscience from early 2000s in that series.
rowanthorpe 2 points 2 years ago
That's definitely one of Randall's more wholesome ones. By the way, this is one of my favourite book quotes on that subject:
The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.
T.H. White, The Once and Future King
Kyoyeou 7 points 2 years ago
Yeah never heard about it, although I never watched Star Trek personally.
But did you know that we can extract Graphene by heating it up super high so that everything else gets destroyed except graphene?
Madison420 4 points 2 years ago
Read the bobiverse and you'll come across a topopolis. The pictures on wiki suck so here's one from fiction.
VitoRobles 3 points 2 years ago
I didn't know that! You keep sharing the hits! Keep it coming!
argh_another_username 6 points 2 years ago
Wait! The same problem Larry Niven’s Ringworld have also applies to Dyson Spheres? Huh! Saving to read later.
rumba 9 points 2 years ago
If you think it's cool, you should try the game :)
VitoRobles 6 points 2 years ago
That's crazy that they made this hypothesis based on a steam game
Fedegenerate 3 points 2 years ago
The other "benefit" to the sphere is blacking out a star. Other life, should it exist, is less likely to find the structure. ITT people destroying my dreams of a big shelly boi
Bimfred 3 points 2 years ago
I would think it'd make it more likely that you're discovered when you turn your star into a black ball with a gigantic IR signature where a star should be. Any civilization with a cursory understanding of gravity and stellar spectra would turn every telescope they have on you.
Fedegenerate 3 points 2 years ago
What does IR red shift into over cosmic distances? But it would be just as, if not less, noticeable as a star suddenly dimming to [100%-optimal capture rate]
Bimfred 2 points 2 years ago
Deeper IR, microwave and radio. Within a galaxy, redshift can be ignored. In another galaxy, the issue is moot, you don't need to worry about them and they don't need to worry about you.
Our current scopes can pick up brown dwarfs with a surface temperature below freezing. An object the diameter of a planetary orbit, with the gravitational effect of a main sequence star and giving off just black body radiation is gonna stick out like a neon "Interesting stuff here!" sign the moment someone does a long wavelength survey of your general region.
Even if you build a swarm instead of a solid shell, you're still going to shift the star's apparent spectrum towards IR, from the swarm radiating waste heat. A star whose mass, diameter and emission spectrum don't match up with the math is inviting investigation, regardless of how you try to mask what you've been doing.
PlasticExistence 2 points 2 years ago
The gravity from the star will also still be there regardless of how much of its EM signature is visible outside of the sphere.
rowanthorpe 2 points 2 years ago
It would probably be configured using YAML and require health checks and quorum monitoring. I'm not sure I would want that job, especially on-call shifts. The consequences of downtime would be on a whole other level.
BigBrainBrett2517 3 points 2 years ago
wHaT aBoUt wHen iTs NoT WinDy!!??!?!?
LordeMostarda 6 points 2 years ago
There is also the Matrioshka brain, a hypothetical supercomputer powered by a Dyson sphere
Wxnzxn 6 points 2 years ago
Wait until you learn about the even bigger ones:
SplashJackson 2 points 2 years ago
I've played that Stellaris mod, pretty sweet
Internetexplorer 5 points 2 years ago
Kind of looks like an atom
spicehoarder 4 points 2 years ago
My initial reaction: "What? No."
After thinking a little bit: "hmm I guess you could say that..."
cewren 1 point 2 years ago
While the idea is charming, a Dyson sphere itself would still consist of matter and as such it would emit radiation according to its temperature (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_radiation). And since it surrounds a star it is heated from the inside and would definitely emit radiation that can be detected. Dark Matter is missing this radiation part and is only observed by its gravitation.
So the answer is no, unfortunately.
m0darn 1 point 2 years ago
Edit to add disclaimer: this is shitpost level math here guys, I'm just spitballing.
It would definitely emit thermal radiation. if it was 99% efficient and the size of pluto's orbit, around a star like the sun, and the energy was used to create matter, I think it would radiate the remaining energy as 0.009 W/m2 with a peak emission wavelength of 150micrometers. The James Webb telescope has infrared capabilities that max out at 28.5 micrometers so def not detectable.
But probably a dyson sphere would be smaller than pluto's orbit, which would greatly increase the apparent power, and shorten the wavelength. idk it's all imaginary.
I won't subject you to my hand writing but I did (power of sun × 0.01)/(surface area of sphere with Pluto's orbital radius) to get radiation intensity (0.009 W/m2). Then rearranged Stefan-Boltzmann law to solve for temperature (19.8K). Then used Wien's Displacement Law to calculate the peak wavelength (1.5×10^-4^ m).
Maybe I'll run the numbers again with a martian orbit radius, and 50% efficiency.
m0darn 1 point 2 years ago
Okay I did the same calculation but with Martian orbit as dyson sphere size, and 50% efficiency I got a wavelength of 3.4um so nicely in the infrared range of JWST.
I think the sphere would need to be like 99.95% efficient to be undetectable by JWST at Martian orbit radius.
Quadhammer 4 points 2 years ago
Start with a dyson ring or swarm
merdaverse 2 points 2 years ago
It's a pretty cool concept, and I enjoyed building one in Dyson Sphere Program, but I don't really understand how you would transport that amount of energy to where you need it. Are they like mirrors that redirect and focus light to some point?
Hadriscus 2 points 2 years ago
Split into several laser beams targeting a bunch of big-ass converters in line around the equator. But it would have to be extremely accurate and route a fraction of total power unless you want to pulverize earth
kerrigan778 1 point 2 years ago
Presumably superconductors are a given at that level of technology. But also at megastructure scale, we could easily talk about very exotic energy transfer methods. Mirrors, microwave transmission antennas, kilometer wide conduits of highly conductive "ground" material, large scale production of fusion fuel, maybe usable power from heat difference is such an efficient process at any scale that the sphere just has a hot side on the inside (towards the sun) and a cold side on the outside (towards cosmic background) and anyone who needs power just patches in a heat pipe to the inside surface.
Actually there's a lot there on that last one. Large efficient power plants could be built anywhere where people needed them hooked with big heat pumps into the inner surface and outer radiator surface, smaller applications could just hook into the inner surface and radiate heat passively and let the climate control deal with it. Rogue energy thieves could be tracked down by scanning for unregistered cold spots on the inner surface.
RizzRustbolt 1 point 2 years ago
Most of them use Gap Transmission to get the power from the plants to the users. That's when they use microfolds in space to transmit power across large distances.
Some of them more exotic methods than that though. One of them uses neurotissue harvested from Chuck as a transmission medium.
Quadhammer 1 point 2 years ago
I think the main goal is to power structures around the star and stockpile energy. End end goal would be to create a stellar engine so you can move the solar system itself
bss03 2 points 2 years ago
You might like this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A about how to build one from Earth.
Clinicallydepressedpoochie 2 points 2 years ago
We will be lucky to have Dyson vacuums at the end of this century
brucethemoose 1 point 2 years ago
Would recommend Orion's Arm for "theoretical" but fiction takes on structures like this:
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/5067d430e6021
That article is not comprehensive either, their universe is quite expansive.
Two of my favorites may be "W-brains," computing structures with very carefully arranged wormhole pairs serving as data buses to overcome the latency of communicating at such scale, and "neural stars," another take which is a computational structure inside a neutron star sized volume/mass (again, to overcome latency issues).
There are much smaller megastructures too, depending on where in the timeline you are looking.
BackgrndNoize 2 points 2 years ago
Is this like the SCP foundation stories but for space opera science fiction?
brucethemoose 2 points 2 years ago
Precisely.
And it's a "hard" sci fi universe rooted in theoretically possible physics. No FTL or causality violations.
Mnemnosyne 1 point 2 years ago
Depends on what you mean by ringworld. The thing I think of is orders of magnitude more impossible than a Dyson sphere, which is already pretty impossible.
burgersc12 0 points 2 years ago
Any civilization that needs that much energy would have long ago exhausted their planet's resources and gone extinct.
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