Implications of constructing a Dyson Swarm

Not sure where else to post this since /sci/ has faggots for mods (big surprise) and /tv/ wouldn’t elicit very sophisticated responses.

For the uninitiated: “Dyson Swarm” (less accurately: Dyson Sphere), refers to a megastructure in space that could harness all of a star’s energy. In most concepts it does so by surrounding a star with a dense cloud of solar collectors (think satellites with large, thin photovoltaic surfaces that can also transfer the collected energy, e.g. via laser). They could be surrounding the Sun at, for instance, the range of Earth’s orbit and, once numerous enough, receive every last photon sent out by the Sun.

Concerning its feasibility: While the construction of a full Dyson Swarm constitutes a mindbogglingly huge project, it isn’t particularly ambitious in terms of the technolo/g/y needed. Mankind could basically start building one today. If we can also set up largely automated factories of these satellites in space (and thus save on getting matter out of a planet’s gravity well) then the process will experience a positive feedback loop since, as more and more satellites go online, more and more energy is available to spend on the construction of yet more satellites. So even without any additional technological breakthroughs the entire “structure” could be completed in but a couple centuries. We’ve already built structures on Earth that took about that long to finish.


Now why would we want to do build one? ’Cuz having that much energy available to us means we can basically do whatever we want, even on a galactic scale. People these days are worried a lot about global warming and overpopulation. In concert with O'Neill Cylinders (self-sufficient cylindrical space habitats for 500k+ people) a Dyson Swarm would allow our solar system to easily support population numbers equivalent to colonizing ALL Earth-like planets in the ENTIRE galaxy with TEN billion people each, i.e. several QUINTILLION people.

Thoughts?

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It took hundreds of people and years in man hours to put together an underwhelming photo of a black hole. You really think humans could achieve this currently?

it's just interconnected solar panels, we already have the tech to start building it unlike your retarded example.
the issue will be how to transfer energy from them to where we live and micrometeroids punching holes in everything.

Humans haven't even sent anybody to the moon yet. Let's not get too ambitious here big guy.

This.

I mean ... since we are talking about a swarm of objects rather than a rigid spheroid they could just move out of the way. We’re already breddy good at spotting asteroids of all sizes

See . As I said, the concept itself is grand in scale but fairly lowtech. Regarding your objection, that is an unrelated endeavor. Saying X is difficult so we can't do Y (even though Y is easier) makes no sense.

W E W

>the issue will be how to transfer energy from them to where we live and micrometeroids punching holes in everything
I would imagine the bigger issue would be sourcing and moving billions of tonnes of build material, and stationkeeping, but that's just me.

>If we can also set up largely automated factories of these satellites in space (and thus save on getting matter out of a planet’s gravity well)
Does the factory create the raw materials out of thin air? In fact, since the production process will be most likely less than 100% efficient with respect to materials, you'll end up having to get more mass to escape.

Kessler syndrome, but for real.

Earth is an old Dyson sphere, what we call dirt is just the accumulation of hundreds of thousands of millions of years of space dust. Volcanic eruptions are venting from solar flares but since no cleaned the surface it has to go through all the space dust, melts it and creates lava and all the rest.

Venus is one as well and Mars was one but it’s star is mostly a dead dwarf at this point.

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>they could just move out of the way
>We’re already breddy good at spotting asteroids of all sizes
look up what a micrometeorite is. we cant detect them (yet).

no, we're already launching shit into space, it's just a matter scaling it up, even if it's inefficient, it's possible

is that image a self portrait?

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>it's just a matter scaling it up
Reread my post you cock sniff.
> sourcing and moving billions of tonnes of build material
> sourcing
Have fun with your pipe dream, it's hundreds of years away yet.

Not an argument

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are you retarded?
the materials are all around us already you fucking brainlet. we could build a literal star wars death star with just the shit on our planet.
like i said, it's just a fucking matter of scaling up our current manufacturing.

at least that shit isnt as retarded as flat earth bullshit

I seem to recall that the ENTIRE Dyson Swarm here would only require the mass of a single minor planet. And in the meantime you can just gobble up some asteroids to get you started.

Come on, user, it was implied that you’d put the factories not into the vacuum of space but locate them on small moons, asteroids and other bodies with negligible gravity.

Not really applicable, especially not early on in the construction. Remember, we are talking in this example about an Earth-Sun-distance orbit. There is a loooooot of space to be filled. And if you start building them off-planet Earth’s own surroundings do not even factor into it.

I was giving you the benefit of the doubt, user. We can already detect space debris in our vicinity that is as small as a twentieth of a millimeter and anything smaller than that is unlikely to pack enough kinetic energy to seriously damage the hardware in question.

Did you stop reading at the title? A Dyson Sphere is not a single object but rather a collection of billions upon billions of them.

The completion, sure, but not the beginning. That can start right this second.

No human really knows what’s bellow the “crust” of the earth, it is known that it is relatively thin like the shell of a Dyson sphere, it’s also very hot down there and something is spinning with a strong magnetic field.

That’s like your opinion man

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we dont have to go below the crust, fucking about in the crust is enough. plus there's a god damn asteroid belt with who knows how many fucking billions of tons of raw materials and precious metals

You don't seem to fathom how big a task this is. Think of the biggest project that has ever been undertaken by humans - it doesn't have shit on this dyson pipedream.

Can we build photovoltaic collectors? Can we build lasers? Can we build satellites? Can we launch things into orbit and beyond?

If the answer to those questions is yes then we can start building a Dyson Swarm.

Yea it’s totally easier to fuck around for millions of kilometers to make a shell around the entity that keeps us alive instead of digging a hole 60km down for unlimited free geothermal energy. Flawless logic

Then why hasn't it been done already you fucking moran. BECAUSE IT'S NOT THE ABC123 EASYSTREET YOU MAKE IT OUT TO BE.

>You don't seem to fathom how big a task this is.
OP here, I for one do. But that is irrelevant since it is comprised of small individual tasks (i.e. each single satellite) and those are well within our current capabilities. It’s not like we have to complete the entire swarm before it begins being useful to us. The second the first satellite is in place and working it provides a boon to us (albeit a small one to start with).

No are really underestimating what is needed here. You don't just put satellites up with no infrastructure for monitoring, repairs, energy collection etc. Shit is far more complicated than you think.

It is not unlimited though. The amount of energy we could extract from Earth’s core is absolutely pitiful in comparison to the Sun’s. It is also not something that we know how to do currently. Digging through increasingly hot rock while making sure it does not collapse is way harder than just delivering some payload into a heliocentric orbit, something we have done before.

None of what you list is particularly hard either, that infrastructure could simply be provided by additional customized satellites. And you wouldn’t even need repairs necessarily, you just could decommission broken ones.

you're still missing the point you fucking retard, which is that it is fully possible for us to start building a fucking solar panel network around the sun, even if it's hard, it's still POSSIBLE

>Then why hasn't it been done already you fucking moran.
You might wanna ensure that you spell “moron” correctly before you call someone one.

Anyway, it has not been done because the benefits for you here on Earth would not be immediate (i.e. decades away) and you would therefore have a hard time getting funding.

unless this is entertainment for you quit wasting your time with fictional scenarios and learn some math

you forget the fact that it would be a net loss, meaning fucking no one would give you funding even if it somehow gave us some energy in 50 years

Net loss? How so? Is building a power plant a net loss? Do you even know what that word means?

Besides, the space-based industrial capabilities that I outlined earlier in tandem with the power available to you whoever controls such Dyson Swarm parts can engage in a lot of activity that would yield enormous economical and political gains.

No, thanks. Besides, it’s just an interesting idea to contemplate and a potential solution to issues of environmental degradation. Not for the people on Earth (not to begin with anyway) but for the species.

If it’s so possible why is no one doing it?

Because it’s not not feasible, it’s possible that you won’t be a dumb ass your entire life but I doubt that’s feasible either, not for at least 50 years

You'd have to turn the planets into satellites.

I read this with isaac arthur's voice

Have you read either
>Ring World
>Bobiverse
We could start by building a ring (less material)
The material requirements are literally astronomical. We'd probably have to start stripping entire solar systems to make that work.

because you're building fucking gigantic fucking solar panels in space you fucktard.
first you gotta mine the resources here and then you gotta blast the fuckers up in space and then travel all the way into position, and then we still dont have any fucking way to get the energy back here for several decades, so yeah it's a fucking loss UNTIL we can somehow use the produced energy

See .

Nope, heard of them though. You do not need to strip even one solar system to build a Dyson Swarm. The entire mass of one could be supplied by a single planet (and it need not even be Jupiter or Saturn).

See above.

Building them here is only one way of doing it. Ideally you would do so already in space (again, on minor moons or asteroids). And the energy could be returned immediately, it’s just that to start with it would not be a lot and as such not that profitable. But combined with space mining and manufacture it could be relatively soon.

But be that as it may, net loss is still the wrong term because eventually it would pay itself off.

Shhh, we’wa hunting wabbits.

>Building them here is only one way of doing it.
the other options are still extremely costly and takes a fucking long time just for transports. no matter what with our current tech it will be a massive loss until we can actually start using the energy

I have some doubts regarding the maintenance of a Dyson swarm. Solar panels in particular are a bitch.

>Hey bro why don't we just build solar panels n shit around the sun it can't be that hard

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More so on Earth than in space, honestly.

Do explain how it is hard, user. Go ahead, the floor is yours.

Eh. The idea here is to set up a single factory that can start cranking out parts for both the satellites themselves as well as further factories. In that scenario your only cost is the one-time investment of the initial factory. But I am not sure where we are in regards to that particular technology. Generally things in the vacuum of space (especially mobile ones) don’t have to be all that sturdy and so current 3D printing capabilities might be enough for this. Or not. Point being, you are being misled by the size of the project into thinking that it is not only time we need but also great advances in technology. A wall one lightyear long is a ridiculously massive undertaking but laying the first bricks isn’t hard and neither is laying the last. You just gotta keep at it.

>Not sure where else to post this since /sci/ has faggots for mods
This is literally for /sci/ though. We have had several Dyson sphere/swarm threads there.
Stop fucking posting /sci/ shit on Jow Forums.

do you understand how large the sun, other stars, in the universe are? such structures are impossible fantasies for even the most technological advanced races in the universe. this theory was vomited up by a retard and you've bought into this retardation.

There is not enough resources on the planet to make even 1/1000th of the sphere.

Absolute horseshit. Maybe you are thinking of a literal sphere, a rigid shell of material several centimeters (or even meters) thick but that is explicitly not what I am talking about. Again, a Dyson Swarm of the kind outlined in the OP and in my other posts would require only about the mass of one of the minor planets or roughly all of the asteroids outside the Oort Cloud.

Yes, I do. Do you? Elaborate on what makes this a fantasy given that we can literally start its construction today because its component parts (single satellites) are so lowtech.

/sci/ is super gay about what gets to stay there and what doesn’t. The mods and tranny jannies over there have a very narrow idea of what constitutes threads about science.

>would require only about the mass of one of the minor planets or roughly all of the asteroids outside the Oort Cloud.
>only

you're a fucking idiot

NO U!

Not my problem if you are too dumb to realize that a single planet’s mass is peanuts when considering the power that you have at your fingertips in return. A full Dyson Swarm allows you to:

• colonize and/or sterilize the entire galaxy (the latter being considerably faster and easier)
• move the whole solar system (stellar engine/Shkadov thruster)
• support literally several billion times the population of Earth
• obtain materials via star lifting and conveniently also prolong the Sun’s life span as a side effect
• pretty much anything else you can think of that is physically possible

And again, you neither need to start deconstructing a planet for construction materials to begin with nor do you have to wait to build the entire thing before you begin reaping its benefits.

>Muh Dyson X
No, you fools, you're looking at the wrong direction. The Sun taught us the truth: FUSION.

We build bigass rotating habitats orbiting the gas giants. These habitats have fusion reactors, that use hydrogen and helium sucked out of the gas giants to not only create electricity, but matter too. Robot asteroid miners mine the asteroid field to get anything that would be too costly to make via nuclear transmutation. We use mass drivers daisy chained at various lagrange points to fling stuff (materials, people, robots) between various points to and from the stations.

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>man hours

lol

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’kay, user, you give us a call when someone figured fusion power out, alright? In the meantime the rest of us will make do with proven technology.

The sun has 100x the diameter of earth and the distance between the solar panels and the sun's surface would need to be really fucking big for them not to melt. We don't have enough fucking metal for this shit let alone for drones that would have to move battery cells between the sun and earth.

>We don't have enough fucking metal for this shit let alone for drones that would have to move battery cells between the sun and earth.
We have an entire solar system full of materials eager to be exploited for such an endeavor

I'm not even going to bother going into the geopolitics of sending assloads of energy through microwave laser through the atmosphere.

What is return on investment
Calculate how much it costs to build a satellite and launch it into space.
Calculate the amount of energy that a satellite can receive along with any maintenance costs, such as the human support team.
Calculate the estimated lifespan of a satellite.

And since in your fever dreams, you want to build a factory on a moon, then determine how a foundry and factory will function without water and without an atmosphere of oxygen, and calculate the costs of those workarounds.

Determine an "efficient" method of mining asteroids, with an estimate for the amount of recoverable materials for a given timeframe so that you can determine the cost of such materials.
For reference, a JAXA space probe recently detonated an explosive on an asteroid and had to haul ass behind the asteroid to avoid being hit by the debris, which will never stop... Asteroid mining is obviously an order of magnitude more complicated than mining on Earth.

And I'm going to stop playing to your delusions now since you have no interest in doing any of the above and you're just going to yell in all caps about inane bullshit.

You forget that the panels can be “really fucking thin” and still work, meaning you only require very small amounts per solar collectors.

>And since in your fever dreams, you want to build a factory on a moon, then determine how a foundry and factory will function without water and without an atmosphere of oxygen, and calculate the costs of those workarounds.
Did you forget about the “automated” (or at least tele-operated) part, silly?

>Determine an "efficient" method of mining asteroids, with an estimate for the amount of recoverable materials for a given timeframe so that you can determine the cost of such materials.
If you need not pay anyone to mine them since you do it automatically and the machines used to do so are manufactured by the initial factory, does it not make them de-facto free in terms of monetary cost?

>And I'm going to stop playing to your delusions now since you have no interest in doing any of the above and you're just going to yell in all caps about inane bullshit.
Where did I yell in all caps? You seem incredibly butthurt over this idea for some reason. As for your questions, who knows? You certainly don’t given your silly idea of “human support teams” for each satellite. Given the scale of the project it has to be self-managing by default. And at least where things like course corrections, power management and such are concerned we’re already there.

>panels can be “really fucking thin” and still work
That's still a fuck ton of materials required and hours needed to collect them and produce the panels, probably over a 100 years of work. Solar panels have shit efficiency as well, so a perfect dyson sphere which will harvest even 75% of the solar energy is impossible to make especially if you consider that you need to leave part of the Sun open so that the light to Earth isn't blocked.

>probably over a 100 years of work
Yeah, it’s almost as if I put the estimated time until total completion in the centuries range or something. Huh.

>Solar panels have shit efficiency as well, so a perfect dyson sphere which will harvest even 75% of the solar energy is impossible to make
100% energy efficiency is impossible in practice anyway, your point being? What is being talked about here is harvesting all that is possible, not literally every kilowatt.

>especially if you consider that you need to leave part of the Sun open so that the light to Earth isn't blocked.
Uh, no, you don’t. First off, remember how I mentioned that the Dyson Swarm would be constructed at the Earth-Sun distance? In other words, the Earth would be inside the swarm. But even if it weren’t, with the energy of a whole DS at your disposal it’d be downright trivial to light Earth. I specifically mention light because it’d still be warmed to an extent. Energy would still escape the swarm after all, just no longer in the visible spectrum but in the infrared (from waste heat).

>Earth would be inside the swarm
Good luck getting enough resources from within our solar system to make this. It's a thousand years too early to fantasise about this.

How is it a thousand years to early if we can start today? That it might take centuries to finish is irrelevant since it does not need to be finished to become useful.

As for the required resources, for the umpteenth time, disassembling one of the minor planets or mining all of the asteroids in the inner solar system is sufficient. This sounds like a lot but given the positive feedback loop mentioned earlier it is most certainly not a fever or pipe dream as some clueless anons here suggested.

>cover the entire sun with panels
>sunlight can't reach the earth
>photosynthesis eventually stops
not to mention it would require more fuel than we currently have on Earth to even extract the required materials from all the objects in our solar system. yes there may be enough raw materials out there but we'll eventually run out of the stuff we need to travel to those places.

I don't disagree with your premise that it would be quite straightforward with automated production systems, but how are we going to build those without any kind of competent assembler technology? And how will we effectively transmit and store the resulting energy? By laser?

>>cover the entire sun with panels
>>sunlight can't reach the earth
>>photosynthesis eventually stops
This isn't how a Dyson Swarm works. The collectors are still separated by reasonable distances and the majority of the energy being collected would otherwise just be radiated out into space.

That’s addressed by setting up the required industry outside of Earth’s gravity well. No need (or even reason) to mine the resources, fabricate the satellites and launch them into their heliocentric orbit all from Earth.

You could either power the required space travel with regular rocket fuel from places like the Moon (or other objects with water), use solar power or employ solar sails and navigate using the solar wind. Obviously, that last option is the slowest but it shows that it is impossible to do this basically until our Sun starts dying.

Storage is the least of your problems given the amount of energy you are generating at a constant pace. Even using today’s ones with their considerable losses/inefficiency would be acceptable.
Lasers are one method of transmission, yeah, especially if the distances in question are below 1 AU.

And I am not sure what you are referring to with assembler technology. Nano assemblers? Those seem like overkill for this. 3D printing and other, even more established production methods should suffice. Again, we’re talking about comparatively lowtech machines here.

Wait until non shitty solar panel then we talk.

Maybe 3D printing would suffice for the frame, but the solar collectors themselves? The onboard control systems? The energy transmission systems? The miners? I just can't see current 3D printing technology handling that. And what automated method do you propose for refining and preparing the input materials with reasonable enough quality?

How do we do it on Earth? Put material X is into machine Y and out comes product Z. Isn’t most heavy industry largely automated already anyway? What little mechanical human labor remains there could probably be replaced with telerobotics at this point given that we can even do *surgery* that way nowadays.

Why wait? No need to be all that efficient when you have literally the entire Sun’s output at your disposal and not just the miserable little squirt that hits Earth (i.e. one billionth), only part of which even reaches the surface because of the atmosphere, clouds and so on.

Automation isn't a matter of "just doing it"
And no, automation does not make resources free and we have not achieved communism.

Resources have value implicit in the fact that they are desired... resources that could be used to make a solar cell are resources that could be used to make a CPU, and so comes property and value through speculation.
This results in costs, where the value of the energy being produced does not exceed the value of resources and other hidden costs.

How would you transfer acquired energy to Earth/anywhere where its needed?

And in case you are thick and did not understand: You have the Merchant (Jew)'s dillemma.
The merchant's purpose is to make as much money as possible... to do otherwise is non-competitive and results in the merchant being lost to Darwin.
It is always possible to make more money by spending your resources in a different way.
If the Merchant sees more value in a particular venture, then why would they use their resources on something that provides them no foreseeable value or utility?

Only when the costs of energy are so high that they need to import it from space is when you will see something like this happening.

That just over-simplifies the process way too much. Machine Y has to be designed and set up, in the case of an operation like this it would also be massive, complex and riddled with failure points that tiny robots would undoubtedly not be able to properly inspect and maintain, and this would probably only be amplified by weak 3D-printed construction provided we even have anything capable of withstanding the various conditions required to properly refine the input materials, let alone build and test the end products.

I still agree that with proper production methods the idea of deploying a massive array of collectors isn't really as complicated as it sounds, but I can't see the shotgun approach working universally. We've still got a little while to go still before we're messing around with von neumann tech, maybe for the better.
I think I can agree with the idea that exploiting sheer amounts of unowned resources that would otherwise go completely underutilized in an automated and unsupervised manner is "free" in a way. It's a little different on Earth not only because people own the mines and the land but also people take time out of their lives and put significant effort into producing a product from those resources, where an automated system of VN probes mining unclaimed clumps of rock and converting them into collectors takes a lot of that out of the equation.

>unlimited

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Lasers are an option as already mentioned multiple times but obviously there’s other ways, too (e.g. creating hydrogen fuel on, say, the Moon and sending that back to Earth).

Not free as in worthless but as in not requiring money to purchase, silly. It costs you as the investor on Earth no money for your already set up, self-sufficient, automated industry to mine, refine and use local resources.

>Only when the costs of energy are so high that they need to import it from space is when you will see something like this happening.
But the energy of a Dyson Swarm allows you to do so many things! Dominate all of Earth for one thing (although that and even dominating the entire solar system is peanuts) and you can hardly put a monetary value on that.

The point is that they wouldn't be unowned, and if an industry were ever to be bootstrapped enough that asteroid mining becomes a viable way to do things, then suddenly you'll start seeing claims on entire stretches of asteroids. On top of that, the historical method of proving a claim has always been through presence combined with military force.

You're ignoring the steps in between.
It would probalby cost investors multiple times the world GDP to bootstrap a self-sustaining anything in space.


You can't promise someone world domination and unlimited energy if they just waited a thousand years.

You also can't just espouse the benefits of something without considering the cost to get there.
"Oh man it sure would be great if I could just purge the whole continent of Africa and use all of its resources for the good of mankind, what do you mean we can't do that, we could purge them right now if we really wanted to!"

It would costs tens of billions to be sure, maybe even hundreds, but you are exaggerating. The annual world GDP is upwards of $80 trillion, even one percent of that would be way more than enough to get this started.

>You can't promise someone world domination and unlimited energy if they just waited a thousand years.
It would not be thousands of years. Expecting it to take centuries to complete the entire thing is reasonable and you would become the unassailable hegemon as a result of operating even a partial Dyson Swarm way, way, way before that.

Not sure what that other paragraph is getting at.

You're pulling worse figures out of your ass, and what's worse, I doubt you know what an arc furnace is.

It means you're excessively optimistic about impossible tasks without understanding how OTHER people can get in your way.

It would be relatively easy for your competitors to just do the same thing and demolish your fragile swarm by spamming lasers and kinetic weapons throughout space.
Better yet your competitors can just wait for you to run out of money and buy out your constellation for scrap at a bargain.

You make these claims as if they were in a geopolitical bubble and the prospects of a dyson swarm are already diminished by basic economics.

>centuries to complete
mothefucker

the whole project is retarted nobody will ever try to undertake it until sublight space travel is commonplace and cheap (maybe never then)

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thoughts? ridiculous, we would not be able to utilize that much energy, moving energy is the biggest issue here, not even gona start on storing it.

But it would be pointless, nuclear energy is way more efficient than this bullshit

>Dominate all of Earth for one thing (although that and even dominating the entire solar system is peanuts)
what are you talking about brainlet?
What is stopping anyone to blow you up or simply seize ur property?
Are you gonna have a armada of starships alongside ur dyson swarm?

Go to bed, Isaac. You're drunk again.

lmao

go be autistic somewhere else