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Dyson swarm, yes. Dyson sphere, not on our home system. The risks of blotting out your only livable planet's biosphere is too great, not to mention stuff like the dark forest theory.
Exactly, this won't be worth looking into before we have interstellar travel, and that is probably a very very long time away
Lol even in theory it's dubious, in reality it's absurd. Well never make it to that point.
Actually, it might be worth doing this first. Once you've got even a partial Dyson swarm you've got ample energy to make interstellar travel a lot easier. You could either use beamed propulsion (lightsails or magsails), or manufacture bulk antimatter to fuel high-efficiency rocketry, or a combination of the two.
But you can't do this to earth's sun without causing catastrophic changes on earth, so you have to reach a different star before doing this. Blocking out even like 1% of the sun's energy from reaching earth would likely wreak havoc on the earth
No, there's ways to do this without damaging Earth. You could arrange the sphere so that there's a gap that allows light through specifically to keep Earth lit, or you could use mirrors or straight up artificial light sources to maintain Earth's sunlight levels.
Or you get over the obsession with maintaining Earth exactly as it always was and carry on without it. Once we're talking about Dyson spheres a planet like Earth would be a very minor population center. Probably more valuable as a source of additional building material than as a place to live in its own right.
Well, given that the earth only utilizes about 1 billionth of the sun's energy, so I think we could have both with just a little effort.
If our Dyson sphere project has become large enough that this is a risk, then we've got ample energy to spare to artificially light Earth. Assuming we still want to keep it around at that point and not dismantle it for additional raw materials.
Dark Forest only works in the context of a cheesy sci-fi story. Under real-world physics it fails utterly.