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Dyson spheres at some point were conflated to a structure that is a rigid shell around a star, something for which no known material would be able to support. T
by cletus 8y ago
Dyson spheres at some point were conflated to a structure that is a rigid shell around a star, something for which no known material would be able to support. The original idea of a Dyson sphere is now more often called a Dyson swarm to avoid this confusion.
A Dyson swarm (the original Dyson sphere) is a cloud of independently orbiting habitats/bodies/structures.
- yellowapple 8y agoThat seems like it'd be even less efficient. A "swarm" like that would be inherently reliant on maintaining orbits around the target star. In order to capture even a significant fraction of a star's energy you'll need a lot of stations orbiting that star, and they'll need to overlap (i.e shadow out stations further behind them / get shadowed out by stations further in front of them). Even if a civilization's capable of building that many stations to surround a star in a deliberate sort of Kessler syndrome, it ain't clear that a civilization would ever need to do so.