Would the creation and implementation of a bona fide Dyson sphere megastructure to capture energy more directly from a star ever be feasible or viable were it to succeed? Can the risk be underwritten?
Sufficiently and feasibly
Im all for planning ahead, but but you're a few centuries too early for feasibility studies.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.