Maybe make it a dyson fan since the sphere would only work during the daytime. In polar areas that means half a year without any energy production!
Whereas there is always solar wind.
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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wHaT aBoUt wHen iTs NoT WinDy!!??!?!?
Is dark matter just Dyson sphered stars?
My initial reaction: "What? No."
After thinking a little bit: "hmm I guess you could say that..."
Like I'm sure it's not but I don't know if it's a worse explanation than any of the other ideas being considered. But I don't know enough to even know how wrong I am.
Start with a dyson ring or swarm
Kind of looks like an atom
Some TIL posts really surprise you, it's crazy to me that you have never heard about this. Not being degrading or anything like that, it's just surprising.
One of today's lucky 100000
That's definitely one of Randall's more wholesome ones. By the way, this is one of my favourite book quotes on that subject:
The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.
T.H. White, The Once and Future King
Yeah never heard about it, although I never watched Star Trek personally.
But did you know that we can extract Graphene by heating it up super high so that everything else gets destroyed except graphene?
Read the bobiverse and you'll come across a topopolis. The pictures on wiki suck so here's one from fiction.
I didn't know that! You keep sharing the hits! Keep it coming!
Eh, there's only one in all of Star Trek, and they forgot about it after one episode. Should have a whole series.
There was a star trek novel dealing with it. I read it but don't remember any details. My favorite along those lines was the ringworld books.
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I don’t remember the math, but you lose return on investment after a certain percentage of coverage.
Dyson Grids are the future!!! 😜
The other "benefit" to the sphere is blacking out a star. Other life, should it exist, is less likely to find the structure. ITT people destroying my dreams of a big shelly boi
I would think it'd make it more likely that you're discovered when you turn your star into a black ball with a gigantic IR signature where a star should be. Any civilization with a cursory understanding of gravity and stellar spectra would turn every telescope they have on you.
What does IR red shift into over cosmic distances? But it would be just as, if not less, noticeable as a star suddenly dimming to [100%-optimal capture rate]
Deeper IR, microwave and radio. Within a galaxy, redshift can be ignored. In another galaxy, the issue is moot, you don't need to worry about them and they don't need to worry about you.
Our current scopes can pick up brown dwarfs with a surface temperature below freezing. An object the diameter of a planetary orbit, with the gravitational effect of a main sequence star and giving off just black body radiation is gonna stick out like a neon "Interesting stuff here!" sign the moment someone does a long wavelength survey of your general region.
Even if you build a swarm instead of a solid shell, you're still going to shift the star's apparent spectrum towards IR, from the swarm radiating waste heat. A star whose mass, diameter and emission spectrum don't match up with the math is inviting investigation, regardless of how you try to mask what you've been doing.
The gravity from the star will also still be there regardless of how much of its EM signature is visible outside of the sphere.
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If you want to make one you can.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Program/
this looks like it will suck 500 hours out of my life the moment i press play
it's basically factorio, but it allows 3D belt placement and interplanetary/interstellar transports!
it's excellent!
factorio latest update added interplanetary stuff! its actually quite cool.
please send help!
oh yeah, i know!
but there's like 5 planets in factorio...there's upwards of 16 entire solar systems in DSP ;)
please don't tempt me
Help me. Factorio has me.
i cant. tell me if you find a way to escape. please.
That's correct.
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There is also the Matrioshka brain, a hypothetical supercomputer powered by a Dyson sphere
Ok this one's new to me!
Would recommend Orion's Arm for "theoretical" but fiction takes on structures like this:
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/5067d430e6021
That article is not comprehensive either, their universe is quite expansive.
Two of my favorites may be "W-brains," computing structures with very carefully arranged wormhole pairs serving as data buses to overcome the latency of communicating at such scale, and "neural stars," another take which is a computational structure inside a neutron star sized volume/mass (again, to overcome latency issues).
There are much smaller megastructures too, depending on where in the timeline you are looking.
Is this like the SCP foundation stories but for space opera science fiction?
Precisely.
And it's a "hard" sci fi universe rooted in theoretically possible physics. No FTL or causality violations.
Or the slightly more achievable version - Ringworld.
Depends on what you mean by ringworld. The thing I think of is orders of magnitude more impossible than a Dyson sphere, which is already pretty impossible.
Be carful with those. You may block the light of constellation aliens use and really piss then off.
excellent stellaris reference! ;)
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A pinnacle of science, a wonder of engineering, that we will never get to see in our lifetimes. Instead, we get to see Taiwan get nuked or something, I don't know. I don't follow the news much, I only know I'm disappointed.
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