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.
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.
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.