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Forgive me for asking a potentially silly question, but wouldn't the heat dissipating via IR be also seen as wasted energy? I understand that at our current lev
by robbomacrae 5y ago
Forgive me for asking a potentially silly question, but wouldn't the heat dissipating via IR be also seen as wasted energy? I understand that at our current level of physics, to do anything less would involve catastrophic heat build up but I would suspect an alien species capable of building a Dyson Swarm to have access to other means of keeping the temperature stable whilst leaving very little energy to go to waste.
- contravariant 5y agoThere are thermodynamic limits to how efficient solar energy can be. It's almost inevitable that a sizeable portion of the energy will get lost as heat.
- Hallucinaut 5y agoThat may be the case, but why would it radiate on the non-star facing side? Take the JWT for example: no-one looking back at that would see anything higher than -50 degrees Celsius. If the point was to capture energy then anything radiating from the non-star facing side suggests inefficiency. Even if the solar energy has limits, why wouldn't they use waste heat to support, say, plant growth? Not that I think it is a mega-structure, it's just it doesn't strike me as lack of IR emissions as being that informative.
- contravariant 5y agoThe JWT is a perfectly good example of this, it's not hot compared to the sun but it's way hotter than the cosmic background. And that's if you're just reflecting light back to the sun, when you try to extract meaningful work from it you'll have to absorb a lot more energy.