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Got mine plugged in: gonna vacuum later
Ha ha yup me too! Got one hiding in my closet. $50 and it’s theirs 🤣
Isn’t that like a 95% loss?
From MSRP, yes. Mine was second hand and has seen better days. One of the older DC07 ones
Okay, so the title is a bit off. They’re hunting for partial Dyson spheres using infrared and optical.
I was confused on how they would detect something completely blocking a sun from millions of light-years away.
Even a Dyson sphere, which is technically unlikely anyway, would be possible to spot. You would look for something very bright in the infrared spectrum with almost no light in the visible spectrum. It would also be larger than a normal star of the same energy, but that would be hard to tell given all the other issues.
A partial swarm is easier because it will have variability towards more infrared and then back to a more normal spectrum.
And, of course, all this is speculation until we find a candidate and determine it doesn’t have a natural source for that behavior.
Why would there necessarily be strong infrared emissions? Since a Dyson Sphere is meant to harvest all energy produced by a star, any leakage would be unnecessary inefficiency, wouldn’t it?
Thermodynamics says that energy can’t be destroyed (mass-energy, but generally that won’t matter). So after the work of running your stellar civilization is done, you will radiate out waste heat. There is no real way around this without breaking thermodynamics or having a handy black hole to dump all your waste heat into. Therefore, the energy of the star will still be released, but it will be released as infrared.
If you’re using the Dyson sphere purely as a power plant and e.g. charge batteries, the thermal radiation will be distributed over the whole area covered by the civilization.
A solar panel, or any other power generator we use, doesn’t radiate away all the generated energy either. It’s radiated from the point of use.
So you heat habitats, which radiate heat. And run computers, which radiate heat. And move objects around, which radiates heat (among other things). And if you merely absorb energy from your star…it radiates as heat. This is the whole idea of entropy. Unless your lasers are particularly efficient and you use them to beam the energy elsewhere, your Dyson swarm is going to radiate heat equivalent to the energy your star puts out.
You’re ignoring my example - what if you charge up batteries at the Dyson sphere, and use the energy anywhere else? There’s no physical reason the energy must be used around the Dyson sphere.
So all you need is a perfect charging system. We don’t have those, and physics doesn’t allow for them. This would be no different than the laser example I gave, and this only makes sense after you have a second Dyson swarm.
Because all that energy contains heat as well, and you’ll need to balance the heat from your star along with the energy absorbed.
You’re never going to get to 100% efficient conversion, so you’ll have to radiate away the heat so your sphere doesn’t melt or something.
Sure, you won’t reach 100%. But say you reach 99.9% - the Dyson sphere should radiate infrared at 0.1% of a normal star, right? It wouldn’t necessarily be bright.
They must be mining a lot of bitcoin to need 99.9% of a star’s energy.
Or else to power one of those Kurtzgestat space lasers that will melt us anyway.
Maybe they are just fabricating matter. That takes a surprising amount of energy!
Not all heat can be converted to work by the second law of thermodynamics. Now the question is, how hot can the star be for it to sustain life? Can most of its light be UV with very little visible? https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-physics/chapter/15-4-carnots-perfect-heat-engine-the-second-law-of-thermodynamics-restated/
Dyson swarms are more likely. We even have a tiny one with our satellites using solar power in a heliocentric orbit. (Dyson spheres are basically impossible.) But we could theoretically detect either in infrared since if it doesn’t give off waste heat, it’d all heat up and melt.
That being said, I’m personally of the opinion this is a waste of time. Not to get all Fermi Paradox but it’s pretty sci fi brained to think any other species out there is as dumb as we are. Space sucks. You die super fast there. Everything had to align just right for Earth to make a bunch of dumb fuck apes willing to strap themselves onto rockets, have a planet small enough that the rocket could even overcome gravity to enter orbit using chemical rockets, and a World War and Cold War to accelerate things.
Time will always be the great filter. Even if we did spot a Dyson swarm, we have no feasible way to contact anything on a practice timescale. Any speck of civilization we detect will be hundreds of thousands of years out of date at best, billions at worst. Life in the universe, imo, is basically guaranteed. If it happened once, it can happen again. Meaningful contact between separately evolved concurrent sapient species? Not likely.
blocking a star*
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This feels like trying to determine FTL travel is possible by looking for warp signatures. We don’t yet know megastructures are feasable.
Agree this sounds ridiculous, but isn’t this the basic point of science? Propose something is possible, then make predictions and see if you can prove or disprove. The Dyson Sphere idea itself is ridiculous, but to the extent you can detect large scale technology around a star, that would be fantastic. Even better, this is simply a query on existing data. Imagine if they detected intelligent life this way!
Kind of reminds me of the search for Dark Matter. That whole idea sounds so preposterous yet is the best fit for our current knowledge. But we can make predictions based on this. What could all this matter be to fit the theory while remaining undetected so far? Then you can build particle detectors to find them and particle accelerators to explore conditions for causing them. Eventually we should be able to either detect that matter or to rule out enough possibilities for another theory to better fit our knowledge
In the Kardashev Scale, a Type II Civilization would build a Dyson Sphere
I know there’s an methodical thought process behind those things, but mhh… this feels more fiction than science to me.
I’m fine with research, but I’m worried some might use it as a slippery slope into pseudo science.
A Ringworld would be more likely than a Dyson sphere, the mass requirements are so much lower.
RTFA they are looking for swarms, rings, and other subtypes of Dyson Spheres.
I read the fucking article. What makes you fucking think I didn’t?
Easy there cowboy
The fact that you just reiterated one of its points.
Huh. So commenting on the content of the article means it wasn’t read? That’s a really odd position to take.
Wouldn’t a Dyson swarm be much easier to construct than either? Like a dyson sphere but a swarm of smaller collectors.
Ringworlds are not orbitally stable so they are firmly in the realm of sci fi.
But it’s unstable.
So is a Dyson sphere?
Spheres aren’t unstable around a star. Rings are unstable in orbit around a star.
If a civilization can figure out how to make one, they can keep it from sliding into the sun!
Like how if they figure out how to build an 833’ long ship they can keep it from immediately hitting an iceberg and sinking?
Or the most advanced starship in the galaxy not having a Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure
We could just ask the mice.
Damn, imagine the number of lifeboats you’d need to evacuate a Dyson Sphere?
Where you gonna go?
You know, that’s a really good point, but this is on such a bigger scale and if it’s a known problem today, I think they would know about it by the time they can build something like that.
Just glue 3 of them together, that’ll make them 300% stable!
220, 221. Whatever it takes!
what’s ringworld?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld_series
Imagine a slice of a Dyson sphere, about one earth wide and one earth deep.
Or the halo from the game ‘halo’
Though its important to note that the halos aren’t true ringworlds, they aren’t nearly big enough.
I guess the big difference is it doesn’t encircle the sun
Basically. The the whole idea is that it’s 1 AU out so it’s in the habitable zone, spinning fast enough to simulate 1 gravity. Stats for nerds.
Also known as a Banks orbital.
Yeah. Ringworld was written way before that and Dyson thought it was a cool idea. Glad to see it used in other stories.
As an owner of three private for profit Dyson spheres, I strongly disapprove.
Stellaris users in the wild
Let’s say we detect one in some other galaxy. What then? And how do you reach out to them?
We don’t because we can’t. We will just observe the thing for science and stuff.
IF (and that’s a big if) it would lead to clues how to build one. And we could direct communications precisely at it and hope for something to come back.
Well if we find one we have proof of advanced life elsewhere in the universe. That’s the most important thing. Reaching out will take millions of years.
Does it roll around and suck up dirt? How does this work?
No. So it works just like the vaccuum cleaner.
Kind of, except it is more like wrapped around a star and sucks up light.
Like a duster… for light dirt.
You could say: all that light is going to waste without the dyson sphere.
