Dyson Spheres and Stellar Engines

We are now entering the realm of the theoretical and technological.

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What is a Dyson Sphere? A Dyson Sphere is a megastructure with the scale of a star. It surrounds the star, captures the solar rays, and turns them into energy, just one hour of solar energy harvested by a Dyson sphere would last humanity an entire year. It would mark the point where we go from a planetary species to an interstellar. A solid Dyson sphere would not work because it would be weak to impacts and liable to crash into the sun, we need something more like a Dyson Swarm, a bunch of solar panels harvesting limitless energy from the sun. Conventional solar panels would not work because they do not last long, are expensive and need lots of maintenance, and we would need thirty quadrillion to surround the sun, the most efficient way of making one would be large mirrors made of reflecting foil attached to supports. They would reflect sunlight into solar collectors which beam the energy around the solar system. We would need to largely disassemble a planet, the best candidate for this would be Mercury, as its very metal rich with little atmosphere making it relatively easy to disassemble than a planet like earth which has water and a very thick atmosphere, we need the energy and infrastructure in space to start building, so let’s get to the disassembly then. It costs a lot of energy, for example if we used all the fossil fuels on earth, we would only be able to send as much mass as Mount Everest, a rather meager accomplishment compared to planetary disassembly. Humans are expensive to keep alive and need lots of energy, food and are sensitive to the environment, so we’ll want to automate as much as possible. We will need to launch some solar panels into orbit to supply energy to the miners which strip mine the surface of the planet and our refiners which take the valuable materials out of the soil and turn them into the swarm satellites. To launch them into space we need an efficient and effective solution, rockets are expensive and difficult to deorbit and reuse, the simplest way to do it would be to use a long railgun that uses electromagnetics to launch them at high speeds. At this point we would be able to use exponential growth, one satellite providing the energy to make the next one, which makes two, then 4, then 8, so on and so forth, in about 60 doubling times we would have our Dyson Swarm built, it would only take about a decade for the Sun to be surrounded, the infrastructure on mercury will need to keep up with the growing budget of energy.

 

 

What is a Stellar engine? A Stellar engine is a Megastructure that uses the power of a star to move the star. you might think “the star is being pushed, wont that just push the star out of the system?” the star holds everything to it with gravity, there are two main types of stellar engines; a Shkadov Thruster and a Caplan thruster. A Shkadov Thruster is a big mirror over the poles that is a Parabola shape and all it does is push the photons from the sun to generate thrust. A Caplan Thruster is slightly more complicated than a Shkadov Thruster, it’s a space station powered by a Dyson sphere which collects material from the sun using large electromagnetic fields to funnel hydrogen and helium, this doesn’t provide enough fuel though, which is where our dyson sphere comes in, it can refocus sunlight back at the sun to heat up the surface of the sun which lifts billions of tons of mass off of the Sun to power nuclear fusion, it shoots out a fast jet of particles at 1% the speed of light out of the solar system, a second jet pushes on the sun along like a tugboat. The helium is burned in thermonuclear fusion reactors and a jet of radioactive oxygen is shot out which provides thrust, to stop the engine from crashing into the sun, we speed up the collected hydrogen with an electromagnetic particle accelerator which shoots a jet at the sun to balance the Stellar engine. With this we could dodge deadly supernovae and black holes, it could redirect the galactic orbit of the solar system in about one hundred million years,