3 ms·

Dyson spheres are a stupid idea to harness power. You need ridiculous amount of resources to cover even a fraction of the surface of a star. An advanced civiliz

• philwelch 6y ago
  At which point they need to get hydrogen, and guess where all the hydrogen is.
  • credit_guy 6y ago
    Our Sun burns 1 GT of hydrogen every 2 seconds [1]. This is the mass of the hydrogen in 9 GT of water. The dwarf planet Ceres was discussed just yesterday on HN. It contains about 200 million GT of water. If that's not enough, we can go and use Jupiter, which contains about 1 quadrillion GT of hydrogen. Enough to last for a few billion years. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#/media/File:The_Sun_by_the_Atmospheric_Imaging_Assembly_of_NASA's_Solar_Dynamics_Observatory_-_20100819.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#/media/File:The...
    • TeMPOraL 6y ago
      A star IS a fusion reactor. Already built, already working, already fusing hydrogen. If you want to power an interplanetary civilization, there's zero point in building your own, when you already have a working one, and all you need is to keep adding energy collectors as the demand grows.
      • credit_guy 6y ago
        > there's zero point in building your own That's quite a strong assumption.