Current Events > A Dyson Sphere sounds like a terrible idea

(+) Yeah! (+)

Was it actually a requirement that people live in it? I thought it was basically just a powerplant?

It's not a good idea, especially if you accidentally trigger the outside communication device and a tractor beam pulls your entire ship inside with no chance of leaving. You better hope someone is still outside if that happens so they can help you escape or you are done for.

isnt the entire point of a dyson sphere that any civilization advanced enough to build one would have far better methods of gathering energy

No, quite the opposite. It's that any advanced civilization MUST build one if they hope to accomplish feats of engineering at the planetary scale.

You could actually live on top of the Dyson Sphere, not inside of it. Or you could live on the inside if it was just a "Ringworld."

I don't know why everyone is all like "they are suuuch a bad idea."

You don't live on it, you just harvest energy from it.

The radiation will cook you no matter what side you live on.

Have you never heard of shielding? Not to mention the fact that much of that "harmful radiation" is specifically what the thing is supposed to be harvesting. The point is to capture as much energy as possible (ideally, ALL of it) from the star. That isn't limited to just the visible spectrum. You're not letting all that radiation pass right through because it's literally just energy you're wasting by not capturing it and using it.

EDIT: To clarify, Dyson Spheres are a fucking cool but equally fucking stupid idea. It just has nothing to do with the radiation.

isnt the entire point of a dyson sphere that any civilization advanced enough to build one would have far better methods of gathering energy

They aren't a stupid idea at all.

The burden of proof is on other people to come up with a better idea.

Wtf is this "hurr hurr i smarter than freeman dyson, more like freeman DUMBson HAHAHA"

like, get fucking real.

The thing is, it's not real science.

It's not even pseudoscience.

It's Looney Tunes logic.

You wouldn't be trying to capture the radiation itself as that makes no sense. You'd be capturing the energy from the heat generated when the radiation hits things.

I know I'm wasting my time here, but I'm curious. You do know that "put something in front so the radiation hits it" is just another way of saying "capture the radiation" right? Like they're the same thing. If the radiation hits a thing and heats it up, the radiation is being captured. If the radiation misses or goes straight through without interacting, it's not being captured, and it's not heating anything up.

Attempting to capture radiation in a way that provides usable energy means you can't use that method protect yourself from it and vice versa.

It's not a good idea, especially if you accidentally trigger the outside communication device and a tractor beam pulls your entire ship inside with no chance of leaving. You better hope someone is still outside if that happens so they can help you escape or you are done for.

You wouldn't be trying to capture the radiation itself as that makes no sense. You'd be capturing the energy from the heat generated when the radiation hits things.

Even if there were relics of a Dyson sphere out there, it wouldn't be that hard to find. There would be insane amounts of infrared.

What do you think radiation is, exactly?

1. They can be, but that's not typically thought of as their main purpose. You also wouldn't likely be living on the inside surface with the star overhead, but rather within the shell or on its outer surface facing space. The inside facing the star would almost certainly be reserved for harnessing the radiation.
2. Yes.
3. That's the general gist of it, yes. If you're looking for habitable spaces for people, you'd be vastly better served with large numbers of O'Neill cylinders or similar smaller stations. The DS is meant to encase the star to harness 100% (or nearly, you'll never get it perfect) of its energy production. In some sci-fi I've seen it can also be used as a means to "hide" the civilization from the wider universe, though they tend to get handwavey with how exactly they manage to sustain such a perfectly closed system.

It's basically a dead end idea. To have the material necessary to construct one, you'd need to have an intersteller civilization harnassing resources from dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of other star systems, and if that's already the case said civilization has no real need to perfectly harness every bit of energy from a star.

said civilization has no real need to perfectly harness every bit of energy from a star.

It would be far more worthwhile to mine the solar system for deuterium and helium 3. And then use that for fusion power.

why not?

a civilization at that level is operating in ways we can barely begin to comprehend. I don't see why it seems so impossible that they might have some use for the entire energy output of a star

A Dyson sphere is just an enormous solar array meant to collect solar energy and transmit it via microwaves or lasers using satellite swarms to relay the collected energy back to inhabited locations. You won't actually live on the sphere because the radius of the sphere (smaller than Mercury's orbit) would make the temperatures prohibitively hot for anything but robots to live on for maintaining it.

even if you could some how convert every single atom of a planet into the needed material

you would still need dozens and dozens of star systems worth of planets to build ONE

and then you need to transport and assemble all of this