The fact that the Dyson Sphere was actually inspired by a sci-fi novel goes to show that its not the knowledge that inspires ideas, its the imagination. To me that's absolutely beautiful.
Science fiction and imagination is in general what pushes scientific creations. Icarus story was the one that made people think about flying. Same goes for cars, phones, virtual games, holograms, space...
I never thought about it that way but it’s so true. We don’t invent new things by sticking to what we know is possible, it’s trying to make the impossible possible.
Yeah. Clickbait. Bandying about all these meaningless numbers is silly; dude don’t even start with the quadrillions, only comparisons are worth anything, and the simple multiplication and division to get there is not really educational.
@@colehealey2925 I am afraid, he has a point. In other words, the model with wich this video operatws to give estimates for building time feels way too simple. Gigasized engineering projects are not only determined by a few numbers, for example the dynamics of human society is involved, e.g. alĺ nations would be afraid of weaponisation of that tech..
@@jbruck6874 don't think you understand this Is a hypothetical sittuation. Not instructions on how to destroy Mercury. Of course he's going to get some things wrong.
@@TherandomshitstormerCXVIIeven then. This would require full scale occupation of an extremely harsh planet, solving thousands of engineering problems, unprecedented manufacturing demands. We’d be lucky to create a mirror in 30 years
@@mememealsome it is because we aren't unified, not in a sense that we have the same exact goals but we don't have the same exact vision for the future of our species. Most of the time the higher ups fight against each other for something personal and selfish, so the majority of the people below them have to do the dirty work without realizing that they were just being used for practically nothing.
Not to be that guy but if aliens were to exist one has to wonder if to build one could be concidered as greedy and ego feeding not exactly the friendlys message one wants to send we only care for ourselves a selfish species the universe can do without and even more so if there turns out to be a much better alternative solution we have yet to discover or discovering it then building one anyway imagine they then think we are planning to go to wqr and that's why we need it all in short it could be a bad idea under unforeseen circumstances
I asked a super advanced alien about Dyson spheres. He laughed so hard. Eventually he told me, you are thinking in your frame of reference, we don't build giant balls around stars. You are like a guy from 1850 imagining telegraphs and trains in space
Larry Niven wrote about Ringworld. Not a sphere, but a ring, spinning fast enough to create artificial gravity. And if you look at the predictions of 2000 from 1900, some things look bizarre, but some things are oddly prescient.
Aliens tap into zero point energy. They may even participate in stellar transmutation. It makes Dyson's Spheres look extremely impractical. Even Halo's fictional Forerunners could harness artificial singularities.
What's interesting about Mercury, is that it rotates around it's axis so slowly that you can "outrun" the sunrise, as long as you move faster than ~11 km/h. So it might be possible to create a moving base that always stays in it's twilight, where the surface temperature is somewhat pleasant. (It goes from -173ºC on the night side to 427ºC on the day side.) Dutch author Tais Teng actually wrote an excellent sci-fi novel about this idea (_400 Graden in de Schaduw_, or "400 Degrees in the Shadow"). I don't think it ever has been translated, but it's a big recommend if you ever are in the situation to read it.
It's a lot easier to build your base underground. If you have a few meters of regolith on top of you, there's hardly any temperature variation at all. Ditto for Luna, by the way. As a bonus, this also protects you from energetic particles (solar and cosmic). On Mars, temperature control isn't as important a concern (a reasonably well insulated building on the surface would stay pretty warm just from the people and equipment inside), but you'd still want to build underground for particle protection.
Kim Stanley Robinson also had a city called Terminator in his 1985 novel In Memory of Whiteness. It was pushed by the expansion of the tracks it rode on. It was also a setting in his 2012 novel 2312.
That doesn't make sense in my head... Where is the "pleasant" location? Mercury has no atmosphere, it's not like the temperature "averages out" at the twilight boundary. You'd do a lot better with a stationary base since you still need to implement your own "averaging out" solution that stores thermal energy for later slower release. Maybe a large basin of water?
Nuclear is still a non-renewable, and as we travel to space nuclear will start to be something we send into the stars. We need to utilise stuff we have in abundance.
Well, I certainly do agree that we need to be switching to nuclear, and getting liquid thorium reactors into mass adoption, but nuclear isn't the end all be all answer. Fission is unrenewable, just much slower, so it'd just be kicking the can down the road. Fusion is promising, and for all intents and purposes, is renewable- or as renewable as anything is in the universe. The only problem is that 1) cold fusion is a load of hoo-ha, and 2) the energy requirements to sustain small scale fusion is immense. Fusion, funnily enough, works on a economy of scale, so it's more energy efficient to let the sun do the fusing, and just collect the energy, rather than siphon off hydrogen, fuse it with energy hungry containment fields, and then collect the generated power. In the end, fission is a needed stopgap, and fusion has some use cases, but in the long run, why reinvent the wheel, when there's a fully functional car right there? The sun already does everything we want, all we have to do is collect the power.
The most we could do is build something the size of the moon or mercury. Also considering how an average planet works, we would need nickel and iron for the core and something rocky for the crust/surface. And now an artificial planet would be interesting. It would still have a planet's properties, why? Because gravitational pulls and other stuff come from mass. But would it spin and orbit the sun? Highly likely. And this is possibly the best idea incase Earth ever overpopulates.
It has to be a swarm in order to reorganize for optimization over the variable solar output over time AND in order to dodge solar outbursts and magnetic storms
I think I've read somewhere an actual shell would be unstable. So you'd need to use propulsion pretty much all the time which puts unbearable stresses on the enormous structure... so yeah... a swarm it is
I wonder if dismantling a planet within a solar system, part of an orchestral orbiting situation of several planets together, might become problematic, or result in strange changes in the solar system.
It absolutely would have ripple effects most likely to negatively affect us. The mindset that the sun’s energy is “wasted” just because we can’t fully exploit it for ourselves is ridiculous. The only reason the earth keeps earthing is because we can’t and shouldn’t
Similarly, would a giant metal sphere around the Sun not affect stuff? Maybe over insane amount of times, depending on the size and weight, but still. Maybe you could offset the total mass of Mercury by a same mass dyson sphere, but the place would not be the same and the shape either... Anyway, such tech is speculative so we'd be going blind. Engineers could get an idea but stuff would most likely present itself and make the plan wrong.
Sure, redistributing the mass of a planet wold have effect on orbital mechanics of the solar system, but remember, you've now got the power output of the entire Sun to help you deal with any negative consequences of that.
@@shanepaynter5591 We are allowed to do what we wish to this solar system. No morally ridicolous dilemma will stop future humans shaping either the earth or the galaxy.
you made a mistake at 6:35. 1km² is 1million m². so 35000 people per 1km² would mean that each person would have 28 square meters, not 3 square centimeters
Imbaba إمبابة 8.28 km2 Population 1,465,875. 8280^2/1465875 = 47m2 / person ... they likely exceed 28m2/body in a lot of areas... probably not growing much wheat there nowadays.
Yeah i actually quit the video because of that. I just can’t trust a video that predicts the physical feasibility of the dyson sphere from someone who can’t convert units of measurement properly.
@@ignilc After more than 70 years of nuclear power, there is no country in the world that have an actual long term storage for the waste, and anywhere that waste is stored, it has been neglected and has caused massive pollution of the immediate area, Chernobyl and Fukushima have areas that are uninhabitable for centuries in the future. And no, the fact that Chernobyl was a faulty design is not an argument, because Fukushima was a modern and considered safe design, but exactly because nuclear power plants are made for profits, corners are cut, like in Fukushima, which is why that disaster happened, it was considered too expensive to move the backup generators to higher levels, so they were left in a place where they ended up flooded... Anyone who thinks nuclear power is a good idea are deluding themselves.
Yes but it could also contaminate for thousands of years if there was a meltdown due to things like natural disasters (floods, earthquake, hurricanes, etc.) then you have to deal with cancer. Solar is very good if it was done right, and if we can achieve "solid state batteries" to replace lithium, combined with solar, that's a game changer.
recycling nuclear waste was a normal procedure up to the end of the 70 ties , they stopped it because it cost a little bit more . Recycling nuclear waste on and on reduces its radiation time enourmously ,from 100k years to 1000 or less . And we haven’t even talked about nuclear fusion . Sacrificing mercury is unnessecary and just stupid . Ignoring the gravitation cycles alone is ludicrous. And the whole thought train is just based on the economy has to grow constantly . That’s the first thing that’s got to go . The real incentive is stock market that does not give a damn about nothing and no one . Just personal profit . That will get us destroy earth and beyond . And a Dyson sphere is just expanding economy / profit .
One issue I never see addressed in these types of videos ... increasing the amount of energy arriving at earth should upset the energy balance considerably. Directing near 100% of the sun's energy to earth, even if transformed into something other than sunlight, is still going have to go somewhere. We would have to be able to dramatically increase the amount of energy the earth sheds as well.
I think this is where humanity will try to tinker in turning energy back into physical mass. It is very energy consuming and quite unclear how to do it, but after all - it could solve resource problem and consume vast amount of energy we will get.
A lot of work can be moved off world if we are to the point of building a Dyson swarm. That means less power hunger industry on earth. Orbital factors and lunar product would be a first step since light lag to the moon is about a second which is perfectly fine for most activities.
A lot of work can be moved off world if we are to the point of building a Dyson swarm. That means less power hunger industry on earth. Orbital factors and lunar product would be a first step since light lag to the moon is about a second which is perfectly fine for most activities.
They're talking about mirrors, which means they can shutter them when they don't need them. The rest of the energy can be stored as potential energy. There's also a bigger danger, though. If something goes wrong with the setup, these energy relay drones could become unintended, concentrated energy weapons. The Earth can fit inside the Sun 1.3 million times. That's a lot of energy being made by something so enormous. Such directed energy could cause untold catastrophe.
6:38 How on earth did you get that 35k people per km2 means 1 person per 3 cm2? There are one MILLION square metres in a square kilometre. It's actually one person per 28.6 m2.
There are 148,000,000 square kilometers of land in the world. It will be 148,000,000x1,000,000=148,000,000,000,000 square metres. If this is divided by 8,000,000,000, it becomes 18,500 square meters per person. Human population size will peak before it reaches 11 billion people. What he talks about a planet with 40 trillion people in 800 to 900 years with current population growth and that is just speculation. Unfortunately, many people think it increases because of births, but that is not correct. It peaked several years ago. The population is now increasing due to the fact that all people are living longer than ever and that all over the world. Also in the world's poorest country. In the poor countries, the families with children have become a little richer and then they become smaller and the children can go to school because father and mother work. Unfortunately, western climate and energy politics will make it more expensive to live in the poor countries. So that families with children become large because everyone has to work for their survival.
One idea that I've thought of (and actually employed in Kerbal Space Program a few times) is to make a giant solar farm on the surface of Mercury and have a massive beam that converts the solar energy into microwaves and beam them to the Moon, then to Earth. A side-effect I could see with that is creating massive invisible beams of death in space. A wandering spacecraft that stumbled into the beam wouldn't have a very good time.
@@thecommenternobodycaresabout Microwaves aren’t actually visible to the human eye regardless so if you wanted to avoid them you would need to know exactly where they were and where they were pointing at all times.
Yes, I don't think I would mind living in a world with no industry. I'll miss social media at first, but living simply and in touch with nature is more human than living in tall buildings.
One of my favourite episodes of Startrek tng is called "Relics" and has a Dyson Sphere in the story. It's such a great episode. It's the one with Scotty (James Doohan) making an appearance.
True any type of prospects in the realm of type 2 and above will send signals to the entire galaxy. Which is one signal nasa also is conveniently looking for as any form ofbthese signals pointing in our direction is unmissable.
@@RMadmarksman Signals that would take forever to spread out. By the time someone out there notices, we might have already gone extinct or something for all anyone knows, or we might have vacated the solar system for unforseen reasons, anything could happen. Or humans might already have occupied half the galaxy and the distant ETs reckon it best not pick a fight with a bigger opponent whose battlecruisers can reduce them to space dust.
With mirrors, you can orient however many of them you want to redirect however much sunlight you want towards - or away from - anywhere in the solar system you want. Mars needs more light for terraforming? Task more mirrors to light it up. Want to cool down Venus for terraforming? Block sunlight from reaching it.
That's only part of the problem. We still need oil. We need it to refine our metals, to make all the things we love and depend on. That oil has to be extracted, and then spent. We need oil for our pharmaceuticals, our clothes, our space ventures, and thousands of other things. Nuclear can't replace that.
@@Daniel_P116it could replace lots of those things, also other materials can be used than oil for most things, not just nuclear, its just better as a power source.
Already proven dangerous, more like it. The Sun is the most powerful nuclear reactor the Earth will ever have access. Building risky and vastly inferior reactors here on Earth is completely unnecessary.
@@GrandTourVideos I love Isaac's stuff. I've been watching him for years. These guys are top tier. This video from astrum reminded me of Isaac a little bit
Judging a civilization by how much energy it uses seems like a very flawed metric. Wouldn't an advanced civilization be more efficient, and need less source energy to fuel various technologies? These plans seem to be all brute force and no finesse.
Yes! We currently judge ‘advancement’ based on our Ego driven logic, which is deeply flawed. We have free energy, Tesla proved that. Just currently we let big corps control stuff they shouldn’t. When we evolve past capitalism, towards cooperation built on unity then we will find what’s has already been available to us. Free energy.
I am hearing peak oil and made to write essays in my school in 1983. It was 1997 we would be out of oil. Now we barely scratched oil reserves in the world.
I would think a slight wrinkle in the plan is the proportions of needed materials. nuclear transmutation is pretty energy intensive and is going to affect your timing a fair bit.
That and I’m pretty sure removing mercury could render earth uninhabitable due to unforeseen planetary interactions thrusting us out or something at us.
Only an alien civilisation in a Hollywood movie can build a Dyson Sphere. Because in reality, any civilisation attempting it would be too stupid to exist.
@@Chris.Davies Yes, I think most people know that. It's just thought experiments. Like the space elevator. People are just talking about the engineering. Not the practicality.
@@Chris.Davies Using all energy available to you is not stupid at all. A Dyson Sphere will probably never be just one mega-structure but rather the collected effects of billions and billions of solar panels and mirrors. We have solar panels on Earth and in orbit right now. The tiny amount of light they convert to usable energy and waste heat is already the start of a Dyson Swarm/Sphere. If people continue to explore space and use solar energy then more tiny pieces will be added. It might take a long time but sooner or later a civilization like that will use 100% of their sun's output.
@@Chris.Davies Why is using all of the energy sources available to you stupid? And the way Dyson Sphere Program implemented the Dyson Swarm is pretty feasible I imagine. Though, instead of shooting single use mirrors into orbit, we want to add some boosters with fuel to them so we can maybe repair or at least aim them at a receiver?
I firmly believe that it's far more likely that we'll eventually live like the Flintstones -- minus the dinosaurs, of course -- than it is that we'll someday live like the Jetsons. Not the best analogy but I'm sure people get the point. Honestly, though, the likelihood that humanity will be gone completely altogether actually seems much higher than the possibility of us making any real significant movements up the Kardashev scale.
The fundamental premises in this video are insane. We need more energy for first world needs for consumption (everything is fine, let's keep going just as we are!). Ethics comes into destroying a space rock, not the fact that polluting the earth at this rate for another 150 years will be catastrophic for all life on earth. No worries re food, water, clean air, sanitation, quality of life, ending wars, etc. Yes I know this is a "thought experiment", but it is still sick at its root.
150 years of oil left IF we used it for all of our energy demands. We currently make less than 1% of our electrical grid power from oil. The rest is coal, natural gas, nuclear, and renewables.
Removal of Mercury could change the orbit of the planets, causing a catastrophic inward migration or something stranger. Mining asteroids with an attached space-based factory would pose less of a threat & could be aimed at any temporary, near-Earth satellites to start. -1st complete the technology for a mobile space-based factory. Probably 10 years to create & use, with another 40 years to perfect. An investment of at least 3 factories to start, should be easy on the Earth's resources but with an insane price-tag. -2nd target asteroids that are in Mercury's LaGrange points or cross it's orbit. Give the factories up to 5 years to get into location. Up to 1 year to get the collector into place. Up to 1 year to start producing. -3rd target any additional material further out up to Jupiter's LaGrange points, if more mass is needed. -4th allow time for the object to migrate into position. (up to 5 years once made) We'd have something usable in 16 years with a steady increase by the 45th. At any point, the technology could be scaled up. I don't think we'd get to 6 percent the mass of the Earth, though. I don't know the numbers, but I think we would need to poach some of Saturn & Jupiter's moons for that. Maybe two-hundred to five-hundred years for full completion, but no orbit-changing craziness.
Mercury is only 0.0000005 solar mass or 0.0005 Jupiter mass. The inner planets are hundreds of millions of kilometers apart; none of them have a strong enough gravity to affect each others' orbits for at least the remaining main-sequence life of the Sun.
I don't disagree with your numbers. Since I'm an enthusiast & not a degreed-scientist, I can only say that orbital resonance is a known-known. The time scale & effect with a deconstructed Mercury is not something I know. I just know that its removal would affect any orbital resonance, whether known or unknown. Would removing Mercury make something terrible happen? I don't know. Could removing Mercury make something bad happen? Yes, because it presents a known-unknown. There would be a loss of mass, but...what would it do? ...Why risk it?
But you forgot to consider the asteroids, comets, Coronal Mass Ejections, solar flares, solar storms, gravity of planets, the disruption of orbit by a nearby passing star, fluctuations in temperature, possible material and component failures and the maintenance. I would suggest considering the trojan locations in the Earth's orbit. They are gravitationally stable and would require little adjustments over the years. We know the science of trojan asteroids in the orbit of Jupiter and the Lucy spacecraft is going to dive deeper for that matter, so that might help as well.
the solar flares are less of a problem than it would be on many other solar systems just because our star is less solar active than other stars but the others would be a hurdle to get over
Firstly alot of these problems can be solves by not having the mirrors, collectors and facilities to beam the energy elsewhere succum to the whims of physics and predetermined orbits, as I suggested in an earlier comment instead of just having mirrors the these mirrors could be attached to a central frame where the can fold and unfold like origami such as in satellites and the central frame has a propulsion system that can supply its energy from the ever abundant sunlight that can be commanded manually and/or automatically this way they can move out of the way of asteroids, comets, cme's, solar storms and flares as well as passing stars. As for fluctuating Temps of the satellites and any habitats around the sun that can be accounted for with high tech very insulation shielding from both heat and radiation. For Temps on earth the swarm can be built in such an orientation that its at an angle above and below the plane of the earth's orbit (not the Sun's equator) on either side and for the two places the swarm intersects the orbit these can be strategically placed in areas that coincide with hot seasons on Earth this achieving a win win of still being able to suppl earth with light and making hot times just a bit cooler and not freezing the planet. The materials aren't that out of reach with a sawtm most definitely possible with mercury, a ring/rings or a sphere is completely impractical and unusable with our resources. Any failures can be easily combated with the first statement granted the central structure is still intact faulty components can be moved out for fixing or complete replaced. The major downfall for all designs is this tho, in a swarm and rings if one is damaged the pieces can cause a whole Kesler Syndrome Effect, if a hole is punched through a sphere it will implode (picture it as a hole in an airplane that will only get bigger with time, but instead of air pressure ots gravity) thus the whole structure will implode. Maintenance will be the least of problems for any type 2 civilization much like how nasa and other have tracking of satellites and even trash in space tracking and locating faults will be easy. Lastly the stability of orbits is not a problem modern computers, supercomputers, math and physics can determine these effects down to a tee and if we want to the sun itself is a good example of this. The sun is always kept in balance due to the equalized struggle between radiation and gravity, Tha same can be done with satellites finding a stable orbits that can consider these with the addition of proper speed, or these can be disregarded in favor of better more efficient orbits. I hope this long rant answers your questions and that understand.
It wouldn't even be necessary to set up a manned mission to Mercury if we could build machines sophisticated enough to mine and refine materials automatically and replicate themselves.
Thank you for gently weaving in Brilliant into your presentation. it didn't feel so jarring to suddenly be talking about it that it felt like an advertisement. well done.
Nuclear has been plagued by an odd stigma in our culture, it's like people are going 'oh no what are we going to do about this energy crisis' while looking around the nuclear power plant right in front of them. It's almost like they don't want to acknowledge that there's solutions that don't require cutting back resources and mobility for the general population...
And assuming a perpetual 1% population growth rate is Mathlusian nonsense. Earths population is already forecast to start precipitously declining by end the century
Yeah I get it but the overall pramise is that nuclear is limited yh I may last for millennias or millions or years but that's the blink of an eye in terms of the galaxy. I agree tho that we should focus on nuclear both fission and/or fusion as well as harnessing the others (type one and all) and moving away from burning huge amounts if not all coal and oil, but it is important to note that oil will always be necessary in refining materials and synthetics and reducing burning it for energy and producing waste can divert it to doing these useful processes (not that power gen is useless).
That's what we're hearing since the 70's. I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. A workable science project? No problem. Commercial feasibility to represent a viable alternative to even fission? Within our lifetimes? Pipe dream...
@@poetryflynn3712 Like I said, science project, no problem. Commercial feasibility is a whole different domain. You have to sustain it, not "repeat" it. Being able to turn the ignition on at which point the engine starts running and immediately stalls is a far cry away from driving a car.
@@dominic.h.3363 That's what I thought too, but since we've now achieved ignition, I think it's possible within my lifetime. I might be like 80 tho by the time it works out
Unfortunately, humans seem intent on fucking up Earth by "making it great again" well before we'll ever have a chance to do it to another planet. It's almost like we've asked Venus to hold our beers while we do our very best to outdo her hellscape.
Worth adding that building a Dyson Sphere is impossible as the sphere would collapse. The material at the equator (assuming the sphere rotates with the sun) would stay in place, but as soon as the material is "north" or "south" of the equator, it's subject to gravitational forces pulling it toward the center. And the material at the poles of the star are just, somehow, supposed to magically float in space? I don't see how any material made from atomic matter would hold itself over the star in such a position and I don't see how firing some kind of thruster continuously would be worth it. So the only "Dyson Sphere" anyone or anything could build, would be a larger series of "Dyson Rings", narrow bands which would revolve around the sun. Also managing their positions would be physically challenging as you'd want thin material to reduce the cost, but applying force to a very thin material also requires incredible precision. And you'd need to apply forces to it often because the orbits of planets, the motion of the star through the galaxy and other events do exert forces on the rings and those forces in turn will move the rings which means they can collide with each other.
Speaking simply on the point of thrusters firing to keep the segments in place, the amount of radiant energy from the sun would more than offset whatever we spent to fire said thrusters (even if they're ionic plasma thrusters that are way better than what we have today). I think there are other concerns here. The Dyson's Sphere models presented here are variants on the original theory. Thus, I wouldn't even call them true or factual Dyson's Spheres. The way that a real one would work is substantially further way from the sun (say close to Mars' orbit from the sun) and would not run afoul of the problems you're mentioning. Instead, it would encounter completely different ones like the matter necessary to create that would essentially be worth millions of Earths in terms of surface area. So, we fix one problem and create another by using one that fits the general parameters of Dyson's theory. That said, I don't know that we necessarily need to do the variants or the real thing. I think much smaller objects capable of harnessing radiant energy from the sun would be relatively smart from both economics and time perspectives. Also, in this case, ROI (return on investment).
Yh but bithe Dyson spheres and rings are impossible to build with even mercury and every asteriod, comment and dwarf planet we could get our hands on much less at the distances the rings would be (each being behind the other exponentially increasing surface area and mass) a swarm is the best option as if parts are damage the whole thing won't stop working.
@@RMadmarksman I'm not sure that's really relevant here since we don't have the technology to even approach something like this. Simply put, we are too far behind as a society and our level of technology to even begin to attempt something like this. Let's assume for giggles at the moment that we did this on a much smaller scale. For example, the moon. Ignoring the fact that the moon doesn't have radiant energy we could harness, we focus on just the size of it. It's roughly 81 times less massive than the Earth. So, let's assume we want to build a mini-Dyson around the moon. We don't have the technology or materials to do that either. It just doesn't exist here. If we can't do that on a much smaller and closer to home object, I don't see us doing that for larger objects either (starting at a small moon and ending at a G-type star). It's a future state for our civilization. We will know we have made it as a next level civilization when we have the technology and materials to do precisely that. We're not going to be close for at least another 500 years.
Dyson himself noted that he was really talking about a swarm of independently orbiting structures, not a solid shell. However, I wish there was more awareness of the Orbital Ring concept of Paul Birch, which actually does make a solid shell feasible: Essentially, if a ring stretching around an entire planet (or star) is moving faster than orbital velocity, it generates a net outward force, and can support (by maglev) stationary structures. A complete, stationary Dyson shell can be supported by a network of such fast-moving rings at all possible inclinations (obviously with a lot of redundancy). It won't happen on a short timescale of course.
I notice that discussions of dismantling Mercury with optimistic timescales like 31 years never account for the heat energy inside Mercury's core. It would take a megastructure project of its own to dissipate the heat of a 2000 degree K core. Unaided that would take well over a billion years presuming we stripped the core bare and left it 'naked' to radiate.
That exactly my thought if we strip mined it in layers each exposed layer can be cooled and quickly too due to the vast drop in temp on its night side though I know it won't cool overnight leaving the layers bare to radiate away in such cold Temps will help though it may take at least 2 to 3 centuries with the most efficient methods, robots, and most of all consistency as drilling will not work.
It's noteworthy that most of the heat that keeps the interiors of the inner planets molten, is radioactive decay of uranium-238. (Without it the planets would have solidified within tens of millions of years.) So strip-mining Mercury would actually satisfy the "nuclear is better" proponents on this thread.
Now I'm relying on an A Level physics class from 25 years ago, that I didn't totally understand at the time, but.... Our physics teacher was into his star Trek, and when Scotty got stuck in the Dyson sphere, he decided to work us through the gravitational physics. About 2 whiteboards full of calculations later, he came to the conclusion that the gravitational centre of a Dyson sphere would be in the centre of the sphere.... IE, the core of the star, which would be a bit problematic if you were planning on living and maintaining an atmosphere on the sphere's inner surface.
Definitely need a spin to it, but that would be problematic as well in the shape of a sphere. Honestly, in terms of 'Dyson' type constructs, a swarm or 'Halo ring' seems most logical especially for a possibly live-able environment - minus the whole life wiping purge lol
Especially because that's how the sun makes its energy. Forget Dyson things around the sun, build an own spaceborne fusion reactor and build the Dyson things around that.
For Temps on earth the swarm can be built in such an orientation that its at an angle above and below the plane of the earth's orbit (not the Sun's equator) on either side and for the two places the swarm intersects the orbit these can be strategically placed in areas that coincide with hot seasons on Earth this achieving a win win of still being able to suppl earth with light and making hot times just a bit cooler and not freezing the planet.
But the fuel is only so much u can rely on it the few thousand yrs it may last is the blink of an eye interms of civilisations compared to the 5 billion yrs of useful untapped energy the sun has. Like think about it in the long term.
An interesting thought explored a little. Well done on the video creation :) The only practical part of all of this that I see for the current future is to be using the mirrors for setting up industry and foundries on the moon. That gets the energy waste out of the earths biosphere so we can preserve more of the food producing ecology for a while. It really means beginning the transition to a space dwelling species with the early inhabitants of those space metal can dwelling being miners digging up the moon and dragging in asteroids to melt down. Transporting any of those building materials off Earth just isn't practical. But sending additional energy/materials extracted from the sun, moon and asteroids down to earth isn't that difficult. > Moon -> mining -> energy and space craft -> access to more distant resources -> ...
if we just floated a curved mirror out between us and the sun, we could catch a fraction of the sun's energy & focus it back towards Earth where we could get at it with an orbital battery system... it's as easy as reflecting it, we don't need to transfer the energy or get it at the source, just reflect the beam where we need it (as Alex explained as soon as I unpaused the video from writing this comment lol!) I was right there with you man
Yea he messed up and divided the number of people by the area, should of been are divided by number of people. 35,000 people per km2 isn't even that bad, 1 km2 is 1,000 m by 1,000 m so 1,000,000 m2. 1,000,000 m2 divided by 35,000 people is 28.6 m2 per person. Taking square root of 28.6 m2 that's a boxed room 5.3 meters by 5.3 meters per person, much bigger than the studio I lived in, and some people never leave so I guess they'll be alright 😂.
The Sun is a nuclear reactor... It's nuclear fusion in it's core that generates it's energy. Vastly inferior and dangerous nuclear reactors here on Earth are the joke.
One thing that was for some reason omitted - there's no need to rely on Earth's energy even to lift first mirror from Mercury (well, at least not directly and in one go, we still need to launch basic infrastructure from Earth). Build solar panels or w/e from asteroids/Moon and assemble it in space (maybe even near Mercury). Or start by getting power source online on Mercury itself just until it can start using Dyson Swarm. Dyson Sphere Program is a really cool game about building exactly that - Dyson Spheres (and Swarms). It's obviously not 100% realistic (that would be boring) but it gives general idea of the process.
Working and living in space is already incredibly tough, but imagine living and working on a dyson swarm in close orbit of the sun. If it's even possible to send human workers there(ignoring robots), it'd probably be the single most dangerous job we've invented yet. Do we have radiation shielding tech that could protect permanent living quarters that close to the sun?
Not now, but it's not inconceivable that it would exist in 100 years. A proposed q drive, not a great name, you can find it online is a design that harvests energy from the solar wind, and also happens to provide radiation shielding in the process, and that ignoring advancements in material science. You can also use it to go quite fast, concentrating the kinetic energy of a spacecraft into a smaller mass, but that's a whole other beast. Keep in mind, this is a project undertaken by a society that can already exist throughout the solar system, so it's some time in the future.
pushing a plough all day in an agrarian society sounds relatively peaceful. the older i get the more ok i am with slowing down and enjoying nature. might be good to have a multi-pronged approach to this challenge... one that involves us using less energy for frivolous things like all you can eat buffets, energy drinks, using ai to create silly memes on social media, driving an hour one way to go to a big box store to buy consumer electronics that will break within a year, mining metals to create a pair of cheap pliers that get shipped across the world and sold for $2, etc. north america has kind of lost the plot a bit, and europe is only doing a bit better it seems
Sure if you could get some unobtanium. (And prevent it from drifting) Otherwise it's a nogo. That's why, aside from scifi, Dyson's concept is a swarm and not an actual sphere.
No. It would collapse since the gravitational forces of the other planets would pull it in dufferent directions. A ring world only works if: - asteroids didnt exist - only the sun and the ringworld were in the system -you could make the entire thing out of graphite
@@egggge4752 Graphene is still orders of magnitude too weak for a ringworld. You're better off spamming billions of O'Neill or McKendree cylinders instead.
"Math" is the preferred term in the United States and Canada. "Maths" is the preferred term in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and other English-speaking places.
It'd be interesting to see a simulation of the the gravity disturbances in the Solar system in case of a hypothetical sudden disappearance of Mercury or any other planet (or an apperarance of a Dyson sphere): how the orbits of the remaining planets would change.
Given that the barycentre of the solar system is well above the surface of the sun, any major structure orbiting the sun will have to have positioning thrusters to avoid sliding into the sun. This idea was dealt with in the book Ringworld Engineers by Larry Niven back in the 1970's.
@@egggge4752 That's why there's redundancy. For any megastructure, including swarms, hundreds, if not thousands of thrusters would be necessary on each structure to keep a stable orbit.
@@davidmilne4936 or hear me out... we build a swarm thats really cheap and has no redundancy since when a single satellite breaks and falls into the sun... we can just replace it.
A correction, if I may: At 5:04, the second term in the equation is identified by the narrator as "the sun's circular area as it cuts through space". But this is instead the circular area of Earth. And the number shown (1.1 x 10^14 m^2) is indeed the circular area of the Earth. And since this equation is intended to show the amount of solar energy that hits the Earth (in the absence of a Dyson Sphere), it is indeed the circular area of the Earth that matters, not the circular area of the sun.
Sure, when it's economic (again?). In the meantime we should optimise (coincidentally economically & ethically) by maximising solar, wind, geothermal and interconnectors. Fill the little gaps with Throrium MSRs or whatever when they finally pop up.
Given how thorough Astrum videos are, I was surprised that the author didn’t factor in how hard it is to travel to Mercury, given its proximity to the sun.
Explain it to me. How do you get the energy the dyson sphere collects? It looks pretty detached to me. I really don't know how it'll send the energy from the dyson sphere orbiting the sun back to earth.
@@MegaHarko so in short and to over simplify it to the point that it's understandable but technically wrong... A dyson sphere is just a magnifying glass concentrating the sun to a battery on earth?
@@RadzKiram With some detours, but yes. Also: Earth doesn't need to be the sole receiver. You could build a ship with a solarsail and aim at that with your swarm to accelerate it. (in that case actual mirrors would suffice if we're going a low-tech route).
The Dyson sphere assumes people or benefactors would live on the structures rings orbiting the sun around, therefore using locally that energy gathered.
lol we cannot even dig past 10 Km on earth due to heat from the core, imagine trying to do that on a planet that has a surface temp of 427C during the day
@@shadyg999well that's true I would go the strip mining route going from the surface down in layers with robots of course ppl are to fragile for the heat and harsh environment. An added benefit is that the layers when exposed or becomes to hot can be left to cool if high heat resistant materials reach their limits and as such from that logic it would take way longer.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking, none of our population models show human population just exploding exponentially. That drop in birth rate which is almost across the board will eventually result in human population plateauing and then dropping, sometime later this century probably. He does write above the graph that this is just a thought experiment, though I feel like that should've made it into the script at some point, making it clear that this is not what is projected to happen. It comes across a little Malthusian.
I have this idea that a few stoner aliens are floating in their ship thinking, "Do you know what would be funny? If we convince the earthlings to blow up that small planet."
I wonder why this idea of the possibility of a dyson sphere persists? Surely, in a solar system awash with asteroids etc , any construction on this scale would be quickly reduced to space junk in a chain reaction!
We do not live in such a solar system and these would be statites, not satellites and not in orbit so if they are damaged they would just fall into the Sun. No chain reaction is possible.
A dyson swarm. Basically millions of satallites with solar panels or mirrors. They would have a distance of 10000 km to eachother and could move out of the way individually if an asteroid is detected. Idk why astrum keeps saying dyson sphere. Kinda silly.
@@dougal445 they fuel themselfs? They have solar panels on them? And they orbit the sun? How do you think current rovers and satellites work? Did we send people up to mars to fuel the mars rover? Cmon man.
6:37 seems like you made a maths mistake. 1 square kilometre = 1 million square meters. So having 35,000 people per km^2 is roughly the same as 1 person per 30m^2. Not 1 person per 3cm^2.
The actual idea is not a singular structure, it was a swarm of smaller structures. A singular structure of that size is most likely not feasible with current or near current materials and engineering principles. A dyson swarm would resemble the array of satelites around our planet just much more denser.
Have you tried the Dyson Sphere Project PC game. Yes its a game, but the Dyson swarm that is created towards the end of the game, gives some idea of the immense complexity of such a project.
Noone talks about if and how much a Dyson Sphere or swarm would affect space weather and the solar wind. Would it shrink the heliopause radius? Would that affect the objects around that radius? And so on!!
Who cares when you have the power of a star on tap? Literally enough power to sterilize every planet in the galaxy if converted into a Nicholl-Dyson beam. If you have a problem you can make a solution if you control that much power.
The weaker the heliosphere and solar radiation, the better for space colonisation. In case of a swarm the impact would be minimal anyways and sphere isnt possible since it would collapse in on itself.
@@1cool but they are decreased? You didnt understand? You think we are reflecting the sun just to earth? No the swarm sends a laser bundle to a collection station on earth.
@@egggge4752 sorry for the confusion, i meant that with the heliosphere decreased, the radiation from other stars in the galaxy and other events (black holes, supernovae) might increase and be harmful to life.
Whenever I see videos about Dyson spheres I never hear people talk about the environmental effects it would have on the planet of we blocked out that much of the light from reaching the planet
Earth only receives one billionth of the suns light. If we actually did enclose the entire sun in a solid sphere of solar panels, we could probably afford to convert one billionth of that energy back into light and point it at the earth. If we had a smaller Dyson swarm blocking, say, half of the sun's light, we should have the technology to build an Earth-sized space mirror reflecting sunlight towards Earth, doubling the light we receive back up to full.
@@patrickskelly8517 With a swarm, you could just position the collector satellites so they leave open a corridor for natural sunlight to reach Earth. Since the Earth only receives one billionth of the sun's total energy, your swarm could get all the way to 99.999999% complete before the amount of energy Earth receives gets decreased at all.
We wouldn't need to block any of the light reaching the planet. You just position the orbits of your collector satellites so that none of them get in the way of the 1 billionth share of sunlight that reaches the Earth naturally. And instead of pushing all the way to a 100% swarm, you just stop at whatever density of swarm your current computer technology can handle calculating the needed orbital arrangements for, and expanding only as your computer technology advances, and your populaltion needs. Even a 10% Dyson Swarm gives you a vast amount of energy to play with.
yeah there‘s something completely off with his numbers. the wikipedia article about population density of the earth says there are already 16 people per km² when you include all waters. it rises to 58 people per km² if you only take land into account. if you multiply by 5000 you get 290.000 people per km² but since there are 1 million m² in 1 km², there is still about 3,45m² left per person.
Astrum it's a very interesting idea. But instead of only mirrors. Also living habits in-between. And massive generational spaceship, with its own mini star.
We don't have a power problem, we have a storage problem. The best thing to focus on is the use of batteries and how to be able to change those out in a fast and economical way
6:34 Admittedly, not everyone uses a lot of energy these days because in some places it's limited, so if we had ample energy for everyone then the amount we use for 8 billion people would increase dramatically and so the amount of additional people we could handle would decrease. But my real concern with this is less that not enough light will get to the plants, but that reducing the amount of sunlight hitting the planet by even a modest amount could significantly cool the planet. Which may be what we need, but only a little.
The fact that the Dyson Sphere was actually inspired by a sci-fi novel goes to show that its not the knowledge that inspires ideas, its the imagination. To me that's absolutely beautiful.
Science fiction and imagination is in general what pushes scientific creations. Icarus story was the one that made people think about flying.
Same goes for cars, phones, virtual games, holograms, space...
I never thought about it that way but it’s so true. We don’t invent new things by sticking to what we know is possible, it’s trying to make the impossible possible.
+1
Science would be nothing without religion to ask the original questions
BETAVOLT
Astrum in 2014: Mercury is so interesting!
Astrum in 2024: Mercury is not necessary 💀
Yeah. Clickbait. Bandying about all these meaningless numbers is silly; dude don’t even start with the quadrillions, only comparisons are worth anything, and the simple multiplication and division to get there is not really educational.
@@michaeltrilliumwha
@@michaeltrillium i cant tell if you just dont like this guy or you just dont understand what hes talking about
@@colehealey2925
I am afraid, he has a point. In other words, the model with wich this video operatws to give estimates for building time feels way too simple. Gigasized engineering projects are not only determined by a few numbers, for example the dynamics of human society is involved, e.g. alĺ nations would be afraid of weaponisation of that tech..
@@jbruck6874 don't think you understand this Is a hypothetical sittuation. Not instructions on how to destroy Mercury. Of course he's going to get some things wrong.
Astrum: “a dyson sphere could be completed as little as 31 years”
Also my city builds a 12 story office building in 5 years
That’s IF humanity is so desperate for energy that we devote all of our resources into building a Dyson sphere
@@TherandomshitstormerCXVIIeven then. This would require full scale occupation of an extremely harsh planet, solving thousands of engineering problems, unprecedented manufacturing demands. We’d be lucky to create a mirror in 30 years
@@mememealsome you know humans we can create a starship in a week and a traditional mirror in half a day
@@mememealsome it is because we aren't unified, not in a sense that we have the same exact goals but we don't have the same exact vision for the future of our species. Most of the time the higher ups fight against each other for something personal and selfish, so the majority of the people below them have to do the dirty work without realizing that they were just being used for practically nothing.
Obviously it's not accounting for corruption and incompetence.
I think if a civilization is advanced enough to have the technology and resources to build a dyson sphere, then they wouldn't need a dyson sphere.
Not to be that guy but if aliens were to exist one has to wonder if to build one could be concidered as greedy and ego feeding not exactly the friendlys message one wants to send we only care for ourselves a selfish species the universe can do without and even more so if there turns out to be a much better alternative solution we have yet to discover or discovering it then building one anyway imagine they then think we are planning to go to wqr and that's why we need it all in short it could be a bad idea under unforeseen circumstances
I asked a super advanced alien about Dyson spheres. He laughed so hard. Eventually he told me, you are thinking in your frame of reference, we don't build giant balls around stars.
You are like a guy from 1850 imagining telegraphs and trains in space
The only reason he made this video is that fat paycheck from Brilliant, notice how many times he references "the course" he was taking on that site.
Larry Niven wrote about Ringworld. Not a sphere, but a ring, spinning fast enough to create artificial gravity.
And if you look at the predictions of 2000 from 1900, some things look bizarre, but some things are oddly prescient.
Your alien was from Ringworld, right?
Aliens tap into zero point energy. They may even participate in stellar transmutation. It makes Dyson's Spheres look extremely impractical. Even Halo's fictional Forerunners could harness artificial singularities.
Building anything near a star invites disaster, solar storms, radiation, flares, arc filament grounding if really close.
What's interesting about Mercury, is that it rotates around it's axis so slowly that you can "outrun" the sunrise, as long as you move faster than ~11 km/h. So it might be possible to create a moving base that always stays in it's twilight, where the surface temperature is somewhat pleasant. (It goes from -173ºC on the night side to 427ºC on the day side.)
Dutch author Tais Teng actually wrote an excellent sci-fi novel about this idea (_400 Graden in de Schaduw_, or "400 Degrees in the Shadow"). I don't think it ever has been translated, but it's a big recommend if you ever are in the situation to read it.
It's a lot easier to build your base underground. If you have a few meters of regolith on top of you, there's hardly any temperature variation at all. Ditto for Luna, by the way. As a bonus, this also protects you from energetic particles (solar and cosmic). On Mars, temperature control isn't as important a concern (a reasonably well insulated building on the surface would stay pretty warm just from the people and equipment inside), but you'd still want to build underground for particle protection.
As a fellow dutch speaker, i will definitely check it out!
Kim Stanley Robinson also had a city called Terminator in his 1985 novel In Memory of Whiteness. It was pushed by the expansion of the tracks it rode on. It was also a setting in his 2012 novel 2312.
Make no mistake, when we build a dyson sphere no human will set foot on mercury. We will control the machines from mars.
That doesn't make sense in my head... Where is the "pleasant" location? Mercury has no atmosphere, it's not like the temperature "averages out" at the twilight boundary. You'd do a lot better with a stationary base since you still need to implement your own "averaging out" solution that stores thermal energy for later slower release. Maybe a large basin of water?
Interesting that nuclear isn’t mentioned. This would solve a lot of our energy problems.
I agree!
Nuclear must still be supplemented with fossil fuel production as it cannot respond quickly to changing load demands.
@@Hakuna_Frittata Agreed but it would cut down demand greatly. And for fossil, we should transition from coal to natural gas as it's so underutilized.
Except that man can’t be trusted with machinery, that can kill the environment and the people around it I E Fukushima
Nuclear is still a non-renewable, and as we travel to space nuclear will start to be something we send into the stars.
We need to utilise stuff we have in abundance.
The solution is not solar, wind, nor tidal... Its nuclear
Why can’t it be a combination of all sources?
Well, I certainly do agree that we need to be switching to nuclear, and getting liquid thorium reactors into mass adoption, but nuclear isn't the end all be all answer.
Fission is unrenewable, just much slower, so it'd just be kicking the can down the road.
Fusion is promising, and for all intents and purposes, is renewable- or as renewable as anything is in the universe. The only problem is that 1) cold fusion is a load of hoo-ha, and 2) the energy requirements to sustain small scale fusion is immense. Fusion, funnily enough, works on a economy of scale, so it's more energy efficient to let the sun do the fusing, and just collect the energy, rather than siphon off hydrogen, fuse it with energy hungry containment fields, and then collect the generated power.
In the end, fission is a needed stopgap, and fusion has some use cases, but in the long run, why reinvent the wheel, when there's a fully functional car right there? The sun already does everything we want, all we have to do is collect the power.
It is definitely a combination of all 4 although nuclear is cracked for sure absolutely S tier energy source shame russia fucked it up for everybody
@@johnnyramirez3717solar and nuclear take it or plow a field all day
Fusion is the future.
This makes terraforming Mars seem like a backyard landscaping project
😂😅
Forget Dyson sphere. Just build two more earth's.
Now that’s what I’m talking about
The most we could do is build something the size of the moon or mercury. Also considering how an average planet works, we would need nickel and iron for the core and something rocky for the crust/surface. And now an artificial planet would be interesting. It would still have a planet's properties, why? Because gravitational pulls and other stuff come from mass. But would it spin and orbit the sun? Highly likely. And this is possibly the best idea incase Earth ever overpopulates.
Just terraform Mars.
Terraform the moon 🌙
Terraform Pluto 🔥🔥🔥
It has to be a swarm in order to reorganize for optimization over the variable solar output over time AND in order to dodge solar outbursts and magnetic storms
Not to mention to be able to handle gravitational disruptions caused by larger planets in the system and due to the movements of stars themselves.
I think I've read somewhere an actual shell would be unstable.
So you'd need to use propulsion pretty much all the time which puts unbearable stresses on the enormous structure...
so yeah... a swarm it is
The Starlink and other satellite constellations are a solid first step.
yeah, an ongoing project built up over time, spacing adjusts as more cells are added.
also to avoid a total catastrophic failure, which is far less likely when you have independent nodes.
I wonder if dismantling a planet within a solar system, part of an orchestral orbiting situation of several planets together, might become problematic, or result in strange changes in the solar system.
It absolutely would have ripple effects most likely to negatively affect us. The mindset that the sun’s energy is “wasted” just because we can’t fully exploit it for ourselves is ridiculous. The only reason the earth keeps earthing is because we can’t and shouldn’t
Similarly, would a giant metal sphere around the Sun not affect stuff? Maybe over insane amount of times, depending on the size and weight, but still.
Maybe you could offset the total mass of Mercury by a same mass dyson sphere, but the place would not be the same and the shape either...
Anyway, such tech is speculative so we'd be going blind. Engineers could get an idea but stuff would most likely present itself and make the plan wrong.
Sure, redistributing the mass of a planet wold have effect on orbital mechanics of the solar system, but remember, you've now got the power output of the entire Sun to help you deal with any negative consequences of that.
like introducing a new species to an area, there will always be consciences that will slap us in the face
@@shanepaynter5591 We are allowed to do what we wish to this solar system. No morally ridicolous dilemma will stop future humans shaping either the earth or the galaxy.
you made a mistake at 6:35. 1km² is 1million m². so 35000 people per 1km² would mean that each person would have 28 square meters, not 3 square centimeters
Even it is true ..It's impractical babe😂😂
That's a relief 😊
Imbaba إمبابة
8.28 km2
Population
1,465,875.
8280^2/1465875 = 47m2 / person ... they likely exceed 28m2/body in a lot of areas... probably not growing much wheat there nowadays.
Yeah i actually quit the video because of that. I just can’t trust a video that predicts the physical feasibility of the dyson sphere from someone who can’t convert units of measurement properly.
So the same as the Netherlands right now basically😂
We just gonna ignore that nuclear can power earth for thousands of years?
Yes, because it is the worst possible option.
@@MrWeedWacky no, it is not
@@ignilc After more than 70 years of nuclear power, there is no country in the world that have an actual long term storage for the waste, and anywhere that waste is stored, it has been neglected and has caused massive pollution of the immediate area, Chernobyl and Fukushima have areas that are uninhabitable for centuries in the future. And no, the fact that Chernobyl was a faulty design is not an argument, because Fukushima was a modern and considered safe design, but exactly because nuclear power plants are made for profits, corners are cut, like in Fukushima, which is why that disaster happened, it was considered too expensive to move the backup generators to higher levels, so they were left in a place where they ended up flooded...
Anyone who thinks nuclear power is a good idea are deluding themselves.
Yes but it could also contaminate for thousands of years if there was a meltdown due to things like natural disasters (floods, earthquake, hurricanes, etc.) then you have to deal with cancer. Solar is very good if it was done right, and if we can achieve "solid state batteries" to replace lithium, combined with solar, that's a game changer.
recycling nuclear waste was a normal procedure up to the end of the 70 ties , they stopped it because it cost a little bit more . Recycling nuclear waste on and on reduces its radiation time enourmously ,from 100k years to 1000 or less . And we haven’t even talked about nuclear fusion . Sacrificing mercury is unnessecary and just stupid . Ignoring the gravitation cycles alone is ludicrous. And the whole thought train is just based on the economy has to grow constantly . That’s the first thing that’s got to go . The real incentive is stock market that does not give a damn about nothing and no one . Just personal profit . That will get us destroy earth and beyond . And a Dyson sphere is just expanding economy / profit .
Humanity: **Destroys earth's atmosphere oceans ect**
Mercury: ...
Humanity: We need to destroy you-
Mercury: WHAT DID I DO?!
One issue I never see addressed in these types of videos ... increasing the amount of energy arriving at earth should upset the energy balance considerably. Directing near 100% of the sun's energy to earth, even if transformed into something other than sunlight, is still going have to go somewhere. We would have to be able to dramatically increase the amount of energy the earth sheds as well.
I think this is where humanity will try to tinker in turning energy back into physical mass. It is very energy consuming and quite unclear how to do it, but after all - it could solve resource problem and consume vast amount of energy we will get.
A lot of work can be moved off world if we are to the point of building a Dyson swarm. That means less power hunger industry on earth. Orbital factors and lunar product would be a first step since light lag to the moon is about a second which is perfectly fine for most activities.
A lot of work can be moved off world if we are to the point of building a Dyson swarm. That means less power hunger industry on earth. Orbital factors and lunar product would be a first step since light lag to the moon is about a second which is perfectly fine for most activities.
@@calluxdoaron1903 Surely entropy wouldn't allow this to be effetive
They're talking about mirrors, which means they can shutter them when they don't need them. The rest of the energy can be stored as potential energy. There's also a bigger danger, though. If something goes wrong with the setup, these energy relay drones could become unintended, concentrated energy weapons. The Earth can fit inside the Sun 1.3 million times. That's a lot of energy being made by something so enormous. Such directed energy could cause untold catastrophe.
6:38 How on earth did you get that 35k people per km2 means 1 person per 3 cm2? There are one MILLION square metres in a square kilometre. It's actually one person per 28.6 m2.
This video is a perfect example of why it was a mistake to let just anyone broadcast their thoughts.
I got 1 person per 300,000 cm squared in my head. That's the same as 30 metres squared right?
There are 148,000,000 square kilometers of land in the world. It will be 148,000,000x1,000,000=148,000,000,000,000 square metres. If this is divided by 8,000,000,000, it becomes 18,500 square meters per person. Human population size will peak before it reaches 11 billion people.
What he talks about a planet with 40 trillion people in 800 to 900 years with current population growth and that is just speculation. Unfortunately, many people think it increases because of births, but that is not correct. It peaked several years ago. The population is now increasing due to the fact that all people are living longer than ever and that all over the world. Also in the world's poorest country.
In the poor countries, the families with children have become a little richer and then they become smaller and the children can go to school because father and mother work. Unfortunately, western climate and energy politics will make it more expensive to live in the poor countries. So that families with children become large because everyone has to work for their survival.
seems legit@@Saabmann79
@@JooooooooooooshJeez, it was just likely an off-chance mistake, perhaps it should be you who shouldn’t be able to broadcast their thoughts eh?
150 years of oil reserves? When I was a kid they told us we'd be out in 1982.
So, do we have a Illudium Q-36 modulator to blow Mercury away?
Great, we would never have to worry about mercury being in retrograde again
One idea that I've thought of (and actually employed in Kerbal Space Program a few times) is to make a giant solar farm on the surface of Mercury and have a massive beam that converts the solar energy into microwaves and beam them to the Moon, then to Earth. A side-effect I could see with that is creating massive invisible beams of death in space. A wandering spacecraft that stumbled into the beam wouldn't have a very good time.
That wandering spacecraft would be like jiffy pop.
Yep. Because, unlike on movies, the light traveling through space cannot be seen.
Depends on the ship. You get one for black hole diving, you got nothing to worry about.
@@thecommenternobodycaresabout Microwaves aren’t actually visible to the human eye regardless so if you wanted to avoid them you would need to know exactly where they were and where they were pointing at all times.
wonder if that could slightly alter the orbits of the bodies
Personally. I think the most advanced societies just chilled around camp fires at night and live as simply as possible
Yes, I don't think I would mind living in a world with no industry. I'll miss social media at first, but living simply and in touch with nature is more human than living in tall buildings.
I wish I could do that and also have a girlfriend to share it with
@@PraveenSrJ01 BRO SAME
@@SvanTowerMan thanks for replying
@@PraveenSrJ01 Dont be so pathetic.
One of my favourite episodes of Startrek tng is called "Relics" and has a Dyson Sphere in the story. It's such a great episode. It's the one with Scotty (James Doohan) making an appearance.
Yup, I thought of that too; excellent episode
If they were such a great civilization to build a Dyson Sphere, why were they dead?
40 trillion people……now that’s cosmic horror!
That is really scary 😱
If we live in a Dark Forest, these Dyson Spheres may attract the wrong kind of attention
True any type of prospects in the realm of type 2 and above will send signals to the entire galaxy. Which is one signal nasa also is conveniently looking for as any form ofbthese signals pointing in our direction is unmissable.
could you explain what you mean by that
@@RMadmarksman Signals that would take forever to spread out. By the time someone out there notices, we might have already gone extinct or something for all anyone knows, or we might have vacated the solar system for unforseen reasons, anything could happen. Or humans might already have occupied half the galaxy and the distant ETs reckon it best not pick a fight with a bigger opponent whose battlecruisers can reduce them to space dust.
@@Jason75913there won't be such battlecruisers if it's gonna take long time to even get to another planet light years away.
@@GoopolHavy right, all aliens out there will be much older and have fast interstellar travel figured out and we never will, right?
My question: what happens to all of the planets beyond the sphere with less or no sunlight (or solar particles) reaching them?
With mirrors, you can orient however many of them you want to redirect however much sunlight you want towards - or away from - anywhere in the solar system you want. Mars needs more light for terraforming? Task more mirrors to light it up. Want to cool down Venus for terraforming? Block sunlight from reaching it.
@@darthrainbowsWant to eradicate all life on Earth? Hack the Dyson sphere and direct all solar rays to Earth.
good question!
They become our "junk closet" of raw materials to be exploited when / as needed. Also, the mirror idea suggested by @darthrainbows could be used.
Guess
Nuclear is enough for our energy needs. It is already proven safe and highly effective.
Fission fuel will run out in 50-100 years if used to satisfy most of the energy consumption of people on Earth.
That's only part of the problem. We still need oil. We need it to refine our metals, to make all the things we love and depend on. That oil has to be extracted, and then spent. We need oil for our pharmaceuticals, our clothes, our space ventures, and thousands of other things. Nuclear can't replace that.
@@Daniel_P116it could replace lots of those things, also other materials can be used than oil for most things, not just nuclear, its just better as a power source.
@Daniel_P116 even just reducing the NEED for oil, thus reducing or eliminating the need to drill for it, would be a win.
Already proven dangerous, more like it. The Sun is the most powerful nuclear reactor the Earth will ever have access. Building risky and vastly inferior reactors here on Earth is completely unnecessary.
It's cool to see Alex covering more 'futurist' topics in his style. The optimist in space really suits him, and we need more of that.
Check out Isaac Arthur. He's been doing that for years.
@@GrandTourVideos I love Isaac's stuff. I've been watching him for years. These guys are top tier. This video from astrum reminded me of Isaac a little bit
Judging a civilization by how much energy it uses seems like a very flawed metric. Wouldn't an advanced civilization be more efficient, and need less source energy to fuel various technologies? These plans seem to be all brute force and no finesse.
Great insight
Not how energy works unfortunately, it's referring to the ability to move more people more places and faster. Like the cosmos
@@greyarea3804 thank you!
Yes! We currently judge ‘advancement’ based on our Ego driven logic, which is deeply flawed. We have free energy, Tesla proved that. Just currently we let big corps control stuff they shouldn’t. When we evolve past capitalism, towards cooperation built on unity then we will find what’s has already been available to us. Free energy.
actually advanced societys would learn to be happyy without abssurd amount of energy
I am hearing peak oil and made to write essays in my school in 1983. It was 1997 we would be out of oil. Now we barely scratched oil reserves in the world.
I would think a slight wrinkle in the plan is the proportions of needed materials. nuclear transmutation is pretty energy intensive and is going to affect your timing a fair bit.
That and I’m pretty sure removing mercury could render earth uninhabitable due to unforeseen planetary interactions thrusting us out or something at us.
Only an alien civilisation in a Hollywood movie can build a Dyson Sphere.
Because in reality, any civilisation attempting it would be too stupid to exist.
@@Chris.Davies Yes, I think most people know that. It's just thought experiments. Like the space elevator. People are just talking about the engineering. Not the practicality.
@@Chris.Davies Using all energy available to you is not stupid at all. A Dyson Sphere will probably never be just one mega-structure but rather the collected effects of billions and billions of solar panels and mirrors. We have solar panels on Earth and in orbit right now. The tiny amount of light they convert to usable energy and waste heat is already the start of a Dyson Swarm/Sphere. If people continue to explore space and use solar energy then more tiny pieces will be added. It might take a long time but sooner or later a civilization like that will use 100% of their sun's output.
@@Chris.Davies Why is using all of the energy sources available to you stupid?
And the way Dyson Sphere Program implemented the Dyson Swarm is pretty feasible I imagine. Though, instead of shooting single use mirrors into orbit, we want to add some boosters with fuel to them so we can maybe repair or at least aim them at a receiver?
I firmly believe that it's far more likely that we'll eventually live like the Flintstones -- minus the dinosaurs, of course -- than it is that we'll someday live like the Jetsons. Not the best analogy but I'm sure people get the point. Honestly, though, the likelihood that humanity will be gone completely altogether actually seems much higher than the possibility of us making any real significant movements up the Kardashev scale.
If Putin gets his way
Assuming that power consumption us directly equivalent to civilization progress is an exceptional example of "correlation is not causation."
The fundamental premises in this video are insane. We need more energy for first world needs for consumption (everything is fine, let's keep going just as we are!). Ethics comes into destroying a space rock, not the fact that polluting the earth at this rate for another 150 years will be catastrophic for all life on earth. No worries re food, water, clean air, sanitation, quality of life, ending wars, etc. Yes I know this is a "thought experiment", but it is still sick at its root.
@@heatherjones6647 I whole heartedly agree
150 years of oil left IF we used it for all of our energy demands. We currently make less than 1% of our electrical grid power from oil. The rest is coal, natural gas, nuclear, and renewables.
Plot twist: black holes are Dyson spheres, we just don't recognize the tech.
Nah, gravitational lensing says no
@@Pao234_ Sure thing earthling.
This channel always gives me the "reading a bedtime story" vibe. Thank you for another fantastic upload 😀
Removal of Mercury could change the orbit of the planets, causing a catastrophic inward migration or something stranger. Mining asteroids with an attached space-based factory would pose less of a threat & could be aimed at any temporary, near-Earth satellites to start.
-1st complete the technology for a mobile space-based factory. Probably 10 years to create & use, with another 40 years to perfect. An investment of at least 3 factories to start, should be easy on the Earth's resources but with an insane price-tag.
-2nd target asteroids that are in Mercury's LaGrange points or cross it's orbit. Give the factories up to 5 years to get into location. Up to 1 year to get the collector into place. Up to 1 year to start producing.
-3rd target any additional material further out up to Jupiter's LaGrange points, if more mass is needed.
-4th allow time for the object to migrate into position. (up to 5 years once made)
We'd have something usable in 16 years with a steady increase by the 45th. At any point, the technology could be scaled up. I don't think we'd get to 6 percent the mass of the Earth, though. I don't know the numbers, but I think we would need to poach some of Saturn & Jupiter's moons for that. Maybe two-hundred to five-hundred years for full completion, but no orbit-changing craziness.
Basically never play God
Mercury is only 0.0000005 solar mass or 0.0005 Jupiter mass. The inner planets are hundreds of millions of kilometers apart; none of them have a strong enough gravity to affect each others' orbits for at least the remaining main-sequence life of the Sun.
I don't disagree with your numbers. Since I'm an enthusiast & not a degreed-scientist, I can only say that orbital resonance is a known-known.
The time scale & effect with a deconstructed Mercury is not something I know. I just know that its removal would affect any orbital resonance, whether known or unknown. Would removing Mercury make something terrible happen? I don't know. Could removing Mercury make something bad happen? Yes, because it presents a known-unknown.
There would be a loss of mass, but...what would it do? ...Why risk it?
But you forgot to consider the asteroids, comets, Coronal Mass Ejections, solar flares, solar storms, gravity of planets, the disruption of orbit by a nearby passing star, fluctuations in temperature, possible material and component failures and the maintenance. I would suggest considering the trojan locations in the Earth's orbit. They are gravitationally stable and would require little adjustments over the years. We know the science of trojan asteroids in the orbit of Jupiter and the Lucy spacecraft is going to dive deeper for that matter, so that might help as well.
the solar flares are less of a problem than it would be on many other solar systems just because our star is less solar active than other stars but the others would be a hurdle to get over
Firstly alot of these problems can be solves by not having the mirrors, collectors and facilities to beam the energy elsewhere succum to the whims of physics and predetermined orbits, as I suggested in an earlier comment instead of just having mirrors the these mirrors could be attached to a central frame where the can fold and unfold like origami such as in satellites and the central frame has a propulsion system that can supply its energy from the ever abundant sunlight that can be commanded manually and/or automatically this way they can move out of the way of asteroids, comets, cme's, solar storms and flares as well as passing stars. As for fluctuating Temps of the satellites and any habitats around the sun that can be accounted for with high tech very insulation shielding from both heat and radiation. For Temps on earth the swarm can be built in such an orientation that its at an angle above and below the plane of the earth's orbit (not the Sun's equator) on either side and for the two places the swarm intersects the orbit these can be strategically placed in areas that coincide with hot seasons on Earth this achieving a win win of still being able to suppl earth with light and making hot times just a bit cooler and not freezing the planet. The materials aren't that out of reach with a sawtm most definitely possible with mercury, a ring/rings or a sphere is completely impractical and unusable with our resources. Any failures can be easily combated with the first statement granted the central structure is still intact faulty components can be moved out for fixing or complete replaced. The major downfall for all designs is this tho, in a swarm and rings if one is damaged the pieces can cause a whole Kesler Syndrome Effect, if a hole is punched through a sphere it will implode (picture it as a hole in an airplane that will only get bigger with time, but instead of air pressure ots gravity) thus the whole structure will implode. Maintenance will be the least of problems for any type 2 civilization much like how nasa and other have tracking of satellites and even trash in space tracking and locating faults will be easy. Lastly the stability of orbits is not a problem modern computers, supercomputers, math and physics can determine these effects down to a tee and if we want to the sun itself is a good example of this. The sun is always kept in balance due to the equalized struggle between radiation and gravity, Tha same can be done with satellites finding a stable orbits that can consider these with the addition of proper speed, or these can be disregarded in favor of better more efficient orbits. I hope this long rant answers your questions and that understand.
It wouldn't even be necessary to set up a manned mission to Mercury if we could build machines sophisticated enough to mine and refine materials automatically and replicate themselves.
Thank you for gently weaving in Brilliant into your presentation. it didn't feel so jarring to suddenly be talking about it that it felt like an advertisement. well done.
Dyson Sphere... a pipe dream.
Its nonsense, lets reach Proxima Centaury first.
So sick of hearing about it tbh. Really rather see these TH-camrs talk about realistic things.
@@mrwolsy3696 Maybe let's not. Voyager 2 hasn't even reached the theoretical location of the Oort Cloud, let alone the orbit of another star.
If u say so but u can't call something ull never live to see nor confirm a "Pipe Dream"
In the first 30 seconds of this video it is almost as if the author has never heard the word nuclear
😂😂😂
Nuclear has been plagued by an odd stigma in our culture, it's like people are going 'oh no what are we going to do about this energy crisis' while looking around the nuclear power plant right in front of them. It's almost like they don't want to acknowledge that there's solutions that don't require cutting back resources and mobility for the general population...
He also conflates fossil fuels as a source with the TOTAL energy usage of humanity, all sources together. It fucks up his maths
And assuming a perpetual 1% population growth rate is Mathlusian nonsense. Earths population is already forecast to start precipitously declining by end the century
Yeah I get it but the overall pramise is that nuclear is limited yh I may last for millennias or millions or years but that's the blink of an eye in terms of the galaxy. I agree tho that we should focus on nuclear both fission and/or fusion as well as harnessing the others (type one and all) and moving away from burning huge amounts if not all coal and oil, but it is important to note that oil will always be necessary in refining materials and synthetics and reducing burning it for energy and producing waste can divert it to doing these useful processes (not that power gen is useless).
We're much closer to nuclear fusion than a dyson sphere / swarm
That's what we're hearing since the 70's. I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. A workable science project? No problem. Commercial feasibility to represent a viable alternative to even fission? Within our lifetimes? Pipe dream...
It's just a rumors it's impractical 😂😂
@@dominic.h.3363What about the recent advances at the National Laboratory in California? They've repeated efficient fusion at least 5 times last year.
@@poetryflynn3712 Like I said, science project, no problem. Commercial feasibility is a whole different domain. You have to sustain it, not "repeat" it. Being able to turn the ignition on at which point the engine starts running and immediately stalls is a far cry away from driving a car.
@@dominic.h.3363 That's what I thought too, but since we've now achieved ignition, I think it's possible within my lifetime. I might be like 80 tho by the time it works out
“The shocking reality of a world without electricity”
Our ancestors: *it’s about time you little chits learned*
Slogan: Let’s make Mars great again
Slogan: Let’s fuck up Mercury
Unfortunately, humans seem intent on fucking up Earth by "making it great again" well before we'll ever have a chance to do it to another planet. It's almost like we've asked Venus to hold our beers while we do our very best to outdo her hellscape.
One thing about oil is that we don’t burn it all. Oil is the base of many chemical products, which are bit harder to build from sunlight or wind.
We would be better off if we stopped using oil for fuel, but that will take a while to happen. Oil is far better as a chemical base.
0:09 upside down vulcan rocket
Worth adding that building a Dyson Sphere is impossible as the sphere would collapse. The material at the equator (assuming the sphere rotates with the sun) would stay in place, but as soon as the material is "north" or "south" of the equator, it's subject to gravitational forces pulling it toward the center. And the material at the poles of the star are just, somehow, supposed to magically float in space? I don't see how any material made from atomic matter would hold itself over the star in such a position and I don't see how firing some kind of thruster continuously would be worth it. So the only "Dyson Sphere" anyone or anything could build, would be a larger series of "Dyson Rings", narrow bands which would revolve around the sun. Also managing their positions would be physically challenging as you'd want thin material to reduce the cost, but applying force to a very thin material also requires incredible precision. And you'd need to apply forces to it often because the orbits of planets, the motion of the star through the galaxy and other events do exert forces on the rings and those forces in turn will move the rings which means they can collide with each other.
Speaking simply on the point of thrusters firing to keep the segments in place, the amount of radiant energy from the sun would more than offset whatever we spent to fire said thrusters (even if they're ionic plasma thrusters that are way better than what we have today).
I think there are other concerns here. The Dyson's Sphere models presented here are variants on the original theory. Thus, I wouldn't even call them true or factual Dyson's Spheres. The way that a real one would work is substantially further way from the sun (say close to Mars' orbit from the sun) and would not run afoul of the problems you're mentioning. Instead, it would encounter completely different ones like the matter necessary to create that would essentially be worth millions of Earths in terms of surface area. So, we fix one problem and create another by using one that fits the general parameters of Dyson's theory.
That said, I don't know that we necessarily need to do the variants or the real thing. I think much smaller objects capable of harnessing radiant energy from the sun would be relatively smart from both economics and time perspectives. Also, in this case, ROI (return on investment).
Yh but bithe Dyson spheres and rings are impossible to build with even mercury and every asteriod, comment and dwarf planet we could get our hands on much less at the distances the rings would be (each being behind the other exponentially increasing surface area and mass) a swarm is the best option as if parts are damage the whole thing won't stop working.
@@RMadmarksman I'm not sure that's really relevant here since we don't have the technology to even approach something like this. Simply put, we are too far behind as a society and our level of technology to even begin to attempt something like this.
Let's assume for giggles at the moment that we did this on a much smaller scale. For example, the moon. Ignoring the fact that the moon doesn't have radiant energy we could harness, we focus on just the size of it. It's roughly 81 times less massive than the Earth.
So, let's assume we want to build a mini-Dyson around the moon. We don't have the technology or materials to do that either. It just doesn't exist here. If we can't do that on a much smaller and closer to home object, I don't see us doing that for larger objects either (starting at a small moon and ending at a G-type star).
It's a future state for our civilization. We will know we have made it as a next level civilization when we have the technology and materials to do precisely that. We're not going to be close for at least another 500 years.
Dyson himself noted that he was really talking about a swarm of independently orbiting structures, not a solid shell.
However, I wish there was more awareness of the Orbital Ring concept of Paul Birch, which actually does make a solid shell feasible:
Essentially, if a ring stretching around an entire planet (or star) is moving faster than orbital velocity, it generates a net outward force, and can support (by maglev) stationary structures.
A complete, stationary Dyson shell can be supported by a network of such fast-moving rings at all possible inclinations (obviously with a lot of redundancy). It won't happen on a short timescale of course.
I notice that discussions of dismantling Mercury with optimistic timescales like 31 years never account for the heat energy inside Mercury's core. It would take a megastructure project of its own to dissipate the heat of a 2000 degree K core. Unaided that would take well over a billion years presuming we stripped the core bare and left it 'naked' to radiate.
Would be better to use that energy to propel mercury across the galaxy before the sun eats it, so we've got millions of years to figure it out.
That exactly my thought if we strip mined it in layers each exposed layer can be cooled and quickly too due to the vast drop in temp on its night side though I know it won't cool overnight leaving the layers bare to radiate away in such cold Temps will help though it may take at least 2 to 3 centuries with the most efficient methods, robots, and most of all consistency as drilling will not work.
It's noteworthy that most of the heat that keeps the interiors of the inner planets molten, is radioactive decay of uranium-238. (Without it the planets would have solidified within tens of millions of years.)
So strip-mining Mercury would actually satisfy the "nuclear is better" proponents on this thread.
We're so far off, any answer to that initial question is meaningless.
31 Years, an i thought Isaac Arthur is optimistic....
Now I'm relying on an A Level physics class from 25 years ago, that I didn't totally understand at the time, but....
Our physics teacher was into his star Trek, and when Scotty got stuck in the Dyson sphere, he decided to work us through the gravitational physics.
About 2 whiteboards full of calculations later, he came to the conclusion that the gravitational centre of a Dyson sphere would be in the centre of the sphere.... IE, the core of the star, which would be a bit problematic if you were planning on living and maintaining an atmosphere on the sphere's inner surface.
Definitely need a spin to it, but that would be problematic as well in the shape of a sphere. Honestly, in terms of 'Dyson' type constructs, a swarm or 'Halo ring' seems most logical especially for a possibly live-able environment - minus the whole life wiping purge lol
Thanks for sharing your story from 1999
Crazy how Nuclear Energy/Fusion Energy was completely ignored in the intro.
Especially because that's how the sun makes its energy. Forget Dyson things around the sun, build an own spaceborne fusion reactor and build the Dyson things around that.
The entire debate over future energy sources has to ignore nuclear, because it is obviously the best option.
Some of us just want to see Mercury get what it deserves.
RIP mercury sacrificed by humanity to survive in the universe
If we build a dyson swarm/sphere, wouldnt the earth be in darkness? It would be cold and night every few hours
We don't have to capture all 100% of light, we can still redirect any amount of light we want on other planets
For Temps on earth the swarm can be built in such an orientation that its at an angle above and below the plane of the earth's orbit (not the Sun's equator) on either side and for the two places the swarm intersects the orbit these can be strategically placed in areas that coincide with hot seasons on Earth this achieving a win win of still being able to suppl earth with light and making hot times just a bit cooler and not freezing the planet.
Temperatures will vary very wildly
Energy crisis? Just build nuclear plants.
But the fuel is only so much u can rely on it the few thousand yrs it may last is the blink of an eye interms of civilisations compared to the 5 billion yrs of useful untapped energy the sun has. Like think about it in the long term.
@@RMadmarksman And if it takes us a few thousand years to figure out how to build a Dyson sphere, nuclear will be a great way to last until then.
An interesting thought explored a little. Well done on the video creation :)
The only practical part of all of this that I see for the current future is to be using the mirrors for setting up industry and foundries on the moon. That gets the energy waste out of the earths biosphere so we can preserve more of the food producing ecology for a while. It really means beginning the transition to a space dwelling species with the early inhabitants of those space metal can dwelling being miners digging up the moon and dragging in asteroids to melt down. Transporting any of those building materials off Earth just isn't practical. But sending additional energy/materials extracted from the sun, moon and asteroids down to earth isn't that difficult.
>
Moon -> mining -> energy and space craft -> access to more distant resources -> ...
Well, we wouldn’t need to worry about Mercury being in retrograde anymore.
Mercury is like Dres you forget it exists sometimes.
Related to Dyson spheres are ringworlds at 1AU. Plenty of space but requires some super strong materials we don’t have yet
if we just floated a curved mirror out between us and the sun, we could catch a fraction of the sun's energy & focus it back towards Earth where we could get at it with an orbital battery system... it's as easy as reflecting it, we don't need to transfer the energy or get it at the source, just reflect the beam where we need it (as Alex explained as soon as I unpaused the video from writing this comment lol!) I was right there with you man
6:36 thats quite the miscalculation man😂
i was looking for this comment 🤜
Yea he messed up and divided the number of people by the area, should of been are divided by number of people.
35,000 people per km2 isn't even that bad,
1 km2 is 1,000 m by 1,000 m so
1,000,000 m2.
1,000,000 m2 divided by 35,000 people is 28.6 m2 per person.
Taking square root of 28.6 m2 that's a boxed room 5.3 meters by 5.3 meters per person, much bigger than the studio I lived in, and some people never leave so I guess they'll be alright 😂.
@@dewsjievpdav6557 *Should have been. We all make mistakes. He should have triple checked the math in his video though.
Lot of higher level math 🧮
That’s gonna take a LONGGGGG extension cable! 😅
Nuclear: “Am I a fuxking joke to you?”
The Sun is a nuclear reactor... It's nuclear fusion in it's core that generates it's energy. Vastly inferior and dangerous nuclear reactors here on Earth are the joke.
One thing that was for some reason omitted - there's no need to rely on Earth's energy even to lift first mirror from Mercury (well, at least not directly and in one go, we still need to launch basic infrastructure from Earth).
Build solar panels or w/e from asteroids/Moon and assemble it in space (maybe even near Mercury). Or start by getting power source online on Mercury itself just until it can start using Dyson Swarm.
Dyson Sphere Program is a really cool game about building exactly that - Dyson Spheres (and Swarms). It's obviously not 100% realistic (that would be boring) but it gives general idea of the process.
Working and living in space is already incredibly tough, but imagine living and working on a dyson swarm in close orbit of the sun. If it's even possible to send human workers there(ignoring robots), it'd probably be the single most dangerous job we've invented yet.
Do we have radiation shielding tech that could protect permanent living quarters that close to the sun?
Not now, but it's not inconceivable that it would exist in 100 years. A proposed q drive, not a great name, you can find it online is a design that harvests energy from the solar wind, and also happens to provide radiation shielding in the process, and that ignoring advancements in material science. You can also use it to go quite fast, concentrating the kinetic energy of a spacecraft into a smaller mass, but that's a whole other beast. Keep in mind, this is a project undertaken by a society that can already exist throughout the solar system, so it's some time in the future.
RELEASE THE DRONES!
??? You forgot that we can build robots???
@@egggge4752 Yeah because we currently use robots to perform all the dangerous jobs on earth right now..
Humans will not be needed.
Enjoy the time you have.
pushing a plough all day in an agrarian society sounds relatively peaceful. the older i get the more ok i am with slowing down and enjoying nature. might be good to have a multi-pronged approach to this challenge... one that involves us using less energy for frivolous things like all you can eat buffets, energy drinks, using ai to create silly memes on social media, driving an hour one way to go to a big box store to buy consumer electronics that will break within a year, mining metals to create a pair of cheap pliers that get shipped across the world and sold for $2, etc. north america has kind of lost the plot a bit, and europe is only doing a bit better it seems
Rather than a Dyson Sphere, a Ring World would be technically easier, and use far less material.
The math (never 'maths') would be easier too.
Best sci-fi novel ever written!
Sure if you could get some unobtanium. (And prevent it from drifting)
Otherwise it's a nogo. That's why, aside from scifi, Dyson's concept is a swarm and not an actual sphere.
No. It would collapse since the gravitational forces of the other planets would pull it in dufferent directions. A ring world only works if:
- asteroids didnt exist
- only the sun and the ringworld were in the system
-you could make the entire thing out of graphite
@@egggge4752 Graphene is still orders of magnitude too weak for a ringworld. You're better off spamming billions of O'Neill or McKendree cylinders instead.
"Math" is the preferred term in the United States and Canada. "Maths" is the preferred term in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and other English-speaking places.
It'd be interesting to see a simulation of the the gravity disturbances in the Solar system in case of a hypothetical sudden disappearance of Mercury or any other planet (or an apperarance of a Dyson sphere): how the orbits of the remaining planets would change.
*"If the idea of pushing a plow all day doesn't quite align with your lifegoals"*
Then change lifegoals, problem solved.
Given that the barycentre of the solar system is well above the surface of the sun, any major structure orbiting the sun will have to have positioning thrusters to avoid sliding into the sun. This idea was dealt with in the book Ringworld Engineers by Larry Niven back in the 1970's.
Thats why it would be a swarm. We aint building a structure that falls into the sun if a thruster breaks.
@@egggge4752 That's why there's redundancy. For any megastructure, including swarms, hundreds, if not thousands of thrusters would be necessary on each structure to keep a stable orbit.
@@davidmilne4936 or hear me out... we build a swarm thats really cheap and has no redundancy since when a single satellite breaks and falls into the sun... we can just replace it.
The structure will orbit the barycentre as all the other objects in the Solar System do. Do planets need thrusters?
Don: "Hey professor Fuzzhair, Let's nuke Mercury today!"
A correction, if I may:
At 5:04, the second term in the equation is identified by the narrator as "the sun's circular area as it cuts through space". But this is instead the circular area of Earth. And the number shown (1.1 x 10^14 m^2) is indeed the circular area of the Earth.
And since this equation is intended to show the amount of solar energy that hits the Earth (in the absence of a Dyson Sphere), it is indeed the circular area of the Earth that matters, not the circular area of the sun.
Did I just watch a sponsor seamlessly integrated into a video? That just blew my mind right there!
It was the best advert for them I've seen.
We need more nuclear power in order to save the "energy crisis". Uranium, but better yet, Thorium based.
True but dyson swarm cooler + more research into robotics, heatproofing and solar radiation.
Sure, when it's economic (again?). In the meantime we should optimise (coincidentally economically & ethically) by maximising solar, wind, geothermal and interconnectors. Fill the little gaps with Throrium MSRs or whatever when they finally pop up.
Given how thorough Astrum videos are, I was surprised that the author didn’t factor in how hard it is to travel to Mercury, given its proximity to the sun.
Dyson Spheres are impossible, you have to build a dyson swarm
Explain it to me. How do you get the energy the dyson sphere collects? It looks pretty detached to me. I really don't know how it'll send the energy from the dyson sphere orbiting the sun back to earth.
lasers or probably microwaves... something like that.
Gremlins. Or goblins. Or gnomes. Or ghosts. Or Gods. Most likely one of those types of fantasy G creatures.
@@MegaHarko so in short and to over simplify it to the point that it's understandable but technically wrong... A dyson sphere is just a magnifying glass concentrating the sun to a battery on earth?
@@RadzKiram
With some detours, but yes.
Also: Earth doesn't need to be the sole receiver. You could build a ship with a solarsail and aim at that with your swarm to accelerate it. (in that case actual mirrors would suffice if we're going a low-tech route).
The Dyson sphere assumes people or benefactors would live on the structures rings orbiting the sun around, therefore using locally that energy gathered.
The fact that mercury could be disassembled in 31 years is mind blowing to me.
It couldn't. That's pure fantasy maths right there.
lol we cannot even dig past 10 Km on earth due to heat from the core, imagine trying to do that on a planet that has a surface temp of 427C during the day
@@shadyg999well that's true I would go the strip mining route going from the surface down in layers with robots of course ppl are to fragile for the heat and harsh environment. An added benefit is that the layers when exposed or becomes to hot can be left to cool if high heat resistant materials reach their limits and as such from that logic it would take way longer.
In 31 years it will be 2055
7:35 Why does that graph ignore the huge dropoff in growth rate that we are currently seeing. They just act like it is a blip rather than a trend
Yeah, that's what I was thinking, none of our population models show human population just exploding exponentially. That drop in birth rate which is almost across the board will eventually result in human population plateauing and then dropping, sometime later this century probably. He does write above the graph that this is just a thought experiment, though I feel like that should've made it into the script at some point, making it clear that this is not what is projected to happen. It comes across a little Malthusian.
The real question at the point we can build a Dyson Sphere, would be: are we really even biological anymore?
I have this idea that a few stoner aliens are floating in their ship thinking, "Do you know what would be funny? If we convince the earthlings to blow up that small planet."
Our population may never cross 10 billion. In fact with many countries hitting negative growth rate , even reaching 10 billion will be a challenge.
Right now, yes, but as the growth rates fluctuate, we might reach 10 billion some day
I wonder why this idea of the possibility of a dyson sphere persists?
Surely, in a solar system awash with asteroids etc , any construction on this scale would be quickly reduced to space junk in a chain reaction!
We do not live in such a solar system and these would be statites, not satellites and not in orbit so if they are damaged they would just fall into the Sun. No chain reaction is possible.
A dyson swarm. Basically millions of satallites with solar panels or mirrors. They would have a distance of 10000 km to eachother and could move out of the way individually if an asteroid is detected. Idk why astrum keeps saying dyson sphere. Kinda silly.
@@egggge4752 is it reallyt realistic to keep a swarm of such magnitude fuelled?
@@dougal445 they fuel themselfs? They have solar panels on them? And they orbit the sun? How do you think current rovers and satellites work? Did we send people up to mars to fuel the mars rover? Cmon man.
@@dougal445they could be powered from the sun right infron of them
6:37 seems like you made a maths mistake.
1 square kilometre = 1 million square meters. So having 35,000 people per km^2 is roughly the same as 1 person per 30m^2. Not 1 person per 3cm^2.
The actual idea is not a singular structure, it was a swarm of smaller structures. A singular structure of that size is most likely not feasible with current or near current materials and engineering principles. A dyson swarm would resemble the array of satelites around our planet just much more denser.
Have you tried the Dyson Sphere Project PC game. Yes its a game, but the Dyson swarm that is created towards the end of the game, gives some idea of the immense complexity of such a project.
Dyson sphere program**
And yes it is an awesome game! For anyone that liked factorio this is a must play.
Noone talks about if and how much a Dyson Sphere or swarm would affect space weather and the solar wind. Would it shrink the heliopause radius? Would that affect the objects around that radius? And so on!!
Who cares when you have the power of a star on tap? Literally enough power to sterilize every planet in the galaxy if converted into a Nicholl-Dyson beam. If you have a problem you can make a solution if you control that much power.
The weaker the heliosphere and solar radiation, the better for space colonisation. In case of a swarm the impact would be minimal anyways and sphere isnt possible since it would collapse in on itself.
@@egggge4752 wouldn't the increased cosmic rays coming from interstellar space be a hazard?
@@1cool but they are decreased? You didnt understand? You think we are reflecting the sun just to earth? No the swarm sends a laser bundle to a collection station on earth.
@@egggge4752 sorry for the confusion, i meant that with the heliosphere decreased, the radiation from other stars in the galaxy and other events (black holes, supernovae) might increase and be harmful to life.
Whenever I see videos about Dyson spheres I never hear people talk about the environmental effects it would have on the planet of we blocked out that much of the light from reaching the planet
Yes! Thank you! I've been saying this forever!
Earth only receives one billionth of the suns light. If we actually did enclose the entire sun in a solid sphere of solar panels, we could probably afford to convert one billionth of that energy back into light and point it at the earth.
If we had a smaller Dyson swarm blocking, say, half of the sun's light, we should have the technology to build an Earth-sized space mirror reflecting sunlight towards Earth, doubling the light we receive back up to full.
@@patrickskelly8517 you can't match the nuances of how the sunlight affects the earth by just pointing a reflected light
@@patrickskelly8517 With a swarm, you could just position the collector satellites so they leave open a corridor for natural sunlight to reach Earth. Since the Earth only receives one billionth of the sun's total energy, your swarm could get all the way to 99.999999% complete before the amount of energy Earth receives gets decreased at all.
We wouldn't need to block any of the light reaching the planet. You just position the orbits of your collector satellites so that none of them get in the way of the 1 billionth share of sunlight that reaches the Earth naturally. And instead of pushing all the way to a 100% swarm, you just stop at whatever density of swarm your current computer technology can handle calculating the needed orbital arrangements for, and expanding only as your computer technology advances, and your populaltion needs. Even a 10% Dyson Swarm gives you a vast amount of energy to play with.
1:18 Biblically accurate angel
Random human: We build a dyson sphere
Random human: Looks at mercury
That random human: Goodbye...
'Magnifying glasses in space mining' is a topic I'd like to see and hear about. Is Alex up for the research challenge?
Small issue- I think you meant 1 person per 30 meters squared, 3 cm^2 is impossibly small even for one person lol
yeah there‘s something completely off with his numbers. the wikipedia article about population density of the earth says there are already 16 people per km² when you include all waters. it rises to 58 people per km² if you only take land into account. if you multiply by 5000 you get 290.000 people per km² but since there are 1 million m² in 1 km², there is still about 3,45m² left per person.
35000 people per km2 equals 0.035 people per m2, that is, about 30m2 per person.
1km = 1000m
But
1km2 = 1000000m2 not 1000m2
Astrum it's a very interesting idea. But instead of only mirrors. Also living habits in-between. And massive generational spaceship, with its own mini star.
We don't have a power problem, we have a storage problem.
The best thing to focus on is the use of batteries and how to be able to change those out in a fast and economical way
Nuclear reactor technology and limitless uranium: exists
Astrum: we're gonna run out of oil
Removing a planet would seriously disrupt the resonance of the orbits of other planets, including ours. I cannot imagine a worst idea.
Nuclear energy may be a solution... but just think how much nuclear, radioactive trash we would have on earth.
Two words, nuclear energy.
Dyson spheres are a pipe dream, too massive, too far away and too advanced for humans to engineer. Ever.
6:34 Admittedly, not everyone uses a lot of energy these days because in some places it's limited, so if we had ample energy for everyone then the amount we use for 8 billion people would increase dramatically and so the amount of additional people we could handle would decrease.
But my real concern with this is less that not enough light will get to the plants, but that reducing the amount of sunlight hitting the planet by even a modest amount could significantly cool the planet. Which may be what we need, but only a little.