A Star In a Ball: Dyson Spheres and How to Make One
Space has been an alluring concept ever since humanity first looked to the stars. So, it made perfect sense that once we had the technological prowess to ascend into the skies, we would do it.
Slowly, but surely, we explored the cosmos, spurring dreams that before long, we would colonize the Solar System, with outposts on Mars, Venus, and even Mercury.
But if we’re going to achieve our wildest sci-fi dreams, we’ll need more power.
A LOT more.
“The universe is finite, its resources finite…”
~Thanos, Avengers: Infinity War
Let’s face it: We’re going to run out of power soon.
It is estimated that the world will run out of oil and all other fossil fuels by 2060.
Renewables, like solar and wind still haven’t gotten over their major issue — reliability. If it’s cloudy or there’s no wind, no power is generated.
Nuclear energy has been marred by disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima, making it unappealing to many.
And fusion energy likely won’t be available for about 20–30 years.
But, we do have one constant source of energy, one that will keep going for billions of years.
Yep, I’m talking about the Sun. Our local enormous hydrogen-helium exploding ball of gas otherwise known as a star.
The Sun will keep going for another 10 billion years before going supernova and consuming half the solar system, according to estimates.
And harnessing the almost 400 trillion watts of energy released by the star without interference from our Earthly weather patterns could power the globe for 500,000 years.
This proposition has been an endless source of ideas for scientists and physicists.
But one man took things a step further.
Enter Freeman Dyson, a mathematician-turned-theoretical physicist. He was a huge proponent of this idea.
And he proposed something massive.
That, dear readers, is a Dyson Sphere, a megastructure designed to absorb the power of a star and then beam it back down to Earth.
This, in theory, is the solution to all of our power needs, and will provide power for our entire planet for as long as we will inhabit it.
With the amount of power generated by a Dyson Sphere around the Sun, we would finally have the resources to not only solve all our energy problems on Earth, but also reach for the stars, colonize our solar system, and maybe even begin interstellar travel.
There’s only one problem: We can’t build one, at least not yet.
Yeah, I know, but hear me out.
The Sun is HUGE. Like, really huge.
In fact, it is so massive, that even if we were to build this Dyson Sphere, it would take 100 quintillion tons of material to build.
That’s 85% of the Earth. Yikes.
So, let’s just say that we really wanted to build a Dyson Sphere. How would we go about it?
First, we’re going to need some metal. A whole planet’s worth.
In order to gain the materials we need for a Dyson Sphere, we’re probably going to have to hollow out an entire planet.
Mercury is the most likely candidate, since it’s the closest planet to the Sun, making it an ideal staging point to assemble sections of the Sphere, and has an abundance of the natural resources necessary to construct the solar panels, which would be needed to generate power.
So, we’ll need to colonize Mercury. Let’s assume that we do so, and that mining operations on the scale we need are, in fact, possible.
Now, we’ll need to fabricate the segments of the Sphere, and launch them into a heliocentric orbit.
The rest is surprisingly easy. If we launch 1-kilometer wide sections from Mercury, and use the power from those to build new ones, we could complete the Sphere in about ten years. Not bad.
For now, this just remains an interesting thought experiment. But, hundreds of years in the future, when humanity looks to spread its influence across the cosmos, maybe, Dyson Spheres will become a reality.
And that, my friends, is how you put a star in a ball.
