Dyson Spheres

4 min readMar 11, 2021

Introduction

Human history is told by the energy we use. At first, we had to use our muscles, and then we learned to control fire. We industrialized the world using coal and oil and entered the Atomic Age when we learned how to split a nucleus. As humanity progresses further, if we don’t destroy ourselves or our habitat, we will likely gain complete control of our planet’s resources. Of course, this energy that we get from our habitat will be used up at some point. And space is vast (even getting to Mars takes about six to seven months), so we will need tons and tons of energy. Luckily, we know where to find it. The Sun — the ultimate source of energy for our solar system. A furnace 100 quintillion times more powerful than our most efficient nuclear reactor. It shines with the energy of a trillion nuclear bombs per second.

So how do we get this energy? Not some of it… ALL of it.

The concept of the Dyson sphere was the result of a thought experiment by physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson when he theorized that all technological civilizations continuously increased their energy demand.

Building a Dyson sphere seems so hard because we might need the energy from another Dyson sphere. But this is not true. Its fairly easier than we think it is.

First, let’s talk about its shape and structure.

Shape and Structure

If we make it so that it covers the entire Sun with interconnecting chains of solar panels or something like that, an object like a small stone (small and big stones or meteorites are found throughout the solar system), moving at a very high speed, hitting one of the solar panels might make all of them crack and fall right into the Sun. So instead, we would want giant mirrors, around 1 km2 each, to surround the Sun. Even though they may be 1 km in length and breadth, we would need 11 trillion mirrors like that. They would swarm around the Sun in an oval or spherical shape.

Next, we would need to think about its assembly around the Sun.

This pattern would be the most efficient one

Assembly

The amount of energy needed will increase if the transportation distance increases. So, we would need to find a planet to fully disassemble it, and gain whatever energy we can get. And the best of all would be Mercury which is the nearest to the Sun. The only problem would be the temperature there, the cost and labour of getting humans to Mercury, and so on. Let us say for the sake of this that future humans will take care of that.

Labour

Humans are expensive to keep alive and are very sensitive to the environment. So, we’d want to automate as much as possible. Ideally, we’d have a small crew of controllers who oversee an army of autonomous machines doing the actual work. There are four significant pieces of technology required solar collectors, miners refiners, and launch equipment. The solar collectors are going to give us the energy we need to disassemble the planet. To start, maybe we deploy something like one square kilometer of them either as mirrors or as traditional solar panels. They’ll provide the energy to run our miners, which strip-mine the planet’s surface, and our refiners, which extract valuable elements and fabricate them into our swarm satellites.

Mode of Transportation

Even if we get all the uranium, fossil fuels, and all that energy we can from the earth, we can only take as much as Mount Everest into space, only if we are using the rocket way. Instead, we’ll want to use a sort of railgun, a long electromagnetic track that launches our satellites at high speeds.

The Mirrors

Our swarm satellites will be packed tight for launch, unfurling like an enormous origami once in orbit. From this point, we can take advantage of exponential growth. Each panel provides the energy to build another. Those two will work to build the next two, 4 becomes 8, 8 becomes 16, and so on. By around 60 doubling times, the Sun will be horizontally covered by solar panels. If these solar panels take around 1 month to complete, by around a decade, we would be finished fully covering the Sun.

Profit

Even 1% of the Sun’s energy is an unbelievable change in our species budget. We could create the infrastructure to bring unlimited amounts of energy around the solar system for all sorts of projects.

Conclusion

Based on physics alone, this is not just possible but easy. It’s such a simple process and such a necessary step for any species to expand beyond their home planet that many astronomers think there are probably Dyson spheres already out there in the Milky Way. We haven’t spotted any yet, but they could be there!