Im all for planning ahead, but but you're a few centuries too early for feasibility studies.
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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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.
Every argument I've seen against the cool science fiction future boils down to "we couldn't do it this financial quarter, so it'll never be possible at all".
It's not that. It's that organized civilization won't last long enough to get that advanced. How long do you think it'll take to get that far scientifically? 3-4 centuries? We're lucky if we get 2-3 decades left out of civilization between running out of resources, climate change, pfas, microplastics, fascism/war, and unbridled capitalism. That's just shit that's happening right now, not even including unexpected shit like super volcano eruptions or major meteor strike or something. We simply don't have enough time to get that advanced.
Very pessimistic viewpoint. We have issues to solve for sure but I very much doubt humanity will implode in less than 50 years.
We're entering a new dark age
Guess we'll see.
Humanity won't, but civilization will.
RemindMe! 50 years
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.
Put the Dyson swarm at the orbit of the asteroid belt. Won't block much in the way of light, but comets could become an issue.
We'll just keep a window open on that side of the Dyson sphere.
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.
The risks of blotting out your only livable planet's biosphere is too great
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.
not to mention stuff like the dark forest theory.
Dark Forest only works in the context of a cheesy sci-fi story. Under real-world physics it fails utterly.
I don't think so, but we could possibly put a ring around the sun large enough to fit every human being to ever live on comfortably.
This would make both Apollo and Beyonce very happy.
There are a couple of physically feasable versions, yeah. The sci-fi solid shell with an Earthlike environment magically glued to the interior isn't possible, but that's not what any serious physicist or futurist was ever talking about to begin with.
A Dyson swarm in particular is quite easy, as it can be assembled piece by piece is immediately useful from day one. Just start manufacturing solar power satellites, and keep doing that until the orbital space around the Sun is full. There's plenty of raw materials in the solar system to support building that.
This makes a lot more sense and is much more practical. It’s not as if a Dyson sphere could be built overnight anyway. It would be a massive undertaking and would take, potentially, centuries to complete. Might as well get some use out of the pieces you have already built while you work on the rest of it.
I like Dyson Spheres/Swarms in concept. Is it possible on paper, yes. Is if feasible to accomplish? No. Not even a little bit, imo.
Any Dyson sphere or even swarm would demand an unfathomable amount of resources, time, and manpower. It would be a mega project that would take thousands of years. You'd need to totally disassemble a cosmic body like Mercury or the Moon to even have enough materials. Even with wildly more advanced tech, you'd end up using an incredible amount of energy to build this, and the EROI would take hundreds more years to ever come to fruition after it's completed.
I'm of the opinion that any civilization advanced enough to theoretically build such a megastructure has likely figured out a much more feasible energy source by that point.
Why do you need a more powerful energy source, while you have a star going that's gonna release free energy anyway? A Dyson swarm need not be a single project, it can be assembled gradually by just adding solar power arrays until there's eventually no place left to put one.
Well for starters, you have to put the satellites into orbit. It's gonna be pretty hard to do that without an initial energy source.
Second, aforementioned effort +thousands of years.
Third, you are limited by your means to transmit this power, which diminishes as you get further away from the star. Photovoltaic capture abiliy and microwave power transmission capture abiliy drop the further you get away from the star as the energy gets dissipated into the cosmic background. At some point you won't be able to rely on your Dyson structure and will need to rely on a different power source.
Fourth, these satellites have a continuous upkeep. So it's not as simple as just putting them up there, they'll need to be constantly replaced because they will burn out over time.
The traditional notion of a Dyson sphere/swarm isn't using the thing to power earth, or launching the construction materials from earth for that matter. You would literally deliver enough power to overheat the planet that way.
The idea is that you mostly live in space habitats by that point, so a given solar array is just powering the habitat it's attached to, or one nearby (or for one farther out, you can have some satellites that are just big, thin foil mirrors that focus sunlight from a wide area onto a solar array). You probably build these from asteroids and such, since again the energy cost to launch material from earth is prohibitive. A bit like how it would be cost prohibitive for a single city on an empty planet to engage in a project to colonize and build new farmland and cities across the entire world: they wouldn't actively build with that goal in mind, so much as they expand a little bit, and a bit more with the surplus gained by that expansion as the population grows, until one day their descendants run out of empty land to expand to. A Dyson sphere is just the end state of this for a solar system rather than a planet.
It probably does take thousands of years, or more, and a corresponding level of effort, but that's nothing compared to the life of a star, so if you have a species that's got the technology to build a civilization in space, they have the time.
So Chris Columbus gets back to Spain and says, "And the whole point of this is to build a city on the west coast that will be populated by over 12 million people," at which point he is laughed out of court.
LA would have been a ridiculous idea to the Europeans when America was first discovered, and no one would have said it was feasible at the time, yet there it is, just another achievement built on the successes of thousands of years of civilization. I don't see why a Dyson swarm or other megasteuctures would be any different.
LA is hardly hundreds of years old.
You are correct. That was a hypothetical comment that is absurd now as the ones about not making a Dyson shell sometime in the future if civilization doesn't collapse first.
Do you think the risk can be adequately and feasibly underwritten?
Do you think the risk can be adequately and feasibly underwritten?
I mean, I suppose that technically a lone satellite with solar panels in orbit around the Sun is probably an extremely limited form of a Dyson sphere
it's not as if there's some firm lower bound on what percentage of energy output from the star that needs to be captured. One could presumably scale up incrementally.
So, in that technical sense, sure.
Could humanity in 2025 aspire to build enough infrastructure to capture something like 1% of the Sun's output? No, that's just way beyond our capabilities now.
I mean, I suppose that technically a lone satellite with solar panels in orbit around the Sun is probably an extremely limited form of a Dyson sphere
it's not as if there's some firm lower bound on what percentage of energy output from the star that needs to be captured. One could presumably scale up incrementally.
By that definition the solar panels that are already on the Earth are a tiny Dyson swarm. And honestly, I approve.
They aren't in orbit, and they aren't in orbit around a star, so not really part of a Dyson swarm (and also technically don't add to the energy available to our civilization), but I still approve of your solar panels. You could argue that the ISS or the few solar orbit satellites we have are the start of a Dyson swarm even if they don't add to our energy pool.
Well, I'm pretty sure the Earth is in orbit around a star [citation needed], so I would think solar panels on Earth would also be in orbit around a star.
Not currently. We have no plan to make one.
If it were to be technically feasible, what would that have to look like? If you found a way for every insurance company on Earth to jointly underwrite part of the risk, is it theoretically possible?
I wonder if there would even be enough accessible matter (on Earth) to manufacture such a crazy thing and I havent even considered or am unaware of how it would even be possible to manufacture even if we technically could
Not enough resources exist currently that are accessible to us, and not enough money exists to pay workers to get the job done.
On earth? No, not by a long shot. We would need to get into the deconstructing planets business.
For a power-collecting Dyson sphere you don't actually need all that much matter. Most of the sphere's area can be thin metal foil that just acts as a mirror to concentrate light on power converters, for example. You could build it with asteroidal material.
If you really want to get massive, then Mercury is usually the first target people propose for demolition. Lots of heavy elements and already close in to the Sun. And nobody cares much about Mercury.
Or at the very least, the entire asteroid belt would put a good dent in it.
Sure, what would be the obstacle? You start by building a single solar energy collector. Then build another. Then another. And so forth.
We don't even have the technology to beam solar efficiently down to earth from earth orbit, yet.