Nice callout to Starmaker. For those who aren't aware of it (pretty much everyone) the author Olaf Stapledon wrote the books Starmaker and Last and First Men in the 1930s which are some of the first works of epic, hard sci-fi. He created the ideas of dyson spheres, genetic engineering and a ton of other incredibly prescient ideas decades before other sci-fi writers who are often credited with those ideas did. Although he's largely unknown to the public today, he was incredibly influential on numerous sci-fi authors such as Arthur C. Clark, Vernor Vinge and Stanislaw Lem. Freman Dyson himself credited Stapledon for coming up with Dyson spheres and said that they should be called Stapledon spheres instead.
Q99g Stapledon was pretty well known in his time. I couldn't find any specific references to Asimov being influenced by these works but it's probable that he was at least aware of them.
+Dan Heidel Those two books are some of my most prized possessions. Last and First Men paints some mighty future histories and in my opinion stands still unmatched till today.
I could be wrong, but I think that a civilization that was so advanced might have managed energy utilization to the point where they didn't have much waste heat. After all this is the product of inefficient utilization. Humans are already pretty skilled at capturing the energy of waste heat and augmenting their generators rather than just letting it radiate off. If there are civilizations so desperate for resources like energy that they are doing this, than there are "pirater civilizations" looking to tap the energy resources of a civilization like this sooooo you wouldn't want to betray yourself with such a easily detected "beacon".
+Lord Zephyros antimater/mater anihalation makes almost no waste energy, if they master the production of antimater on large scales they migth be able to have enough energy
+Jesus Ramirez Romo Define waste energy. Sure the MA reaction may produce mostly usable energy. Say you then use it to power a light bulb, after that light strikes a few things and then your eyeball then guess what, it becomes heat/waste energy. It ALL does, so their must be as much waste heat as the energy they use.
+Abaris84 Yep, episode "Relics" has the dyson sphere and it was the episode where the original Scotty makes an appearance having been suspended inside the transporter.
To my understanding, I thought Dyson never meant a rigid object when he was talking about the Dyson Sphere and more like what was mentioned later in the video more accurately referred to as the Dyson Swarm. Just a large number of habitats orbiting the Sun. It would be very similar to the way the Earth looks now with all of the objects orbiting it.
Mr.Durden You misunderstand me if you think I don't understand the difference between an astrophysicist and a damn sci-fi writer. My issue is with the presentation of this video. His wording is in such a way as to make it sound as if he thinks the 1930s example was subsequent to Dyson's conceptualization.
End of the day, there is a HUGE leap between a writer writing a sci-fi novel where his imagination runs wild, and a scientist taking the concept, doing the math on it, and proving on paper that it could work if we met certain criteria.
a lot of the old sci-fi writers used to study a lot of science unlike the pop culture sci-fi of the 80s and 90s (aka space operas such as star wars) so it's not unusual for authors to make logical steps in terms of speculative science only for science to catch up a few years later to quote hal clemant "The fun, and the material for this article, lies in treating the whole thing as a game. I've been playing the game since I was a child, so the rules must be quite simple. They are: for the reader of a science-fiction story, they consist of finding as many as possible of the author's statements or implications which conflict with the facts as science currently understands them. For the author, the rule is to make as few such slips as he possibly can." unfortunately these days it's a case of "rule of cool" (which isn't always a bad thing)
Here's an idea for extra energy: Build millions (or billions) of solar panels that orbit the Sun, roughly the same distance as the Earth, and follow the Earth's orbit around the Sun. The speed that they orbit the Sun, however, is slow enough that the Earth is constantly passing them, or perhaps they could orbit the opposite direction as the Earth. All year they collect solar energy in enormous batteries, and as the Earth passes them, we trade out their charged batteries for new, empty ones. Every year we would collect millions, maybe billions of these humongous batteries, and use them to power our space stations / space ships. Solar panels in space are suppose to be 5 times as efficient as on Earth, so they could capture quite a bit of energy in a year, I imagine. Its an interesting idea, anyway...
Black holes are just huge vacuums, aliens tried to make Dyson spheres but instead of using the correct blueprint they used the vacuum blueprint and it made black holes. (Obviously kidding)
Good reference to the literary works of Olaf Stapledon in this video. The incredible future histories written in Last and First Men still stand unmatched to this day.
There are probably some other life forms out there right now, receiving information from their planetary network about a structure similar to a Dyson sphere, and how they can detect other life forms who also use it.
Sci_Ant And there's someone commenting on a video about this similar structure calling the internet "planetary network" and someone replies to that comment saying they like how the other life form adressed the internet as "planetary network".
Dyson's first idea was the "Dyson Ring", a ribbon at 1 A.U. that was a couple of thousand km wide, and 20-30 km thick, around our sun. The exposed surface area is massive, the solar flux is similar to what we get on Earth now, and with a ring, it can be spun to create "artificial" gravity for people living on the inside surface. The sphere came later. This was also around the time when Dyson was working with Theodore Taylor on the Orion project. If you want to move a very large amount of mass to, say, Mars, or out to the Asteroid belt, then an Orion would do the job. Ol' Bang Bang is dismissed by some, but a time may come when it's our best option.
Why not build a Dyson ring instead of a sphere? Wouldn't building a sphere around a star trap a lot of the star's radiation in the sphere? If so, wouldn't that be really bad? Also, how would we make an artificial magnetic field large enough to deter/control solar winds?
I dont see how having a lot of radiation traped in the sphere is a bad thing but a ring would be better especially if we build around a star that provides heat and light to planets such as our own.
Imagine the Sun is a bowling ball the Earth is a small marble (1 millionth of bowling ball) 93 feet away. How many bowling balls of material would you need for a ring 292 feet in circumstance? How are you going to drag all those stars to our system? Pure fantasy.
This made me think of a sci-fi story idea. Imagine a civilization that had created such a thing and set it up perfectly to be around their star but something happen causing them to be nearly wrapped out. Generations later having no idea that they are in a sphere, no idea of the outside universe, or that the ground they walk on was created
Hearing the Dyson sphere concept explained leaves me wondering how anyone could entertain it outside of a work of fiction. Between the cost of physical resources, the zero-sum gravity that would allow it to drift into collision with the star it contains, the intensely redoubling heat/radiation that would likely tear the structure apart, or at the very least reduce its lifespan and usefulness to the makers... Any civilization advanced enough to be able to make a Dyson sphere, would be advanced enough to NOT make a Dyson sphere. If you have the means to mine or destroy an entire solar system's worth of planets; to collect, refine, and transport all the resources thereof; and then to build, in open space, a structure with a 185,920,000 mile circumference, and a 1.09×10^5 mile wide surface area... You must already have at your disposal more portable and cost-effective sources of energy than this activity would result in.
I was really fascinated with the idea at first, until I listened to people theorize how it could be made. There is no way that this is possible. A huge sphere around a star could be drawn in by the star's gravity. It would also make any planet on the other side of the sphere uninhabitable. The Dyson bubble is more possible but still not ideal. We have hundreds of not thousands if satellites around the earth orbiting, daily, they crash into each other and destroy themselves. It doesn't matter how thin these satellites will be around a star, they will still collide. And if we wanted to harvest all of the energy, it would take millions of satellites. Which highly Increases the chances of collision. And with each collision, the scattered parts act as tiny meteorites, which can collide with other satellites, which is seen in the satellite orbit around the earth. So the Dyson bubble would just serve as a temporary means if energy.
I realize Im 2 years late to your comment, but a ringworld isnt stable. As mentioned in ringworld(and the sequels) the people living on it still require minerals to be brought in. You can't mine the ringworld to expand your civilization. It isnt easily defended, either from astronomical or alien threats. The entire outer side and a good portion of the inner would have to have meteor defenses to stop the stray intruder rock(or alien). Due to equal and opposite reaction, you would have to balance the force used to destroy the danger with an opposite force to stabilize the ring. Speaking of balance, and solar flare(ringworlds children) would cause the ring to wobble a little. Over time, if not corrected, it would either tear itself apart or send a portion into the sun.
You should have mentioned building asynchronously so as to give the sun a little tug in one direction. From there you could create a mobile star system. \o/ ...just don't expect it to go anywhere very rapidly for a long time. :P
+Lutranereis But once it picks up speed, say, after a few million years, you could take it gallivanting around the galaxy, gobbling up other solar systems, incorporating them into the structure and replacing stars as you go. It would truly be, *awesome.*
There are two alternatives to this that I quite like. The first is called the sunken dyson sphere, which is when you build mechanisms that extend bellow the surface of the sun. This way you not only tap the energy being produced by the fusion reactions in the sun, you can actually dial them up or down. In effect turning the entire sun into one big semi-artificial fusion reactor. You could create shafts or "spotlights" through which we would beam sunlight to the worlds that need it. This way you could dial-down the fusion reactions by a tremendous amount and still have plenty to light up the Earth and the Moon and Mars. We could extend the lifespan of our sun by orders of magnitude, since it would burn it's fuel more slowly. The other one is called a gossamer dyson. This is where you create a solid ring-world near the ecliptic plane, but for all of the other areas (the north and south hemispheres) you create paper-thin solar cells. The solar wind would be enough to keep these two half-shells filled, like the sails in a ship. The ring world would spin (probably kept separate from the two gossamer shells) since only it would have life living on it. This way most of the sphere would actually be super thin, which would make building it much much easier.
I wonder how humans would react if they discovered extraterrestrial life so far away that humanity could never actually make contact, but we knew they were out there. I mean, the age of the light would be millions of years old so they'd all be dead. But we'd know that at some point in time, life existed elsewhere and may still exist today.
+Connor Skudlarek i doubt they'd all be dead! as long as they know how to build rocket then their chances of survival is almost 100%. we have been around for more than 3 milion years as bipedal apes, so what makes you assume 1000, even 10 000 years are enough to kill off an intelegent species? thats ctually a really short about of time. but I assume you listen to a lot of random rumors about this topic. anyways, I assure you, from this point on, we will never die out.
Jason Denton Millions... I very clearly said millions of years... I wasn't referring to 'life as a whole' on the planet millions of lightyears away. I meant that those species and beings we discovered would be dead. I also excluded "comparable intelligence" from the thought, merely considering organisms such as foxes, bears, dragonflies, etc. I assure you, humanity can be easily wiped from the universe. We could die out this month, century, or millennia. All it takes is the right set of circumstances, and everyone is gone. Just a random blip in the cosmos that faded out. Life will probably live on forever, but intelligent life could be permanently eradicated in a few weeks.
Connor Skudlarek oh I see, i admit that was my bad. I wasn't referring to life as a whole either, I was talking specifically about intelligent life. then again I suppose I was only being logical as it would be impossible for us to ever tell if life existed anywhere near a million light years from where we are now(assuming that's the time the signal takes to reaches us, then it must indeed be that distance in time away from us). Lets be logical, foxes and dears have no way of sending signals now can they? therefore we would not receive such message, put it this way, humans have been around for the last 200,000 years as homo Sapian sapian, yet if aliens where to enter our solar system, assuming they didn't come to earth, they would never know that intelligent species exist here up to 1920s. life (intelligence) might be just 15 light years from us, be we would never know as our tech does not allow us to see anything that's going on. My conclusion is that your premise was flawed from the beginning, and the though that life(intelligence) would probably randomly die is also flawed and only reflect your fear of not getting confirmation of other life out there. I am in no way disrespecting you, i simply wish to change your view on the world when it comes to plausibilities, logical conclusion and constructive imagination. Therefore even if we were to receive a signal from kepler 186, and they were to die off, bringing up the scenario is pretty pointless as it does not matter. The only thing that truly matter is the fact that life is/was actually out there and the next most important concept is how do we physically explore these billions of star here in our Milky way in good time. Whether or not they live or die is not our problem or concern, such questions like the fermi paradox only takes away the motivation to explore!
Jason Denton You are the one with a false beginning. You are assuming a great deal about a single question about the changes in humanities minds from wondering about "aliens" to knowing they existed... Its a hypothetical question of the sociological impact. We cannot currently detect life millions of lightyears away without them being intelligent enough to create transmissions... But that's not what my simple question was limited to. I made a hypothetical question. It doesn't have to be plausibly doable. As to intelligent life... What would happen to the world trade system of food and supplies if everyone who operates and maintains these systems became sick in a bio-chemical terrorist attack? Someone manages to launch or detonate hundreds of thermonuclear bombs in the atmosphere? Massive earthquakes affect all drinkable water supplies? Global warming releases stored greenhouse gases from the permafrost and kills of ecosystems, affecting other ecosystems and causing life collapse? Its called extinction events, and they're not at all impossible. But extinction of the human race is even easier, due to the dependency on each other to maintain modern living and carry on "intelligent" life. Humans could certainly survive, but without appropriate educators and resources then the human civilization can degrade average IQ levels to below 70 in just a couple generations.
+Gamesman01 Yeah they keep repeating that on multiple videos, but even on earth we try to use the waste heat where possible. Seems like a very dumb assumption to me.
+BIkaloss you can only extract energy from a temperature gradient, and the higher the gradient the easier it is, if the difference is small you are reaching point of diminishing returns thus even Matrioshka Brains should be quite bright in infrared compared to cosmic background radiation and that also assumes that the civilisation has the resources to build them like this, and that is a lot of resources
+Gamesman01 "Sure the MA reaction may produce mostly usable energy. Say you then use it to power a light bulb, after that light strikes a few things and then your eyeball then guess what, it becomes heat/waste energy. It ALL does, so their must be as much waste heat as the energy they use." - +Edward Downer
Keeping the Dyson sphere spinning and stopping it from crashing into the star seems like it would be a cake walk with all of that extra energy you're gathering.
Yeah, I envision a bunch of smaller contraptions rather than one, big one. Looking at all of humanity's technological achievements it has always been one step at a time, the beginning of civilization and the spread of towns and cities, telegraphs, power lines, invisible radio signals and satellites, etc. etc. we didn't just throw hundreds up at once. They slowly evolved into what we have today. An interconnected network of communication and energy.
Am I the only one annoyed that they present the original Dyson sphere concept, of solar energy collector satellites, as an alternative to the evolution o that original idea, a solid shell.
Well the original concept was from Star Maker, and as far as I remember it was a sphere, infact Dyson wanted to call it Staphledon sphere. Of course bubble is much more plausible solution, while not as grand as sphere.
I forget who it was sorry no source to give but he calculated it would take 4000 years to build a real Death Star. Could you imagine the Egyptians started a dyson sphere instead of the pyramids. It would just be finished somewhere around our time. Natural disasters, solar flares, cosmic debris, and world wars would make it even harder. Every government, , country, major corporations, race, and possibly religion (nobody knows if aliens believe in gods) would have to be in complete unity and harmony for a project of this magnitude.
***** Yes of course not I just thought of them as a reference in time to relate the length of time it would take to build something of that size according to those calculations. Which I don't know the accuracy of those numbers.
Red Sniper I don't either building in space would up the total work time for sure. Plus how big does something get before it has its own gravitational pull? Itd be shitty to watch 3000 years of construction collapse in on itself.
several rings of solar collector satellites orbiting in different orientations about the sun beaming energy to each other and ultimately back to earth would probably be able to satisfy humanity's energy need for some time. the total energy emited by the sun in one second would satisfy humanity for a year, so we only need to capture about a 1/30,000,000 of the suns energy to keep us satisfied. considering that this portion of the sun is still enormous we might try placing one giant solar collector centered at the third Lagrange point.
This was the perfect time for this video to be posted because I just learned what a Dyson Sphere was, but also the worst time because now my naiive hopes of it ever really existing are crushed.
+Aiman Amirah If other civilizations were to be doing this, then wouldn't we be able to notice some sort of frequency transmitted from the Dyson Spheres? Also with so many Dyson Spheres around a star would make the gravitational pull toward the star even greater? And even if they could stabilize the gravitational field around the sun, there is always the possibility that the star(Not giving out any heat to current planets in it's solar system) could cause a dis-balance between the planets causing a major catastrophic magnetic interference with the planets causing them to collapse closer into the star at which point would cause the destruction of all the Dyson Spheres orbiting the sun destroying the Sun and Solar System in the process. Either way it's still a fascinating concept and I will always keep that in mind the next time I look up into the night sky!
+Choas To Mayhem you my friend should check out accelerando. latency means using light across space is way too slow for a pangalactic civilization. instead, link the nodes via a wormhole router. viola, low latency comms that we would never detect. also, when a space slug wants to make a deal and enter the solar matrioshka brain, we say NO. ok? got that? not losing my run time on Sol 2.0 for some damn alien scammer wanting to sell my neural net to a self aware ponzy scheme.
+Aiman Amirah Then they are breaking 2-nd law of thermodynamic, by not emmiting any infrared light. thus using all energy and having system that doesn't heat itself. Read. Impossible
and this is why you make self replicating machines. you only need to build one, and just send it out into the asteroid belt. program it to make three copies of itself. one copy goes towards the sun and sets up shop, the other two go elsewhere and themselves make three copies. hey presto, exponential growth, you get a ton of these things over a few decades with zero effort on your part.......aside from building the first one
SniX a simple program that can have unintended consequences, and assuming that copying errors exist you have the foundation for evolutionary process that could produce anything.....
I always thought there would be nothing to give one of these a stable orbit. A ringworld seems like a more practical solution but, gravitationally, I don't even think that would work. Once you start to build a ring it seems like things would become unstable.
I thought the problem with a dyson sphere was that building one would be so energy intensive, that any civilisation capable of building one would have already outgrown the need for one.
Maybe that's the M Night Shyamalan style twist... maybe we ARE the most advance species in the universe. Maybe someday we will go out searching the stars and find species millions of years behind us. It'll be like Stargate, we will be the gate builders and we won't even get to see all the cool crazy shit other races do. Before someone says anything... ONE species has to be the most advanced, so who is to say it isn't us? Maybe we've gotten really lucky with genetics and our sheltered solar system so far, and other systems are having a rougher time or a global extinction event etc.
Quinn Valor So say the universe is 13.84 billion years old, earth is 4.54 billion years old, and there's a mass extinction event that wipes out most life every 1 billion years or so. Since the last major extinction there has been 66 million years. It's taken 7 million years for the human specific tree to evolve into humans supposedly branched from the same line as chimps, so I see no reason why we couldn't be the first intelligent species to make it to space. It takes 3 1/2 billion years for life to go from sludge to human intelligence, and every billion years an event happens strong enough to wipe that life out. Those aren't great odds for space faring beings. What's more likely than my supposed twist is that there is life that can venture into space, but unless they're able to bend space time and they obey typical sub light travel it'd take them BILLIONS of years to reach us. Realistically even if the human race survived? The universe is just too big for intelligent species to meet.
Jesse Crandle Because we havent been around long enough compared to the rest of the nice and old universe. Who's to say there wasnt a species the is much smarter than us and successfully left their planet millions if not billions of years before us. Also in the future who's to say they even still have physical bodies and have not uploaded our minds into computers or stopped aging in either case the problem of time traveling ends up meaning nothing to them. Im just saying that in the age of the universe we are most certainly the new kids on the block and there has and is beings out in the universe who have been there much longer.
Fun back-of-envelope calculation: Volume of Earth = 4/3 * pi * (6.5e6)^3 = 1.15e21 m^3 Surface area of a Dyson sphere at 1 AU from the Sun = 4*pi*(8*60*3e8)^2 = 2.61e23 m^2 Thickness of the Dyson sphere if we use the whole Earth to make it = 1.15e21/2.61e23 = 4.4e-3 = 4.4 mm
There are a couple other popular variants on the idea: The Ringworld (or "halo"), where instead of a full sphere you just use a band around the solar equator. It's advantages are 1) being much cheaper, 2) spin gravity affecting the whole station, 3) your solar power plant can run on rails along the top surface to block out the sun for 12 hrs a day and give a "natural" day/night cycle, and 4) It usually comes with a superweapon in fiction :P. Disadvantages are 1) you only get a small fraction of the power of the star, but that's no different from a dyson bubble and 2) anything that punctures it can suck out huge amounts of atmosphere b/c of the spin gravity. The tight dyson sphere: instead of building at 1 AU from the sun, build where the gravity of the sun is 1g. Advantages are: 1) On the outside surface, gravity is 1g everywhere, so no need for artificial gravity 2) you can harness the full solar output of the star, esp. since it's too hot to build anything else on the inside and 3) while not as cheap as a ringworld, still cheaper than a 1 AU sphere. Disadvantages are: 1) you can't grow plants or put human habitation on the inside, so 2) all light will have to be artificial, including that used to grow plants, and 3) you don't get the same space as a 1 AU sphere.
+PoptartInvasion Halo's rings are MUCH smaller than Niven's Ringworld, however. Considering the size and where the Halo rings lay (depending on the source which are not always in concordance) then on the surface you could get some very weird effects as you move around the center of mass which only itself sits at the gravity point. If the Halo ring sits on something like a Lagrangian point to a large-ish gas giant then it's okay but if it's orbiting that planet closely then you get some weird shit on the inner surface as any point around it is not actually on the orbit proper or at the right vector and velocity. Example, if the ring lays flat compared to the surface of the planet then when you are at the point of the ring a 90 degree preceding the leading point then you are going faster than the overall orbital velocity of the ring. You are being pushed away from the world. On the point 90 degree after the leading point then you are going slower than the overall orbital speed of the ring. You are being pulled toward the planet. *Coriolis on Cocaine*.
Additional building material is in the sun. Our star is rather large and burns pretty hot. "Live fast and die young" has real meaning here! Star lifting technology uses magnetism to cause ejection of hydrogen from a star. Reduction of mass cools the star, increasing longevity and providing abundant building material for Dyson swarm.
I had a large rant on another comment on this subject so I'll keep this one short. 2 different forms of Ringworlds created by their respective Arks, the Greater Ark and the Lesser Ark. We don't see any of the Greater Halos in the series because all of them were dismantled except for 1. Shield Worlds was the Didact's proposed idea to protect the Forerunners if they used the rings. All Shield Worlds had a Dyson Sphere in them for an emergency evacuation where they couldn't be reached until the Dyson Sphere was brought out of Slip-Space and back into Real-Space. While in Slip-Space it is contained inside a 2-3cm wide "ball" that cannot be entered, only way in is via teleporter. Onyx was a Shield World that worked this way, same with Requiem and the Shield World from Halo Wars. If you have any questions for me just reply to this comment and I will get you an answer when I can. If you want more lore related stuff then go and read Halo Mythos. All of the Halo lore is in that book and I mean ALL of it. I have a copy of it and it sheds light on major and minor points of the story.
I read somewhere that a Dyson Sphere around a smaller star could be more feasible. It could be up 1/3 AU away from the star and have less heat. Though the gravity would still be a problem. But the material issue could be less of an issue.
The moon doesn't emit light; it reflects the Sun's light. Consequently, if you enclosed it in a sphere, the inside would be completely dark and not produce any meaningful amount of radiation.
+mvmlego1212 obviously use a cord to plug into the outside of the Dyson sphere so you can plug it into whatever battery they can. Although they'd need quite a large battery to hold all the energy from the moon
Building a partial dyson sphere around a red dwarf and living in the outside shell would make more sense as the red dwarf is smaller, has a vastly longer life, and isn't as hot as our sun.
Maybe cover Ringworlds from Larry Niven's universe. Ringworld are A LOT more feasible to build and would require only about the mass of jupiter. The only problem we have with those technologies is the super-tensile materials. In other words, the unobtaniums.
You don't need a comet hitting the sphere in order to destabilise the system, even the slightest wobble of either the star or the sphere would eventually be amplified to the point where a collision would become inevitable.
Cool video, with one (at least) glaring inaccuracy: If you built a Dyson Sphere at 1AU, you would be under the same gravitational pull from the sun as we currently are. The keen observer will notice that they do not float upward at noon. The sun is able to keep the planets in orbit from such distances due to their size. With an individual being so small, the sun exerts an almost entirely negligible amount of gravity on us. Go hug someone, you are now exerting around the same gravitational pull on them that the sun is. Also, they failed to mention that gravity is not uniform. Some areas experience more than others and as such, any ring built floating in orbit around a body will begin to oscillate more and more violently until it breaks apart.
In the game Stellaris I built 6. And boy did it take a long time, even with the full output of hundreds of garden world colony's, I had to expand over almost a third of the galaxy before I had the means to build one. And even still I wasn't really building them myself I was repairing the remnants of Dyson spheres from much older and powerful empires. But they are soon making it possible in game to make your own Dyson Sphere's from scratch.
its interesting that they recently found a star with unusual dips in its star light. they're gonna point a radio telescope at it because its nothing that has ever been seen before. some speculate a dyson sphere. who knows
A civilization advanced enough to build a Dyson Sphere would know to put giant thrusters on the outside of the shell, so if an asteroid or comet hit it, the thrusters would push it back into place and maintain the spin. Also if 1G would only be at the DS's equator, that's still far more room that on as Earth sized planet. Say if it was 1000kms in either direction from the very center of the equator. It would be like the Halos from the Halo franchise.
the heat problem can easily be sorted with radiators on the outer surface (which is why they are looking for IR spikes because this is what the radiators would put out) as for the gravity problem, one suggestion that has been made in regards to this is to have habitats hang from the inside of the shell so that they use the gravity of the sun. then you have the problem of building the thing as no material known to us is strong enough to make a rigid structure that big.... instead what is suggested is to make the shell a light weight sail (which could be made of carbonium... aka carbon nano materials) which has the advantage that you can change the geometry and possibly even the reflectiveness of the material to adjust for fluctuations in the solar wind (don't want to burn up because of a solar flair do you) but that all said we're still a long way from building such a structure. though a small scale dyson ring built at the earth-sol Lagrange point could work (think halo) which can be spun up for gravity and set on a slow spin on it's other axis to create a day night cycle.
Theories regarding Hollow Earth can gain validity in the light of this explanation.The center of Earth could be a micro-sun (as said in the hollow Earth theory) and the planet could be a micro Dyson sphere created by Nature.
Most stars are red dwarfs. They are by far the most abundant star in the galaxy. But since theyre so much smaller and weaker than our sun, the habital zone is way closer. So a much smaller Dyson sphere would make much more sense in that case for a number of reasons (even though its still bloody unlikely)
what about Dyson Rings, which have all the advantages (huge surplus of livable space, able to harness a massive amount of energy) and few of the drawbacks (reduced impact space, easier to compensate for impacts, nearly invisible, and far lower resource costs)?
If we're talking about a civilization with technology that can accomplish this, wouldn't it be easier to do it with a much smaller star? I'm definitely not an astrophysicist, but it seems to me that if you could find a smaller, but stable star, you could build a dyson sphere with less material and effort, and still get many planet's worth of solar energy. You would still have to build it at the point of equilibrium with the star's gravity, but a smaller star would have a potentially smaller gravity well, and thus you could get a bit closer before your stuff gets fried. Just my hypothesis. I could be wrong. Great video!!
mkay, here goes: (clears throat) red dwarf or neutron star. smaller diameter, less heat to worry about, neutron star would have higher gravity, so you could balance that out, red dwarf would burn longer and have less heat at a given time. you spin a series of rings like a gyroscope to both stabilize it via centrifugal forces and use the acceleration of the rings as artificial gravity, reversing the sides and populating the leading ring. you gradually build the structure on a twist so the angle of solar gravity and the momentum balance out so you have functionally equal earth-gravity most of the way down the rings. stagger the rings so they cover all the available area while having habitation on the edge rather than the back side or sun-side. use mirrors to simulate the day and night as the sun would be a perpetual sunset in this scenario, but whatever, day time sunset would look cool. any impacts would not destabilize the rings because of the gyroscopic effect and small thrusters to aid against drift. plus it would look awesome.
Not to mention that completely enclosing the Sun means that you have to deal with every single solar flare that happens. I keep reading articles about how we were lucky and missed a solar flare that could have destroyed all satellites and electronics on earth. A sphere that surrounds the Sun in every direction would therefore absorb all that energy and have to either withstand or transfer it.
I have a new idea you could focus the light emitted by the sun with lenses very close to the sun and have smaller collectors further out. And with an additional bunch of mirrors you could send all the stars energy in one beam to a planet. Or if you think it further you could send the energy of multiple stars to that planet.
Make a partial dyson swarm from Mercury, use the energy generated to create a Kugleblitz swarm and feed it a few of Jupiter's moons for enough energy to power an interstellar civilization.
A little more doable? We could do the dyson swarm variant (independently orbiting structures) right now. Actually, you could argue that the fact that we now have satellites orbiting the sun means that we already have a dyson sphere, or at least the very beginnings of one. We are capturing solar energy that did not fall on earth, thus increasing the amount of solar energy we intercept, and are using it for our own purposes. Each such structure we use decreases the amount of visible light that escapes our solar system, with a corresponding increase in infrared radiation (the waste heat). Right now we're only capturing a tiny pinprick of the suns energy, and are limited to using it for powering observatories and communication satellites, but you've got to walk before you can run. If we eventually start building bigger structures: free floating habitats, halo rings, solar collectors, mining stations, giant computer modules to expand skynet, etc, etc, we could eventually have so many that our civilization would be visible from many light years away, just by looking for stars that have more infrared radiation than they should given their size and luminosity.
My vacuum has a Dyson sphere.
lmao
+drink15 Oh, no you didn't
+drink15 That has to suck.
+drink15 Pssst. Wanna see some clear instructions? *opens jacket*
+drink15 And my Dyson Sphere has a vacuum!- Wait, what?
I'm Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite video on the Dyson Sphere.
This made my day. :D
We'll bang okay
***** Mass Effect 4 might be on it's way. Not sure if Shepard will be in it though.
+Seraph Archeos I amTali'Zorah!
+Neil Keith Pereira Maybe we will get another character with a name based on keeping live stock like Farrier or Psittaculturist.
I recommend the sci-fi novel Ringworld by Larry Niven.
I recommend you shut the hell up!
@@carbon_no6 i recomend you shut the hell up!
No
I'm gonna set up a Kickstarter page so we can start building the Dyson sphere. I'm sick of paying for petrol and electricity all the time
XD
+
That;s insane! How do you plan to get a license for that with all the corrupted oil company controlled governments out there?
Parakmi I I will forge the license for him :D
+
Nice callout to Starmaker.
For those who aren't aware of it (pretty much everyone) the author Olaf Stapledon wrote the books Starmaker and Last and First Men in the 1930s which are some of the first works of epic, hard sci-fi. He created the ideas of dyson spheres, genetic engineering and a ton of other incredibly prescient ideas decades before other sci-fi writers who are often credited with those ideas did. Although he's largely unknown to the public today, he was incredibly influential on numerous sci-fi authors such as Arthur C. Clark, Vernor Vinge and Stanislaw Lem.
Freman Dyson himself credited Stapledon for coming up with Dyson spheres and said that they should be called Stapledon spheres instead.
was isaac asimov inspired in him too or was he earlier? I really dont know and theyr books are interesting too.
Q99g
Stapledon was pretty well known in his time. I couldn't find any specific references to Asimov being influenced by these works but it's probable that he was at least aware of them.
+Dan Heidel Those two books are some of my most prized possessions. Last and First Men paints some mighty future histories and in my opinion stands still unmatched till today.
One of the best topics on Sci Show Space in months. Thanks!
I could be wrong, but I think that a civilization that was so advanced might have managed energy utilization to the point where they didn't have much waste heat. After all this is the product of inefficient utilization. Humans are already pretty skilled at capturing the energy of waste heat and augmenting their generators rather than just letting it radiate off.
If there are civilizations so desperate for resources like energy that they are doing this, than there are "pirater civilizations" looking to tap the energy resources of a civilization like this sooooo you wouldn't want to betray yourself with such a easily detected "beacon".
+GengoNoTabi true but everything is not perfect no matter how advance because ... physics
+Lord Zephyros antimater/mater anihalation makes almost no waste energy, if they master the production of antimater on large scales they migth be able to have enough energy
+GengoNoTabi the idea of a pirate civilisation that survived by drawing energy from more advanced civilisations kinda like a parasite is awesome
+GengoNoTabi
You can't fool the laws of thermodynamics, not unless you are so advanced that you can change physic laws locally.
+Jesus Ramirez Romo Define waste energy. Sure the MA reaction may produce mostly usable energy. Say you then use it to power a light bulb, after that light strikes a few things and then your eyeball then guess what, it becomes heat/waste energy. It ALL does, so their must be as much waste heat as the energy they use.
Waiting on the fusion experiment in France
+19billdong96
Um, 2024, right?
Inorganic Vegan Around that time?
19billdong96
Yeah
+19billdong96 Any minute now. I still wonder how we haven't picked up fission in the meantime while our solar panels get more efficient.
+Borikuaedu3991 because every hates radioactive waste
The original Dyson Sphere was actually proposed as a swarm of orbiting objects not a solid shell.
Isn't what you are talking about a dyson swarm?
@@karlaraudez7652 you are corrrct
You mean just like he talks about at 3:08 ?
Just discovered that Sci sci space was a thing, subbed immediately. This channel realy pushes home how amazing and fragile our planet is.
This isn't like the other Dyson products?
It might be.
Diffrent dyson
LMFAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sure it is. Doesnt suck any better than my dyson
Mr. Reimers is the only one in the Sci Show crew who doesn't need to cut their sentences into 5 different video clips.
Thank you for your great video.
i love these type of videos. keep it up!
Well I love space... And I love you guys, soooo.. PLEASE NEVER STOP MAKING THESE VIDEOS!!!
Wasn't this in a Star Trek TNG episode?
+Abaris84 yes, it was!
+Abaris84 Season 6 episode 4 "Relics"
+Big Jake Dammit, you beat me by 30s or so ;)
+Abaris84 Yep, episode "Relics" has the dyson sphere and it was the episode where the original Scotty makes an appearance having been suspended inside the transporter.
+Abaris84 Aye, it is laddie.
Space is a vacuum, a Dyson Vacuum
To my understanding, I thought Dyson never meant a rigid object when he was talking about the Dyson Sphere and more like what was mentioned later in the video more accurately referred to as the Dyson Swarm. Just a large number of habitats orbiting the Sun. It would be very similar to the way the Earth looks now with all of the objects orbiting it.
real nice, thanks for the laymen's explanation
That would be something if scientists found one of those while searching for planets. We would know for sure we're not alone. That would be so cool.
There us a candidate for something like that. Tabby Star as it is called.
Tomasz Konstanty Maluszycki hey, they did a video on that!
Yeah it's just surrounded by dust most likely :(
thishadowithin So cool and undoubtedly TERRIFYING
we would know for sure we are at the stage of unicellular organisms to them as well
This idea is so radical!! I love it! Thanks for making a video about it!
No mention of the Star Trek TNG episode? I am not a merry man!
Ok spock
+Njumkiy Lets Play (njumkiy) Spock barely appeared in tng.
thats not the joke >:(
+Rikozilla IMPOSTER!!!
+Njumkiy Lets Play (njumkiy) Actually it was Scotty that appeared in that one ;)
Awesome! I suggested this topic on either SciShow or SciShow Space about 8 months ago.
So Dyson published his paper in 1960, but then the host says that one of the best examples comes from a 1930s science fiction novel "Starmaker". Hmmm
Mr.Durden You misunderstand me if you think I don't understand the difference between an astrophysicist and a damn sci-fi writer.
My issue is with the presentation of this video. His wording is in such a way as to make it sound as if he thinks the 1930s example was subsequent to Dyson's conceptualization.
End of the day, there is a HUGE leap between a writer writing a sci-fi novel where his imagination runs wild, and a scientist taking the concept, doing the math on it, and proving on paper that it could work if we met certain criteria.
Rob Nie agreed
true but i think its funny that serious scientists look at science fiction for inspiration. almost like a ying yang relationship of logic/creative
a lot of the old sci-fi writers used to study a lot of science unlike the pop culture sci-fi of the 80s and 90s (aka space operas such as star wars) so it's not unusual for authors to make logical steps in terms of speculative science only for science to catch up a few years later
to quote hal clemant
"The fun, and the material for this article, lies in treating the
whole thing as a game. I've been playing the game since I was a child,
so the rules must be quite simple. They are: for the reader of a
science-fiction story, they consist of finding as many as possible of
the author's statements or implications which conflict with the facts as
science currently understands them. For the author, the rule is to make
as few such slips as he possibly can."
unfortunately these days it's a case of "rule of cool" (which isn't always a bad thing)
Here's an idea for extra energy:
Build millions (or billions) of solar panels that orbit the Sun, roughly the same distance as the Earth, and follow the Earth's orbit around the Sun. The speed that they orbit the Sun, however, is slow enough that the Earth is constantly passing them, or perhaps they could orbit the opposite direction as the Earth. All year they collect solar energy in enormous batteries, and as the Earth passes them, we trade out their charged batteries for new, empty ones. Every year we would collect millions, maybe billions of these humongous batteries, and use them to power our space stations / space ships. Solar panels in space are suppose to be 5 times as efficient as on Earth, so they could capture quite a bit of energy in a year, I imagine.
Its an interesting idea, anyway...
I was looking to build a vacuum cleaner.
lol i get it
Black holes are just huge vacuums, aliens tried to make Dyson spheres but instead of using the correct blueprint they used the vacuum blueprint and it made black holes. (Obviously kidding)
Good reference to the literary works of Olaf Stapledon in this video. The incredible future histories written in Last and First Men still stand unmatched to this day.
There are probably some other life forms out there right now, receiving information from their planetary network about a structure similar to a Dyson sphere, and how they can detect other life forms who also use it.
"Planetary Network" Hmm I like the way you addressed the Internet! :)
Sci_Ant And there's someone commenting on a video about this similar structure calling the internet "planetary network" and someone replies to that comment saying they like how the other life form adressed the internet as "planetary network".
Dramawind Commentception.
Sci_Ant Indeed.
Dramawind Let me fix that: Interstellar Commentception.
Dyson's first idea was the "Dyson Ring", a ribbon at 1 A.U. that was a couple of thousand km wide, and 20-30 km thick, around our sun. The exposed surface area is massive, the solar flux is similar to what we get on Earth now, and with a ring, it can be spun to create "artificial" gravity for people living on the inside surface. The sphere came later. This was also around the time when Dyson was working with Theodore Taylor on the Orion project. If you want to move a very large amount of mass to, say, Mars, or out to the Asteroid belt, then an Orion would do the job. Ol' Bang Bang is dismissed by some, but a time may come when it's our best option.
Why not build a Dyson ring instead of a sphere? Wouldn't building a sphere around a star trap a lot of the star's radiation in the sphere? If so, wouldn't that be really bad? Also, how would we make an artificial magnetic field large enough to deter/control solar winds?
I understand it's all theory/conjecture but still I think there are better/more feasible options
I dont see how having a lot of radiation traped in the sphere is a bad thing but a ring would be better especially if we build around a star that provides heat and light to planets such as our own.
+Oliver waite loads of radiation in one area would slowly corrode the sphere
Llama Gaming ahh k
+Matt Bowen so pretty much halo...
this was my favorite star trek episode ever, both scotty, and the laforge!
What about a belt shaped dyson belt?
Like a Halo ring?
Mega Guy43 Yeah.
+Mega Guy43 lol
Imagine the Sun is a bowling ball the Earth is a small marble (1 millionth of bowling ball) 93 feet away. How many bowling balls of material would you need for a ring 292 feet in circumstance? How are you going to drag all those stars to our system? Pure fantasy.
Michael Hartman The ring could be made thin. Material could be gathered from nearby planets. It's not fantasy, totally doable.
Instructions Clear Enough. Successfully build the Dyson Sphere. Thank you
Freeman Dyson.
Of course. It would have been amazing to see this in HL3 episode 3 :(
This made me think of a sci-fi story idea. Imagine a civilization that had created such a thing and set it up perfectly to be around their star but something happen causing them to be nearly wrapped out. Generations later having no idea that they are in a sphere, no idea of the outside universe, or that the ground they walk on was created
Hearing the Dyson sphere concept explained leaves me wondering how anyone could entertain it outside of a work of fiction.
Between the cost of physical resources, the zero-sum gravity that would allow it to drift into collision with the star it contains, the intensely redoubling heat/radiation that would likely tear the structure apart, or at the very least reduce its lifespan and usefulness to the makers...
Any civilization advanced enough to be able to make a Dyson sphere, would be advanced enough to NOT make a Dyson sphere. If you have the means to mine or destroy an entire solar system's worth of planets; to collect, refine, and transport all the resources thereof; and then to build, in open space, a structure with a 185,920,000 mile circumference, and a 1.09×10^5 mile wide surface area...
You must already have at your disposal more portable and cost-effective sources of energy than this activity would result in.
I was really fascinated with the idea at first, until I listened to people theorize how it could be made. There is no way that this is possible. A huge sphere around a star could be drawn in by the star's gravity. It would also make any planet on the other side of the sphere uninhabitable. The Dyson bubble is more possible but still not ideal. We have hundreds of not thousands if satellites around the earth orbiting, daily, they crash into each other and destroy themselves. It doesn't matter how thin these satellites will be around a star, they will still collide. And if we wanted to harvest all of the energy, it would take millions of satellites. Which highly Increases the chances of collision. And with each collision, the scattered parts act as tiny meteorites, which can collide with other satellites, which is seen in the satellite orbit around the earth. So the Dyson bubble would just serve as a temporary means if energy.
This one was super interesting, I want to hear more, or similar things.
What about a Ringworld as described by Larry Niven?
I realize Im 2 years late to your comment, but a ringworld isnt stable.
As mentioned in ringworld(and the sequels) the people living on it still require minerals to be brought in. You can't mine the ringworld to expand your civilization.
It isnt easily defended, either from astronomical or alien threats. The entire outer side and a good portion of the inner would have to have meteor defenses to stop the stray intruder rock(or alien). Due to equal and opposite reaction, you would have to balance the force used to destroy the danger with an opposite force to stabilize the ring.
Speaking of balance, and solar flare(ringworlds children) would cause the ring to wobble a little. Over time, if not corrected, it would either tear itself apart or send a portion into the sun.
The longer I watch this video, the more the urge to clear my throat builds up.
You should have mentioned building asynchronously so as to give the sun a little tug in one direction. From there you could create a mobile star system. \o/
...just don't expect it to go anywhere very rapidly for a long time. :P
+Lutranereis But once it picks up speed, say, after a few million years, you could take it gallivanting around the galaxy, gobbling up other solar systems, incorporating them into the structure and replacing stars as you go.
It would truly be, *awesome.*
+ABitOfTheUniverse An actual STAR SHIP :D
Dude I found your channel looking up stuff for stellaris now I'm hooked lol new sub here
So KIC 8462852 is actually probably not anything like a Dyson sphere. Damn!
There are two alternatives to this that I quite like.
The first is called the sunken dyson sphere, which is when you build mechanisms that extend bellow the surface of the sun. This way you not only tap the energy being produced by the fusion reactions in the sun, you can actually dial them up or down. In effect turning the entire sun into one big semi-artificial fusion reactor. You could create shafts or "spotlights" through which we would beam sunlight to the worlds that need it. This way you could dial-down the fusion reactions by a tremendous amount and still have plenty to light up the Earth and the Moon and Mars. We could extend the lifespan of our sun by orders of magnitude, since it would burn it's fuel more slowly.
The other one is called a gossamer dyson. This is where you create a solid ring-world near the ecliptic plane, but for all of the other areas (the north and south hemispheres) you create paper-thin solar cells. The solar wind would be enough to keep these two half-shells filled, like the sails in a ship. The ring world would spin (probably kept separate from the two gossamer shells) since only it would have life living on it. This way most of the sphere would actually be super thin, which would make building it much much easier.
I wonder how humans would react if they discovered extraterrestrial life so far away that humanity could never actually make contact, but we knew they were out there.
I mean, the age of the light would be millions of years old so they'd all be dead. But we'd know that at some point in time, life existed elsewhere and may still exist today.
+Connor Skudlarek it depends is that an advanced civilization that can control spacetime?
+Connor Skudlarek i doubt they'd all be dead! as long as they know how to build rocket then their chances of survival is almost 100%. we have been around for more than 3 milion years as bipedal apes, so what makes you assume 1000, even 10 000 years are enough to kill off an intelegent species? thats ctually a really short about of time. but I assume you listen to a lot of random rumors about this topic. anyways, I assure you, from this point on, we will never die out.
Jason Denton Millions... I very clearly said millions of years... I wasn't referring to 'life as a whole' on the planet millions of lightyears away. I meant that those species and beings we discovered would be dead. I also excluded "comparable intelligence" from the thought, merely considering organisms such as foxes, bears, dragonflies, etc.
I assure you, humanity can be easily wiped from the universe. We could die out this month, century, or millennia. All it takes is the right set of circumstances, and everyone is gone. Just a random blip in the cosmos that faded out. Life will probably live on forever, but intelligent life could be permanently eradicated in a few weeks.
Connor Skudlarek oh I see, i admit that was my bad.
I wasn't referring to life as a whole either, I was talking specifically about intelligent life. then again I suppose I was only being logical as it would be impossible for us to ever tell if life existed anywhere near a million light years from where we are now(assuming that's the time the signal takes to reaches us, then it must indeed be that distance in time away from us).
Lets be logical, foxes and dears have no way of sending signals now can they? therefore we would not receive such message, put it this way, humans have been around for the last 200,000 years as homo Sapian sapian, yet if aliens where to enter our solar system, assuming they didn't come to earth, they would never know that intelligent species exist here up to 1920s. life (intelligence) might be just 15 light years from us, be we would never know as our tech does not allow us to see anything that's going on.
My conclusion is that your premise was flawed from the beginning, and the though that life(intelligence) would probably randomly die is also flawed and only reflect your fear of not getting confirmation of other life out there.
I am in no way disrespecting you, i simply wish to change your view on the world when it comes to plausibilities, logical conclusion and constructive imagination. Therefore even if we were to receive a signal from kepler 186, and they were to die off, bringing up the scenario is pretty pointless as it does not matter.
The only thing that truly matter is the fact that life is/was actually out there and the next most important concept is how do we physically explore these billions of star here in our Milky way in good time. Whether or not they live or die is not our problem or concern, such questions like the fermi paradox only takes away the motivation to explore!
Jason Denton You are the one with a false beginning. You are assuming a great deal about a single question about the changes in humanities minds from wondering about "aliens" to knowing they existed... Its a hypothetical question of the sociological impact.
We cannot currently detect life millions of lightyears away without them being intelligent enough to create transmissions... But that's not what my simple question was limited to. I made a hypothetical question. It doesn't have to be plausibly doable.
As to intelligent life... What would happen to the world trade system of food and supplies if everyone who operates and maintains these systems became sick in a bio-chemical terrorist attack? Someone manages to launch or detonate hundreds of thermonuclear bombs in the atmosphere? Massive earthquakes affect all drinkable water supplies? Global warming releases stored greenhouse gases from the permafrost and kills of ecosystems, affecting other ecosystems and causing life collapse? Its called extinction events, and they're not at all impossible. But extinction of the human race is even easier, due to the dependency on each other to maintain modern living and carry on "intelligent" life. Humans could certainly survive, but without appropriate educators and resources then the human civilization can degrade average IQ levels to below 70 in just a couple generations.
reid is probably my favorite narrator on scishow space
"Waste heat"? Seems to me if you could build a Dyson sphere you'd probably have a way to use that "waste heat" rather than throw it out to space.
+Gamesman01 Yeah they keep repeating that on multiple videos, but even on earth we try to use the waste heat where possible. Seems like a very dumb assumption to me.
+BIkaloss you can only extract energy from a temperature gradient, and the higher the gradient the easier it is, if the difference is small you are reaching point of diminishing returns thus even Matrioshka Brains should be quite bright in infrared compared to cosmic background radiation
and that also assumes that the civilisation has the resources to build them like this, and that is a lot of resources
+Gamesman01 "Sure the MA reaction may produce mostly usable energy. Say you then use it to power a light bulb, after that light strikes a few things and then your eyeball then guess what, it becomes heat/waste energy. It ALL does, so their must be as much waste heat as the energy they use." - +Edward Downer
There will always be waste heat left over from any process. It's a thermodynamic certainty.
Great idea i'll write that down
Keeping the Dyson sphere spinning and stopping it from crashing into the star seems like it would be a cake walk with all of that extra energy you're gathering.
looks like astronomers may have found one
Yeah, I envision a bunch of smaller contraptions rather than one, big one.
Looking at all of humanity's technological achievements it has always been one step at a time, the beginning of civilization and the spread of towns and cities, telegraphs, power lines, invisible radio signals and satellites, etc. etc. we didn't just throw hundreds up at once. They slowly evolved into what we have today. An interconnected network of communication and energy.
Am I the only one annoyed that they present the original Dyson sphere concept, of solar energy collector satellites, as an alternative to the evolution o that original idea, a solid shell.
Well the original concept was from Star Maker, and as far as I remember it was a sphere, infact Dyson wanted to call it Staphledon sphere. Of course bubble is much more plausible solution, while not as grand as sphere.
This video came out at just the right time.
I forget who it was sorry no source to give but he calculated it would take 4000 years to build a real Death Star. Could you imagine the Egyptians started a dyson sphere instead of the pyramids. It would just be finished somewhere around our time. Natural disasters, solar flares, cosmic debris, and world wars would make it even harder. Every government, , country, major corporations, race, and possibly religion (nobody knows if aliens believe in gods) would have to be in complete unity and harmony for a project of this magnitude.
+MystrEthaOne The Egyptians were good at pyramids but didn't build much in space.
***** Yes of course not I just thought of them as a reference in time to relate the length of time it would take to build something of that size according to those calculations. Which I don't know the accuracy of those numbers.
+MystrEthaOne I don't know how it would work, construction in space is a different story. :/
Red Sniper I don't either building in space would up the total work time for sure. Plus how big does something get before it has its own gravitational pull? Itd be shitty to watch 3000 years of construction collapse in on itself.
MystrEthaOne Yea, That would be a big failure for the engineering project. :P
good timing with this video and the recent announcement of a potential dyson sphere discovery...
several rings of solar collector satellites orbiting in different orientations about the sun beaming energy to each other and ultimately back to earth would probably be able to satisfy humanity's energy need for some time. the total energy emited by the sun in one second would satisfy humanity for a year, so we only need to capture about a 1/30,000,000 of the suns energy to keep us satisfied. considering that this portion of the sun is still enormous we might try placing one giant solar collector centered at the third Lagrange point.
we cant transport energy very well wirelessly though (yet)
+Xynthia Not true. We can transmit energy easily using Microwaves, and convert them back into electricity with over 80% efficiency.
Sarge Rho
but aren't microwaves really hard to focus?
+Andrew Mann ooooor we build solar collectors on our roofs.
Andrew Mann Not any harder than any other type of electromagnetic radiation. In fact, I think Microwaves are some of the easiest to focus.
This was the perfect time for this video to be posted because I just learned what a Dyson Sphere was, but also the worst time because now my naiive hopes of it ever really existing are crushed.
what if some of that "dark matter" that was taking up space and producing gravity were just stars covered up in dyson spheres?
+Aiman Amirah That is a scary concept....
That would mean there is some civilization(s) taking up 70% to 90% of all physical space
+Aiman Amirah If other civilizations were to be doing this, then wouldn't we be able to notice some sort of frequency transmitted from the Dyson Spheres? Also with so many Dyson Spheres around a star would make the gravitational pull toward the star even greater? And even if they could stabilize the gravitational field around the sun, there is always the possibility that the star(Not giving out any heat to current planets in it's solar system) could cause a dis-balance between the planets causing a major catastrophic magnetic interference with the planets causing them to collapse closer into the star at which point would cause the destruction of all the Dyson Spheres orbiting the sun destroying the Sun and Solar System in the process.
Either way it's still a fascinating concept and I will always keep that in mind the next time I look up into the night sky!
+Choas To Mayhem you my friend should check out accelerando. latency means using light across space is way too slow for a pangalactic civilization. instead, link the nodes via a wormhole router. viola, low latency comms that we would never detect. also, when a space slug wants to make a deal and enter the solar matrioshka brain, we say NO. ok? got that? not losing my run time on Sol 2.0 for some damn alien scammer wanting to sell my neural net to a self aware ponzy scheme.
+Aiman Amirah Then they are breaking 2-nd law of thermodynamic, by not emmiting any infrared light. thus using all energy and having system that doesn't heat itself.
Read. Impossible
I love sci-fi novels and it's where I read about Dyson sphere. So awesome!
and this is why you make self replicating machines.
you only need to build one, and just send it out into the asteroid belt. program it to make three copies of itself.
one copy goes towards the sun and sets up shop, the other two go elsewhere and themselves make three copies.
hey presto, exponential growth, you get a ton of these things over a few decades with zero effort on your part.......aside from building the first one
+Ryukachoo Like Mantrid's arms.
What of one of those ends up on your planet? Your soda cans will all be turned into machines.
+Ryukachoo what if they want to destroy humanity?
And you make it with what materials?
SniX a simple program that can have unintended consequences, and assuming that copying errors exist you have the foundation for evolutionary process that could produce anything.....
I always thought there would be nothing to give one of these a stable orbit. A ringworld seems like a more practical solution but, gravitationally, I don't even think that would work. Once you start to build a ring it seems like things would become unstable.
Simply make a ring instead of a full sphere..
And make a video game about it called Halo
+matt egan And make funny videos about it called Red Vs Blue.
I thought the problem with a dyson sphere was that building one would be so energy intensive, that any civilisation capable of building one would have already outgrown the need for one.
Maybe that's the M Night Shyamalan style twist... maybe we ARE the most advance species in the universe. Maybe someday we will go out searching the stars and find species millions of years behind us. It'll be like Stargate, we will be the gate builders and we won't even get to see all the cool crazy shit other races do.
Before someone says anything... ONE species has to be the most advanced, so who is to say it isn't us? Maybe we've gotten really lucky with genetics and our sheltered solar system so far, and other systems are having a rougher time or a global extinction event etc.
Because we have only been around 10,000 years and the universe has been around a few billion
Quinn Valor And you can't read.
Jesse Crandle Fuck it. How about the wachowski brothers twist and we're all in the matrix so we'll never be able to visit the stars.
Quinn Valor So say the universe is 13.84 billion years old, earth is 4.54 billion years old, and there's a mass extinction event that wipes out most life every 1 billion years or so. Since the last major extinction there has been 66 million years. It's taken 7 million years for the human specific tree to evolve into humans supposedly branched from the same line as chimps, so I see no reason why we couldn't be the first intelligent species to make it to space. It takes 3 1/2 billion years for life to go from sludge to human intelligence, and every billion years an event happens strong enough to wipe that life out. Those aren't great odds for space faring beings.
What's more likely than my supposed twist is that there is life that can venture into space, but unless they're able to bend space time and they obey typical sub light travel it'd take them BILLIONS of years to reach us. Realistically even if the human race survived? The universe is just too big for intelligent species to meet.
Jesse Crandle Because we havent been around long enough compared to the rest of the nice and old universe. Who's to say there wasnt a species the is much smarter than us and successfully left their planet millions if not billions of years before us. Also in the future who's to say they even still have physical bodies and have not uploaded our minds into computers or stopped aging in either case the problem of time traveling ends up meaning nothing to them. Im just saying that in the age of the universe we are most certainly the new kids on the block and there has and is beings out in the universe who have been there much longer.
Fun back-of-envelope calculation:
Volume of Earth = 4/3 * pi * (6.5e6)^3 = 1.15e21 m^3
Surface area of a Dyson sphere at 1 AU from the Sun = 4*pi*(8*60*3e8)^2 = 2.61e23 m^2
Thickness of the Dyson sphere if we use the whole Earth to make it = 1.15e21/2.61e23 = 4.4e-3 = 4.4 mm
Astro-Engineering? Hmmm... Doesnt sound right. Mayhap call it Space Engineers? :D :D :D
There are a couple other popular variants on the idea:
The Ringworld (or "halo"), where instead of a full sphere you just use a band around the solar equator. It's advantages are 1) being much cheaper, 2) spin gravity affecting the whole station, 3) your solar power plant can run on rails along the top surface to block out the sun for 12 hrs a day and give a "natural" day/night cycle, and 4) It usually comes with a superweapon in fiction :P. Disadvantages are 1) you only get a small fraction of the power of the star, but that's no different from a dyson bubble and 2) anything that punctures it can suck out huge amounts of atmosphere b/c of the spin gravity.
The tight dyson sphere: instead of building at 1 AU from the sun, build where the gravity of the sun is 1g. Advantages are: 1) On the outside surface, gravity is 1g everywhere, so no need for artificial gravity 2) you can harness the full solar output of the star, esp. since it's too hot to build anything else on the inside and 3) while not as cheap as a ringworld, still cheaper than a 1 AU sphere. Disadvantages are: 1) you can't grow plants or put human habitation on the inside, so 2) all light will have to be artificial, including that used to grow plants, and 3) you don't get the same space as a 1 AU sphere.
Is Halo based off this
+likenem halo is based off of Larry Niven's Ringworld books which are in turn inspired by things like Dyson spheres.
The Halo installations are based on Larry Niven's Ringworld, indeed.
+Dan Heidel The halo series however does have similar structures to Dyson spheres called shield worlds.
+PoptartInvasion
Halo's rings are MUCH smaller than Niven's Ringworld, however.
Considering the size and where the Halo rings lay (depending on the source which are not always in concordance) then on the surface you could get some very weird effects as you move around the center of mass which only itself sits at the gravity point.
If the Halo ring sits on something like a Lagrangian point to a large-ish gas giant then it's okay but if it's orbiting that planet closely then you get some weird shit on the inner surface as any point around it is not actually on the orbit proper or at the right vector and velocity.
Example, if the ring lays flat compared to the surface of the planet then when you are at the point of the ring a 90 degree preceding the leading point then you are going faster than the overall orbital velocity of the ring. You are being pushed away from the world. On the point 90 degree after the leading point then you are going slower than the overall orbital speed of the ring. You are being pulled toward the planet.
*Coriolis on Cocaine*.
+JJAB91
the only resemblance a shield world has is that it's a very large structure.
Additional building material is in the sun. Our star is rather large and burns pretty hot. "Live fast and die young" has real meaning here!
Star lifting technology uses magnetism to cause ejection of hydrogen from a star. Reduction of mass cools the star, increasing longevity and providing abundant building material for Dyson swarm.
Like from Halo!
Explain!
those are called ringworlds, and don't necessarily encircle a star. Like in what you referenced
Archeval907 I'm talking about shield worlds, the ones that have a miniature miniature star in the center of the planet
Not all shield worlds.
Pretty sure Requiem had a hollow center.
But yeah, some shield worlds have an artificial star at its center, like in Halo Wars.
I had a large rant on another comment on this subject so I'll keep this one short. 2 different forms of Ringworlds created by their respective Arks, the Greater Ark and the Lesser Ark. We don't see any of the Greater Halos in the series because all of them were dismantled except for 1. Shield Worlds was the Didact's proposed idea to protect the Forerunners if they used the rings. All Shield Worlds had a Dyson Sphere in them for an emergency evacuation where they couldn't be reached until the Dyson Sphere was brought out of Slip-Space and back into Real-Space. While in Slip-Space it is contained inside a 2-3cm wide "ball" that cannot be entered, only way in is via teleporter. Onyx was a Shield World that worked this way, same with Requiem and the Shield World from Halo Wars. If you have any questions for me just reply to this comment and I will get you an answer when I can. If you want more lore related stuff then go and read Halo Mythos. All of the Halo lore is in that book and I mean ALL of it. I have a copy of it and it sheds light on major and minor points of the story.
I read somewhere that a Dyson Sphere around a smaller star could be more feasible. It could be up 1/3 AU away from the star and have less heat. Though the gravity would still be a problem. But the material issue could be less of an issue.
IDEA: Dyson Sphere around the moon to collect moonlight. It could be a lot smaller and would collect all the light the moon emits
The moon doesn't emit light; it reflects the Sun's light. Consequently, if you enclosed it in a sphere, the inside would be completely dark and not produce any meaningful amount of radiation.
+mvmlego1212 obviously use a cord to plug into the outside of the Dyson sphere so you can plug it into whatever battery they can. Although they'd need quite a large battery to hold all the energy from the moon
Hahahaha I like it
IDEA: Realize moonlight is reflected sun light. Rip that idea.
+Charcoal the Otaku Cat I'm sorry buddy but you're a cat and cats obviously know nothing about harvesting energy from space
Building a partial dyson sphere around a red dwarf and living in the outside shell would make more sense as the red dwarf is smaller, has a vastly longer life, and isn't as hot as our sun.
Hell yess, if it gives off waist heat than it will have a small thermal exhaust port. So we can blow it up with proton torpedoes.
I love every narrator on this channel
Happy 420,000 subs SciShow!🍁
Maybe cover Ringworlds from Larry Niven's universe. Ringworld are A LOT more feasible to build and would require only about the mass of jupiter. The only problem we have with those technologies is the super-tensile materials. In other words, the unobtaniums.
You don't need a comet hitting the sphere in order to destabilise the system, even the slightest wobble of either the star or the sphere would eventually be amplified to the point where a collision would become inevitable.
Cool video, with one (at least) glaring inaccuracy: If you built a Dyson Sphere at 1AU, you would be under the same gravitational pull from the sun as we currently are. The keen observer will notice that they do not float upward at noon. The sun is able to keep the planets in orbit from such distances due to their size. With an individual being so small, the sun exerts an almost entirely negligible amount of gravity on us. Go hug someone, you are now exerting around the same gravitational pull on them that the sun is. Also, they failed to mention that gravity is not uniform. Some areas experience more than others and as such, any ring built floating in orbit around a body will begin to oscillate more and more violently until it breaks apart.
Little known fact:
The Dyson Cube was patented as a toy, but at 1 AU on each side, it never proved practical to mass produce.
In the game Stellaris I built 6. And boy did it take a long time, even with the full output of hundreds of garden world colony's, I had to expand over almost a third of the galaxy before I had the means to build one. And even still I wasn't really building them myself I was repairing the remnants of Dyson spheres from much older and powerful empires. But they are soon making it possible in game to make your own Dyson Sphere's from scratch.
@4:00 how do we distinguish a Dyson Swarm from redshifted star or other natural effect?
Sphere has another problem: shell theorem. To wit, the star would not interact gravitationally with the shell and may run into it.
its interesting that they recently found a star with unusual dips in its star light. they're gonna point a radio telescope at it because its nothing that has ever been seen before. some speculate a dyson sphere. who knows
Taking all the fun out of Ring World. :) Dude, the Pak Protectors clearly figured out how to solve these problems.
So you see that's why there's so much excitement right now about the star called KIC 8462852. Dyson did it.
I just cracked laughting when you gave the first con "more building materials than exists in our solar system" xD
I remember that episode of TNG where Scotty was found. "Relics" was a great episode
A civilization advanced enough to build a Dyson Sphere would know to put giant thrusters on the outside of the shell, so if an asteroid or comet hit it, the thrusters would push it back into place and maintain the spin. Also if 1G would only be at the DS's equator, that's still far more room that on as Earth sized planet. Say if it was 1000kms in either direction from the very center of the equator. It would be like the Halos from the Halo franchise.
1:34 how far exactly is one alternate universe away?
the heat problem can easily be sorted with radiators on the outer surface (which is why they are looking for IR spikes because this is what the radiators would put out)
as for the gravity problem, one suggestion that has been made in regards to this is to have habitats hang from the inside of the shell so that they use the gravity of the sun.
then you have the problem of building the thing as no material known to us is strong enough to make a rigid structure that big.... instead what is suggested is to make the shell a light weight sail (which could be made of carbonium... aka carbon nano materials) which has the advantage that you can change the geometry and possibly even the reflectiveness of the material to adjust for fluctuations in the solar wind (don't want to burn up because of a solar flair do you)
but that all said we're still a long way from building such a structure. though a small scale dyson ring built at the earth-sol Lagrange point could work (think halo) which can be spun up for gravity and set on a slow spin on it's other axis to create a day night cycle.
I’d like to do this one day
Theories regarding Hollow Earth can gain validity in the light of this explanation.The center of Earth could be a micro-sun (as said in the hollow Earth theory) and the planet could be a micro Dyson sphere created by Nature.
Most stars are red dwarfs. They are by far the most abundant star in the galaxy. But since theyre so much smaller and weaker than our sun, the habital zone is way closer. So a much smaller Dyson sphere would make much more sense in that case for a number of reasons (even though its still bloody unlikely)
what about Dyson Rings, which have all the advantages (huge surplus of livable space, able to harness a massive amount of energy) and few of the drawbacks (reduced impact space, easier to compensate for impacts, nearly invisible, and far lower resource costs)?
If we're talking about a civilization with technology that can accomplish this, wouldn't it be easier to do it with a much smaller star? I'm definitely not an astrophysicist, but it seems to me that if you could find a smaller, but stable star, you could build a dyson sphere with less material and effort, and still get many planet's worth of solar energy. You would still have to build it at the point of equilibrium with the star's gravity, but a smaller star would have a potentially smaller gravity well, and thus you could get a bit closer before your stuff gets fried. Just my hypothesis. I could be wrong. Great video!!
This guy is such a class.
mkay, here goes: (clears throat) red dwarf or neutron star. smaller diameter, less heat to worry about, neutron star would have higher gravity, so you could balance that out, red dwarf would burn longer and have less heat at a given time. you spin a series of rings like a gyroscope to both stabilize it via centrifugal forces and use the acceleration of the rings as artificial gravity, reversing the sides and populating the leading ring. you gradually build the structure on a twist so the angle of solar gravity and the momentum balance out so you have functionally equal earth-gravity most of the way down the rings. stagger the rings so they cover all the available area while having habitation on the edge rather than the back side or sun-side. use mirrors to simulate the day and night as the sun would be a perpetual sunset in this scenario, but whatever, day time sunset would look cool. any impacts would not destabilize the rings because of the gyroscopic effect and small thrusters to aid against drift. plus it would look awesome.
Not to mention that completely enclosing the Sun means that you have to deal with every single solar flare that happens. I keep reading articles about how we were lucky and missed a solar flare that could have destroyed all satellites and electronics on earth. A sphere that surrounds the Sun in every direction would therefore absorb all that energy and have to either withstand or transfer it.
I have a new idea you could focus the light emitted by the sun with lenses very close to the sun and have smaller collectors further out. And with an additional bunch of mirrors you could send all the stars energy in one beam to a planet. Or if you think it further you could send the energy of multiple stars to that planet.
Make a partial dyson swarm from Mercury, use the energy generated to create a Kugleblitz swarm and feed it a few of Jupiter's moons for enough energy to power an interstellar civilization.
what happens to the solar wind inside a dyson sphere? would there need to be a tiny exhaust vent no bigger than 3 meters?
A little more doable? We could do the dyson swarm variant (independently orbiting structures) right now. Actually, you could argue that the fact that we now have satellites orbiting the sun means that we already have a dyson sphere, or at least the very beginnings of one. We are capturing solar energy that did not fall on earth, thus increasing the amount of solar energy we intercept, and are using it for our own purposes. Each such structure we use decreases the amount of visible light that escapes our solar system, with a corresponding increase in infrared radiation (the waste heat). Right now we're only capturing a tiny pinprick of the suns energy, and are limited to using it for powering observatories and communication satellites, but you've got to walk before you can run.
If we eventually start building bigger structures: free floating habitats, halo rings, solar collectors, mining stations, giant computer modules to expand skynet, etc, etc, we could eventually have so many that our civilization would be visible from many light years away, just by looking for stars that have more infrared radiation than they should given their size and luminosity.