The folks over at Technology Review are reporting on new thinking about the concept of Dyson Spheres. Ibrahim Samiz and Salim Ogur of Bogazici University in Istanbul theorize that building Dyson Spheres around white dwarf stars would be more feasible and more likely to be implemented, than around Sun-like stars. Their paper, submitted on March 15, 2015, details the hypothesis.
From Technology Review's coverage:
Back in 1960, the physicist Freeman Dyson publish an unusual paper in the journalScience [sic] entitled “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infra-red Radiation.” In it, he outlined a hypothetical structure that entirely encapsulates a star to capture its energy, which has since become known as a Dyson sphere.
The basic idea is that all technological civilizations require ever greater sources of energy. Once the energy of their home planet has been entirely exhausted, the next obvious source is the mother star. So such a civilization is likely to build a shell around its star that captures the energy it produces.
Of course, such a sphere must also radiate the energy it absorbs and this would produce a special signature in the infrared part of the spectrum. Such a source of infrared radiation would be entirely unlike any naturally occurring one and so provide a unique way of spotting such as advanced civilization.
Ibrahim Semiz and Salim Ogur at Bogazici University in Turkey, define an entirely new class of Dyson sphere. Instead of thinking about a sphere around a Sun-like star, Semiz and Ogur consider a sphere built around a white dwarf.
Despite fictional accounts depicting a solid sphere, based on a literal interpretation of the 1960 paper, Dyson reportedly said that "A solid shell or ring surrounding a star is mechanically impossible. The form of 'biosphere' which I envisaged consists of a loose collection or swarm of objects traveling on independent orbits around the star."
One commenter calculates that this puts the theorized Dyson sphere within an order of magnitude of the one featured in "Relics", an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @02:21AM
Relics? You are a relic if you remember Star Trek The Old Generation. Take your meds, grandpa, we don't want you crapping your pants again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @02:29AM
Get off my lawn, boy! And I do emphasize the word, 'boy'.
I've got half a mind to give you what's comin' to you young whippersnapper!
If I didn't have to go change my diaper and rewind my VHS tapes, I'd give you such a wedgie!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @02:26AM
And you need solutions for "kessler syndrome" before then (since there will be accidents, unwanted collisions).
(Score: 2) by sigma on Monday March 30 2015, @02:36AM
Unless you use Bussard ramjets to stabilize the ring.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @03:39AM
Until terrorists push your ring straight into the sun. Aten akbar, jihad!
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @03:42AM
I don't know about you, but I personally have more experience hearing terrorists say things like, "God hates fags! The Bible says they're an abomination!" etc etc. I don't know any terrorists that speak something other than English.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @03:59AM
You're right, of course. In my experience, terrorists say things like, "Take the fight to the enemy overseas before they can attack us!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @10:43AM
Aten, as in Aten Ra, the Sun God of Ahkenaten, the Egyptian Pharaoh of quite some time ago. The OP probably reached to far, and flew too high, and now is undone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @03:40PM
... you do realize that literally every middle-eastern country punishes homosexuality with death?
they don't need to shout about it... because it's already the law of the land.
plus, in their scheme, it looks like being a heretic already trumps being gay.
if you brought up abortion in the US, i'd understand the terrorism claim you made... but homosexuality? really? terrorism?
your parochial view on the issue is pretty fucking distorted.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Monday March 30 2015, @06:36PM
... you do realize that literally every middle-eastern country punishes homosexuality with death?
Nope. [wikipedia.org] Middle-Eastern countries generally have a sketchy record with regards to gay-rights, but "literally every" is pretty high bar to set.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @03:45AM
Once you get it all together it *may* be possible to keep it together.
The trick would be putting it together. It would be like trying to keep a piece of spaghetti in a perfect circle hanging onto the outside of a 747 as it cruses from London to NY.
All it would take is 1 failure while building and the thing would probably unwind quite quickly.
Then IF you are able to build the thing you have to keep it orbitaly stable around the whole circumference. Otherwise it would twist apart. That is just a 'halo'. For a sphere it is even worse. Never mind the pull of the star trying to pull the whole thing in which is not even across the whole surface of the star. Plus the challenge of getting off center and the star eating you as it slowly wobbles further and further off center.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday March 30 2015, @02:59AM
Do we even need to surround the star? Have your habitat(s) orbiting the star, have separate modules just collecting more energy and beaming it to where its needed.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by khchung on Monday March 30 2015, @03:22AM
The point is, I think, that you would have more and more such "modules" as the energy needs of the habitat grows (or you get more habitats), so eventually the entire star would be effectively surrounded.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Monday March 30 2015, @03:51AM
By the time you reach that point, you'll have had plenty of time to figure out how to do it without catastrophic failure. And you could support a population of trillions. If it can't be done, you remain a "Dyson swarm".
There are 4 white dwarf stars within 16.3 light years, so room for expansion.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by khchung on Monday March 30 2015, @04:28AM
You think 16 light years is close by? By the time we can send anything useful over 16 light years, we would have computers powerful enough to calculate the orbits needed to effectively cover our Sun with solar panels, whatever you call it, and have it finished already (if it is worth building).
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday March 30 2015, @04:40AM
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Extend the human lifespan, and there are a number of propulsion options that can get you there within a few centuries. People will do it because they can.
We don't need FTL for interstellar travel, although that would be a nice surprise.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by khchung on Monday March 30 2015, @06:29AM
A few centuries. Just to get there.
On the other hand, you think it would take more than a few centuries to compute the stable orbits for solar panel modules, and to launch them, if they are an effective means of collecting energy?
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday March 30 2015, @08:36AM
A few centuries. Just to get there.
What's your point?
On the other hand, you think it would take more than a few centuries to compute the stable orbits for solar panel modules, and to launch them, if they are an effective means of collecting energy?
You seem to be laboring under the somewhat laughable premise that major world organizations do things just because they make sense scientifically. If we did things just because they made sense, we'd be a hell of a lot closer to sustainable clean energy, wouldn't still be denying climate change, and the x% wouldn't be hoovering up all the money.
And if we went back to the 50's and made a list of all the stuff that people thought we would be doing by now, I bet most of them we actually could be doing; we just aren't because of economic reasons, i.e. it's too expensive to make the desired profit margin on.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 30 2015, @12:35PM
You seem to be laboring under the somewhat laughable premise that major world organizations do things just because they make sense scientifically. If we did things just because they made sense, we'd be a hell of a lot closer to sustainable clean energy, wouldn't still be denying climate change, and the x% wouldn't be hoovering up all the money.
Given that the major world organizations, such as the IPCC, are advocating, futilely, a cap of 2 C without regard to the actual needs of humanity or evidence, I'm not particularly impressed by the above assertions. We are already "hell of a lot closer" to sustainable clean energy, in that we already did it. It's just not worth implementing at the moment.
As to denying "climate change", who really is doing that? I think the vast majority of people agree that there is climate change, be it glacial periods or God flooding the Earth for 40 days. And I bet there still is a majority of humanity that agrees that humanity is changing climate now, even that they are contributing significantly to global warming, a particular form of climate change. This acknowledges a big step to the actual problem here. But I don't think a majority of the world believes that human-caused global warming is important enough to justify the huge reduction in human well-being that it currently would require to reach the extreme thresholds I mentioned above. And I don't see the major world organizations helping there.
Finally, there's the matter of the "x%". I see no evidence ever put forth that today's level of inequity is anything other than a benefit to us. There is just a vague feeling that more inequity is bad. But I don't see a lot of valuable stuff like creation of useful jobs or building of infrastructure happening just because we attempt to cap wealth or income inequity. Just throw up a progressive tax system, cut out the loopholes, and call it a day.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday March 30 2015, @12:44PM
I see no evidence ever put forth that today's level of inequity is anything other than a benefit to us.
I agree with the rest of your post but this was total LOL time. Sure, go around saying "let them eat cake", what could possibly go wrong? A study of history is useless because history never repeats itself or provides insight on the present and future.
Its hard to find a historical analog of similar level of the problem that didn't end with heads falling in baskets or firing squads. And the rich folks were not exactly the only ones doing the dying.
Nope, revolution pretty much sucks for everyone, in fact its historically unusual when it doesn't suck for everyone, and flooring it to get there faster and make a bigger impact is perhaps not the most humane strategy for all involved.
The sea level going up an irrelevant amount isn't going to kill my kids or grandkids, but revolution is a clear and present danger to their lives, aside from the obvious impact of decline in standard of living due to poverty both before and after the revolution, obviously.
If the only way to feed yourself and your kids is by playing baseball, and one of the players says F you all, I own that ball, and I'm taking it and going home, screw the rest of you, either everyone dies including the dude going home with the ball, or someone is getting jumped by the rest of the team and it isn't going to be pretty for anyone involved.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 30 2015, @05:40PM
I agree with the rest of your post but this was total LOL time. Sure, go around saying "let them eat cake", what could possibly go wrong? A study of history is useless because history never repeats itself or provides insight on the present and future.
You are the only one saying "Let them eat cake". Maybe you shouldn't say that since you clearly don't believe it?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday March 30 2015, @12:35PM
And if we went back to the 50's and made a list of all the stuff that people thought we would be doing by now, I bet most of them we actually could be doing; we just aren't because of economic reasons, i.e. it's too expensive to make the desired profit margin on.
Not to mention how culturally weird most of it would be to have a 1960 "thing" in 2010. In honor of Dysons paper from 1960, lets think about what a 1960 space bus to Alpha Centauri would look like. First of all the white folks would sit in the front and the black folk would legally be required to sit in the back and they'd get the shit beaten out of them if they tried to re-arrange the seating plan or complained about it, in fact they'd beat the shit out of any white who agreed with the blacks. And think of the engineering headache of having not two bathrooms, but four, because you need men and womens rooms, for whites and colored (and apparently non-white non-colored people either don't exist legally or have to piss in the potted plants and hope no one notices). And the space bus has a lynching post so if a black dude somehow talked to a white woman, despite the police enforced assigned seating in opposite ends of the ship, then they'd hang the black dude from the lynching post and absolutely everyone on the ship would think that perfectly normal BAU. I'm thinking a 1960 space bus would be pretty freaky and messed up in 2010 although the people who filed aboard and sat down in 1960 would think all that crap was self evident and naturally how society works blah blah blah.
Then try some kind of space ship half a century in the future from now. Those ignorant savages, they wasted all those useful and valuable organic molecules on clothes and clothes mfgr and clothes laundry and clothes storage and clothes design instead of going organic and natural and sitting on a towel or at most body paint / body foam (look at the evolution of young womens swimwear over the last half century, we're in the last days of swimsuits being worn at all and I hope to live long enough to see the end of the "swimsuit"...) The savages permitted, encouraged even, worship of imaginary men in the sky who would tell the craziest among them to kill the followers of the other imaginary men in the sky and each imaginary man comically pretended not only was he the only one, he was the only correct one. They only allowed men/women couples apartments instead of any combo pairs. The savages made a virtue of the illness of living to work, whereas all sane individuals work to live. The savages would beat the shit out of each other and imprison each other because they consumed different recreational drugs than the folks administering the beatings. The savages primary form of entertainment and exercise was sitting in front of a recorded video screen for hours on end watching other people exercise while gulping glasses of beer and/or corn syrup, instead of nice modern athletic aerobic sex. Those savages half a century ago (aka 2010s) must have been total idiots compared to us modern spaceship pilots of 2060.
(Score: 1) by triklyn on Monday March 30 2015, @03:43PM
... cryo sleep...
cryogenics is like... super plausible. it's just barely science fiction right now. 500 years of sleep, on a 1 way trip to your doom... but the adventure :)
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday March 31 2015, @06:15AM
Upload.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 30 2015, @12:08PM
And you need solutions for "kessler syndrome" before then (since there will be accidents, unwanted collisions).
There's a simple solution. Harvest or deorbit everything everything large enough to cause you problems. One of the points of having things like a Dyson sphere is that you have a lot of energy to play with. And computationally, keeping track of everything in orbit that can harm your system might be impractical (or not, you did after all figure out a much harder problem), you can still treat it as a gas which you are continually harvesting or deorbiting. I'm not as interested in how. Maybe you're using light beams to push your unwanted particles into a lower orbit. Maybe you generate some sort of gas or plasma cloud which decelerates particles moving through it (relative to the cloud, of course).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @02:26AM
A swarm of objects orbiting a star? You mean like ...... planets?? Holy fuck, Dyson reinvented the solar system. Reinventing the wheel wasn't big enough for him?
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday March 30 2015, @08:42AM
Doesn't "swarm" imply a variety of trajectories? The solar system is more or less a flat ring. [wikipedia.org]
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @02:03PM
Containers are expensive. What if, like, instead of keeping water in bottles and pipes, we dig a hole and, you know, put the water in there? Oh, and I like my wheeled office chair a lot. I mean A LOT. What if I started moving around outside with it? I would not have to walk anymore. Wait, the wheels are too small. Okay give it big wheels to go over bumps and carpet. It wouldn't have room for all 12. Maybe four wheels would be enough. Yeah. That would work. It's too slow though. A motor on it would be cool. But the wind hurts my eyes. I could put a glass plate in the front to block the wind. Yeah that would be so cool. Air conditioning and a cup holder would be perfect! Oh shit we put all the water in the hole though. Dammit!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @02:50AM
And then you walk around on the inside surface? Oh my mistake. I was thinking of an O'Neil cylinder. Let's build one at L5. Don't forget to stock the hardware store.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @02:05PM
I'm Commander Shepard and Soylent is my favorite site on the citadel.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday March 30 2015, @03:48AM
What is this juvenile fascination with building sphere's around stars.
Wouldn't any society capable of that have solved all of their energy problems with pocket sized fusion reactors?
Because if you can't master that, you will never encapsulate a star. If you can master fusion, you don't need no stinkin star.
This this is the ultimate masturbatory daydream, and between this site and that green one I get sick of the total nonsense.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @04:04AM
Pocket sized fusion bombs? What is this juvenile fascination with your second amendment right to put deadly weapons down your pants? Maybe you should just wait a few more years and your dick will grow to adult size.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Monday March 30 2015, @04:24AM
What is this juvenile fascination with building sphere's around stars.
I'd point out that the idea behind theorizing Dyson spheres was to identify energy signatures from other stars to see if they match heat dissipation models associated with that of a theoretical Dyson sphere. The thought was to use such a match to identify advanced, extrasolar civilizations.
We don't (and won't for a long time, if ever) have the means to build something like it, but, as I said, that was never the point.
Wouldn't any society capable of that have solved all of their energy problems with pocket sized fusion reactors?
Because if you can't master that, you will never encapsulate a star. If you can master fusion, you don't need no stinkin star.
An interesting point. At the same time, if a civilization had such advanced fusion technology, they may also have the means to collect solar energy on such a broad scale, too. And if they did, why wouldn't they? For certain applications, using the products of a naturally occurring fusion reactor (e.g., a star) might make a whole lot of sense.
Also, the theory *never* envisioned encapsulating a star. That vision is a product of science fiction, as is clearly noted in TFS.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mhajicek on Monday March 30 2015, @05:15AM
I've long thought that a sufficiently advanced Dyson Sphere might look like a black hole.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1) by MostCynical on Monday March 30 2015, @07:08AM
Please stop all theoretical research. Please ensure all research is done on proper, sensible, objective stuff, with achieveable goals only.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday March 30 2015, @11:50AM
This partners with the logical problem of a 60's outlook shows energy use must go exponential both with time and population and economic growth and self actualization based on the previous century or so of the industrial revolution. However that appears not to have been the case for the following half century or so. Admittedly we've been in decline not growth in the west in that time period and in the developing world things are developing and growing, just not here, not any more. As other evidence I propose the stereotypical Amish dude or the stereotypical Buddhist monk. I'm just not seeing then "requiring" multiple gigawatts continuously.
Its very much like computational power. The first gigamips is really handy, can do world wide networks and digital compressed audio and digital compressed video. The next gigamip of processing power enables ... well, apparently, nothing at all, to the annoyance of hardware mfgrs. So hardware growth has collapsed and we talk about bonus prizes for first loser like energy efficiency or nanopower or virtualization features or whatever other than brute computational power.
Another example is money. Aside from the existing sociopaths who greedily collect it for the sake of collecting more, most folks get enough to get by and refuse to do more. The only way you'll get an exponentially growing economy is exponential growth in population, but we have plenty of pressures in the developed world to keep that around or below replacement value, so good luck with that.
Basically Dysons idea is an interesting though experiment, but the philosophy behind it is unfortunately obsolete. Combine that with frojack's idea of anyone who can build a Dyson sphere no longer needs a Dyson sphere...
Personally I suspect interstellar will be where its at. There's an ignorant fixation in modern minds that centuries ago the silk road traders individually walked the whole way from one end to another personally. Reality was more like nobody ever walked more than a decent camel caravan ride from home. If I were given a "human psychology" based tribe of a couple hundred interesting people to hang out with in a space station that looked like a palace or a tropical resort and my neighbors were in a similar station maybe a month long shuttle ride toward the sun or alpha centauri or whatever, and a shoebox reactor would provide all the power the station could possibly need for millennia and I'm only maybe a light year from the nearest solar system I'd be happy. It would be a hell of a lot like living on a tropical island. In fact that would make an interesting architectural design, no need for clothes especially for the harem of cuties, nice and comfortable, etc. No need to make each station identical, maybe everyone is always within one years shuttle flight (maybe 12 stations or so) of the nearest university station for higher ed or maybe every third station has a co-orbiting major robotic hospital or something. I suppose every 5 years or so you'd have a major robotic factory station capable of making anything at all up to and including another station out of space dust or imported WTF from below. I would imagine a continuous bidirectional stream of semi-interesting commodity goods. So alpha centauri shipped that iron bar sunward 8 centuries ago and it finally arrived at my station, why should I give a F as long as I can participate in the economy enough to buy it, assuming I actually need it to make something? As for what to do, given infinite energy and not too limited resources there's no limit to factory work for people who like making things, or designing things that robots make or whatever, and creative workers like programmers or researchers or artists are only limited by light speed limits, if that, so they'll be fine just keep the biosphere happy. For safety you'd need multiple completely separate habitats with a way to evac between them, so I propose the stereotypical tropical island resort with some aquaculture for fish meat, a river equipped grassland, and maybe something exotic like mountains or arctic or tundra. I would imagine tourism would exist between stations, spend a month on a cruiser and come visit VLM's famous frozen tundra and hike his re-enactment of the ice age.
(Score: 1) by WillAdams on Tuesday March 31 2015, @01:05PM
Interesting.
A little scary though given what objects can do to a planet at near light speeds --- C.J. Cherryh had an interesting examination of that in here Alliance-Union books.
You could add: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ [ucsd.edu] as a footnote to your screed.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday March 31 2015, @01:59PM
Its a good essay. I've read it before. I skimmed it again.
The author comes in with the assumption that the economy would be ordered under the already failed american dream of everyone is equal and in the middle class so averages mean (pun) something and the mean is the median etc. An ancient world scenario where Pharaoh has all the money and everyone else is kicked out of the economic system is what we're rapidly headed toward, and in that weird situation growth can continue quite a bit longer... you don't need to boil the oceans to warm 314 million hot tubs for everyone in the USA if Pharaoh is the only guy with hot running water and everyone else lives in a mud hut. In that case Pharoah's energy consumption can continue to grow for many centuries longer. Although you still bump up against a new theoretical limit where eventually Pharaoh would have to expend more human energy than a lumberjack just to keep wasting more energy, imagine having to burn 10000 calories per day signing contracts and not being able to eat food that fast or the arm wearing out and falling off.
The other fail is the Robinson Crusoe argument that you wash joe 6 pack ashore on an empty island and he has the mental horsepower to bootstrap something at least as good as the ancient world without hitting mental horsepower limitations, but one dude would never pull off the modern world all by himself, just not enough raw brain tissue in one dude. Maybe the occasional really smart dude could find a higher limit, but it'll still be a hard limit. After perhaps 100K years of scientific study, its going to be impossible to not spend most of your time bumping up against sheer mental horsepower limits to growth based on a finite sized planet and finite amount of brain tissue (or silicon, if it comes to that, assuming its more efficient, which it might, or might not, be...). Both mental horsepower limits in the academic world of basic research and in the business world of infinitely complicated systems and procedures. Could I make a modern-ish vacuum tube, yeah, with a lot of work and screwing around and a lot of time. Could I make a modern IC all by myself? heck no. On a world wide scale "we" can make some pretty interesting stuff, but a fundamental limit will be reached beyond which one mere planet of people just isn't enough mental horsepower to pull it off successfully or there's not enough time in the universe to keep on trying repeatedly until it works. Its an open question if one small planet of brains can pull off steady state economic growth, or space colonization, or living in peace... so far the odds are not looking good, sure would be nice to be surprised by an unlikely success in those areas. If it takes more than one planet's brains worth of brain to colonize space, then that's a good explanation why there's no sci fi galactic civilization right now, because what are the odds of that astronomical coincidence? This "must be this tall to enter ride" limit never comes up in Drake equation debates which is too bad. If it takes the bulk mass of 100 worlds of Einstein brain mass to begin to colonize space, that explains the lack of a galactic empire in the observed present and past. Ditto quantum computers or unified physics theories or warp drives or whatever.
There were other arguments for and against that essay, those were the only two I remember, the population distribution doesn't have to be flat argument, and the limits to mental horsepower rarely being an issue in the past argument. There was a lot of "first assume a spherical cow" in the essay.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @03:10PM
I give you credit for suggesting the first plausible type of Dyson Sphere. Fusion is the reaction taking place in a star. Build a micro Dyson Sphere, then create a micro-star inside it.
Gotta run. My overlords are coming to take me away for violating the Prime Directive by giving your civilization the above idea.
Yours Truly,
Prometheus
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Monday March 30 2015, @06:50AM
if you haven't seen the movie titled The Signal (2014) (not the one from 2007), i suggest doing.
=== spoiler alert ===
"a loose collection or swarm of objects traveling on independent orbits around the star." seems pretty close: https://youtu.be/HESgP8KeM5o?t=2m52s [youtu.be]
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday March 30 2015, @07:25AM
One commenter calculates that this puts the theorized Dyson sphere within an order of magnitude of the one featured in "Relics", an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Order of magnitude in what? Size?
10x either way is a pretty wide range, so I'm not really sure what conclusion we're supposed to draw there.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Monday March 30 2015, @10:26AM
Wouldn't any civilization advanced enough to build a dyson sphere also have enough history of war to actually prefer to hide per default?
And wouldn't such a civilization have the technology to hide themselves? (Just off the top of my head I would think of something akin to IR-reflectors that would only allow the heat out at a very specific point in the outer shell of the sphere, and this being pointed towards a nearby star or something else that can absorb the heat - or using effective ir-reflectors and [stirling-ish] engines to convert heat to usable energy).
I mean, just why would a civilization advanced enough to build a dyson sphere broadcast where they are?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday March 30 2015, @12:59PM
Might be the ultimate "male compensation" purchase for a ridiculously over powered society. Most of the discussion has revolved around a civilization wide project that actually needs the energy harvested, whereas a civilization way, way beyond that might see one dude with a really tiny love appendage who would have purchased the largest possible gas guzzler in our century, instead spend his weekends in the shop building two dyson spheres around two of "his" binary stars to show off to everyone who has the biggest (actually, show off to everyone who has the anatomically smallest) balls. I'm sure it would be expensive-ish and showing off how fast you can spend money has always appealed to a certain type of woman (depending on your level of cynicism / experience with the ladies you can read "that type" as breathing or however fits your experiences).
Going to an even bigger civilization if such a thing is imaginable, kids might do this stuff at christmas time to decorate unthinkingly, just like those glass ball ornaments on christmas trees. Theres no conscious knowledge in a kid of how glass is made or how a chinese factory full of slave labor political prisoners impacts society, the kid is just all "oh, shiny!" Not to forget ball game sports, hey lets play soccer your goal is the crab nebula and our goal is that asteroid field and look here's a nice dyson sphere we can use as a ball, ok face off and lets have some fun and our side is going to kick your sides butts.
What can I say, balls (in all senses of the word) have this weird seemingly universal human appeal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @07:43PM
I don't think you really understand thermodynamics...
... but, good luck with that perpetual motion machine!
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Monday March 30 2015, @11:09PM
Assuming near perfect vacuum and near perfect ir-reflectors (hey, we are talking about a civilization able to build a dyson sphere so this is not that unreasonable) just why shouldn't they be able to redirect all the heat/ir into a nearby star?
Or with the stirling-ish engine, with the same assumptions, I am aware that it would cause a quite hefty rise in energy unless it is used for something, like starting to fuse atoms/molecules into configurations that takes a couple of craploads of energy to create (and preferably something that is easy to break down for energy - and suddenly we have fuel for spacetravel).
And as far as I understand thermodynamics anything big enough is a perpertual motion machine (it just needs to be universe-size) and items really big (think dyson spheres as minimum size) can be made "close enough" for something on as short a timespan as an intergalactic civilization.
However, I'm curious as to where and how the heat would disappear if you have a freefloating blob surrounded by near perfect vacuum and that is surrounded by near-perfect ir (and radio) reflectors?
(Score: 2, Informative) by WillAdams on Monday March 30 2015, @02:07PM
Howard Tayler had an interesting spin on Dyson Sphere w/ the balloon twist in his _Schlock Mercenary_ webcomic:
http://schlockmercenary.wikia.com/wiki/Buuthandi [wikia.com]