4 ms·
I was curious about your idea, so I whipped up some numbers in Python. A 1-meter thick spherical shell at 1 AU from our sun would be 0.02% of the volume of the
by fogleman 10y ago
I was curious about your idea, so I whipped up some numbers in Python. A 1-meter thick spherical shell at 1 AU from our sun would be 0.02% of the volume of the Sun, or 260x the volume of the Earth. If you go down to 1-mm thick, you only need 0.26 Earths. :)
- mrfusion 10y agoYou could be a lot closer too. No reason to do one au.
- david-given 10y agoHeat, actually. All the energy the star produces has to escape into space somehow. The way it does this is by heating up the sphere until it radiates out into space at the same rate at which the star irradiates the sphere. The bigger the sphere, the cooler it is, because it has more surface area to radiate away heat. So if your sphere is too small, it may end up glowing at red heat, which might make it difficult to live on. Calculating the temperature is straightforward: http://www.aleph.se/Nada/dysonFAQ.html http://www.aleph.se/Nada/dysonFAQ.html
- mrfusion 10y agoI didn't know we were going to live on it. If so good point.
- jxy 10y agoYou can't assume that they can build a Dyson sphere while their technology is as limited as us earthlings. If you can imagine some alien species building a mega structure in such a short time, you should be able to imagine that they have a way to transfer and store that amount of energy. The laws of thermodynamics, as we know it, prevents 100% efficiency in doing that, but if they have a directional heat dissipation device, and their generator is highly efficient, we will hardly have any chance to detect that. I can imagine they could have some version of our power plant, only orders of magnitude more advanced. Instead of moving electrons, they could be generating and moving matter anti-matter stuffs.
- fogleman 10y agoYeah, one AU was arbitrary.
- _andromeda_ 10y agoVery cool. That's a surprisingly low figure.