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Seven Dyson Sphere Candidates
- illuminant 2y agoI grow skeptical. Congruent planes of orbital accretion explain all this hype much better. The flat planier elliptical orbits (and planetary rings) come by millions of years of settling down of the otherwise chaotic convergence of material that created their systems. These readings that spark imaginations beyond science are yet chaotic systems (from whichever influence) that have not yet settled down (debre would be in irregular orbits.) As sciencey as finding a wormhole off the shoulder of Europa.
- alchemist1e9 2y ago> The flat planier elliptical orbits (and planetary rings) come by millions of years of settling down of the otherwise chaotic convergence of material that created their systems. I thought all of these seven are estimated to be old stars which such processes should have long ago settled down.
- malfist 2y agoThere's lots of reasons an old solar system can become chaotic again, assuming it ever became nonchaotic. Anything with sufficient mass or energy passing near or through the solar system would cause a lot of chaos
- illuminant 2y ago*edit: Incongruent planes ...
- king_magic 2y agoVery curious to see what other astronomers think about this in the comments. My gut feeling is there are almost certainly natural explanations for these. Just seems unlikely we would only be starting to see these now, even with the greater resolution of telescopes & increase in compute to crunch through the data. If there were 7 of these ripe for the plucking that were actual Dyson spheres, each one would be the single greatest discovery in all of humanity. Just seems a little too easy.
- malfist 2y agoHow does one tell the difference between a partial Dyson swarm, and occlusion by planetoids, especially in the early stages of development before the planets are formed
- MadnessASAP 2y agoWell that is the question isn't it. And what the article tries to answer, or at least explore. Suffice to say the 7 candidates in the article do not conclusively have another explanation. Hence their status as Dyson sphere candidates.
- malfist 2y agoIsn't that kindof a "god of the gaps" explanation? We don't understand it, therefore <something unprovable>
- MadnessASAP 2y agoNo, it's a case of if we presuppose the existence of Dyson spheres, here are 7 objects whose EM spectrum matches what would be expected of such an object and who have no other verifiable explanation. It's not saying we don't know what causes lightning therefore it must be gods. It's saying we have expectations of what lightning looks like and this looks a lot like it. There is a significant distinction between "we've found a Dyson sphere" and "we've found an object that has the characteristics we would expect of a Dyson sphere".
- Loughla 2y agoI mean, if we have had breakthroughs in resolution and compute, and life really is everywhere, wouldn't it make sense that we would start finding these at some point? Why not right now?
- cletus 2y agoBayesian reasoning applies here. Natural phenomenon is the most likely cause. think of it this way: imagine in the future we travel to Alpha Centauri and find sentient life or even the remnants of such. That would be really bad. Why? Because if there are 2 civilizations in our galaxy, how likely is it that they're next to each other? Incredibly unlikely. It heavily implies that sentient life is much more common. Now imagine if we find a third at, say, Barnard's Star. In Fermi Paradox terms this heavily implies that there is a Great Filter ahead of us and we're more likely doomed than not. Finding a Dyson Swarm near us has the same negative implications (for us), especially given that the gap between a partial or full Dyson Swarm and colonizing the galaxy is relatively small (~100 million yaers) in cosmic terms so how likely is it that we find a Dyson Swarm that is a) near us and b) in that narrow window between the emergence of spacefaring life and colonizing the galaxy.
- cletus 2y agoI love this topic. If and when we detect a technologically-advanced civilization, I truly believe this is how we'll do it. But why? Because the Dyson Swarm (the preferred name; "sphere" implies a rigid structure that was never the intent) is seen by many as the most likely path forward for any spacefaring civilization. Why? Several reasons: 1. It can be built incrementally. What you'd probably do is build orbitals and put them in Earth's orbit around the Sun, Then you can keep adding new orbits. Ultimately you end up with a "cloud" of orbitals that will block a star's light in the same way that water molecules in a fog block light; 2. A likely candidate for an orbital is waht's called an O'Neil Cylinder: 3-4 miles in diameter, 10-20 miles long, producing Earthlike gravity on the interior by spinning. Smaller than this and it needs to spin too fast. Larger than this and you need stronger materials to stop it ripping itself apart from centrifugal forces. Stainless steel is sufficiently strong to build an O'Neil Cylinder; 3. Solar power is the most likely source for our future energy needs. It's the only known power source that directly creates power and it does so with no moving parts and no waste produced. In space, solar is so ridiculously efficient that it's unlikely fission could ever compete economically and fusion is still a pipe dream. 4. Approximately 1 in 10^9 of the Sun's output hits the EArth. That's an awful lot of "free" energy just radiating out into space. The growth potential is huge. What do we need all that energy for? History has shown we'll find a use but here's a big one: the energy cost of interstellar travel is so mind-boggling large that we'd need something like the Sun's energy output to do it. Plus an interstellar generation ship looks an awful lot like an O'Neil Cylinder. Anyway, the article doesn't really explain why the seaerch for infrared radiation that I could see (maybe I missed it?). It's important. A body in space like an O'Neil Cylinder will heat up, even with converting some of that energy to electricity. The only way to cool down in space is to either expel mater, which doesn't really scale, or to radiate it away into space. The wavelength of light from a radiating body is determined entirely by the temperature of that body and for any temperature we're likely to see, that means infrared radiation. So if you look at a star with a near total Dyson Swarm you'll see much less visible light and much more IR radiation and there's really no way to hide that. Some might say you can capture the heat an turn it into energy but you can't do that with perfect efficiency (ie thermodynamics) plus the material of the orbital will just naturally radiate anyway no matter what you do. It's extremely conservative to say that we'll have the technology to build and deploy an O'Neil Cylinder within 1000 years. Give it 10,000 years if you really want. It makes no difference. That's still the blink of an eye in cosmic terms. And that gap between having 1 and a billion is also the blink of an eye. And once you have what's called a K2 (Kardashev-2) civilization (being one that uses the full energy output of a star) where interstellar travel becomes possible, even practical, seeding a new Dyson Swarm around another star becomes trivial and the proces continues to the point where 100 million years from now is a completely realistic time period to have a Dyson Swarm around every star in our galaxy. A galaxy of Dyson Swarms would be so obvious to observers even millions of light years away, even at our current level of technology. The absence of seeing such a thing contributes to the idea that spacefaring life is incredibly rare.
- VariableStar 2y agoOne aspect that I find problematic with the idea of Dyson spheres is: where will the energy be dissipated? In the civilization's planet's surface? It seems to me that it would create serious energy imbalances and soon climate disruption.
- cletus 2y agoSee my comment for a more detailed explanation but the short version is: a Dyson Swarm (preferred term) is merely a cloud of orbitals (ie not a rigid shell; there is no known or even theorized material with the strength to build a shell that large). The orbitals dissipate heat into space. That's what the infrared radiation is that they're looking for.
- VariableStar 2y agoI see that. My point is that if the captured energy is used, and thus ultimately dissipated as heat, on the planet's surface, that planet is sooner than later going to have climatic imbalance.
- kiba 2y agoEarth already do this. We only use some energy for our purpose.
- sdwr 2y agoWe are using the sun's energy that hits the earth. Some as light (which turns into heat), some as electricity (which turns into heat), and some as plant food > animal food > oil (which turns into heat) A Dyson sphere would capture the sun's energy that leaves the sun, not just the fraction that hits earth. Using that energy on earth would release far more heat than our current activities.
- kiba 2y agoIt would indeed be inadvisable to use all of sun energy captured on Earth, but they're not going to be used entirely on Earth.
- tomtomistaken 2y agoI still don't understand why you need to build a Dyson sphere and then transport the energy to where it's needed when you can build decentralized fusion reactors. What am I missing?
- MadnessASAP 2y agoCan you build decentralized fusion reactors? This far the most efficient fusion reactor humanity has available to it exists approximately 1 AU away and is rather difficult to relocate.
- orbital-decay 2y agoFor comparison, how efficient is the biggest Dyson Sphere humanity built so far?
- vitiral 2y agoWell we have a very incomplete but about 10-15% efficient Dyson swarm on earth with solar and wind farms. Now we just need to scale up.
- aurareturn 2y agoPretty sure solar panels are 20% plus now with some much higher.
- vitiral 2y agoJust did a Google search. Most cells which are actually produced are 10-11%.
- aurareturn 2y agoMost residential deployments are near 20% or higher.
- greenthrow 2y agoLooking for Dyson Spheres or "the Simulation" or any other highly speculative technology is anti-science. It is the opposite of evidence based. I am so sick of these non-science ideas being promulgated and given resources when there is plenty of actual science (evidence based) that needs funding.
- kiba 2y agoDyson sphere(swarm, because sphere is misconstrued as solid) is based entirely on known physics and can be made with our existing technology base, just not with our current industrial base. SETI is a valid research priority.
- greenthrow 2y agoUnicorns are made entirely with known biology. That doesn't mean funding a search for them is a good use of resources. SETI is a valid research priority. There's plenty of less speculative signs we can look for.
- vitiral 2y agoI do not want to be living in your head. Why is searching the unknown with the tools at our disposal anti-science? Because it goes against some kind of norm held by what is deemed the "scientific community"? Who even is that and why do they get to say what knowledge to pursue?
- greenthrow 2y agoI already explained. Evidence. Looking for the unknown does not necessitate looking for a specific highly speculative technology that there is zero evidence for and zero reason to believe exists other than it's a cool idea.
- kiba 2y agoIt is not really a speculative technology. A Dyson Swarm is doable within our existing technological base. If we are capable of building an artificial satellite, we can build a dyson swarm.
- elorant 2y agoTo me, Dyson Spheres seem impractical. For one, where are you going to find all the material needed to cover even a fraction of the surface of a star? Additionally, if you do build something that massive, you'll probably influence the movement of the planets.
- _dain_ 2y agoYou disassemble a planet for the raw materials. Mercury would do. The real problem is that Dyson spheres are wasteful because stellar fusion is thermodynamically inefficient. If you harvest the material of the star and fuse it yourself, you can keep the lights on for trillions of years.
- aurareturn 2y agoThe OP’s second point is that you would change the gravitational balance of the solar system if you disassemble mercury.
- mattsan 2y agoFunny thought - want to solve global warming? Disassemble Mercury! Earth's orbit in theory would space a bit further out
- aurareturn 2y agoEver heard of the 3 body problem? No way we can reliably model that.
- mattsan 2y agoWas a joke :)
- blamestross 2y agoSo that isn't true. The 3 body problem is a problem in theory and extreme situations, not practice. We discovered half the planets by doing the math to predict the orbits based on the known distribution of math in the solar system. General Relativity was initially validated by predicting mercury's orbit accurately.
- consumer451 2y agoJust an hour ago, I learned about Przybylski's Star. [0] > Przybylski's observations indicated unusually low amounts of iron and nickel in the star's spectrum, but higher amounts of unusual elements such as strontium, holmium, niobium, scandium, yttrium, caesium, neodymium, praseodymium, thorium, ytterbium, and uranium. While the explanation is likely some unknown natural process, salting a star with an impossible chemical composition might also be a way for a technological species to create a monument, correct? This seems like it would involve moving less mass around than a Dyson Sphere/Swarm, although it would need a constant feed, if I understand the situation correctly. Astonishingly, there appears to be no contemporary analysis of this star. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przybylski%27s_Star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przybylski%27s_Star "The Star That Shouldn't Exist" - Prof. David Kipping https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maMDGZOD3mI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maMDGZOD3mI "Why is There Plutonium in This Star? Przybylski’s Star with David Kipping" - Event Horizon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUbjdaPy4mw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUbjdaPy4mw
- consumer451 2y ago> Astonishingly, there appears to be no contemporary analysis of this star. I should have stated: there appear to be no contemporary observations of this star. Also, one of the more interesting things to me is that ytterbium, for example, has a half-life which is measured in days.
- consp 2y ago> Also, one of the more interesting things to me is that ytterbium, for example, has a half-life which is measured in days. Which ytterbium are you talking about? It has 7 observationally stable isotopes[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_ytterbium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_ytterbium
- consumer451 2y agoYeah, you are correct. My brain is a bad model lately, since Advanced Neuro Lyme Disease. I synthesized the information from those podcasts + google poorly. This is depressing.
- BurningFrog 2y agoI'm amused by all the "but the Dyson Sphere might affect the natural environment" comments. Building a Dyson Sphere is 100% incompatible with Sierra Club philosophy! It is about ruthlessly destroying the natural world and replacing it with something you prefer. At maximum scale!
- prepend 2y agoIts important to only purchase organic Dyson spheres.
- dmd 2y agoWhen I was 10 (1988) reading Larry Niven's "Integral Trees" I was disappointed that the story didn't end - as I had expected it to - with the Carther descendants eventually building trees to entirely surround the star.
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- mglz 2y agoIf you can build a Dyson sphere it should be trivial to maintain a few extra planets worth of natural environment, or even life seed some new worlds.
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- lven 2y agonah you can just create little holes in the sphere to illuminate the planets. negligible power loss. Earth and all the planets live on the sun's crumbs, no the (crumbs of the cumbs)^12
- micw 2y agoGood point. Since all our planets surround the sun more or less in the same plane, the dyson sphere could cover the remaining 95% of the sphere without affecting the planets too much. Remains the issue that you'd probably need the material of those planets to build the dyson sphere.
- deadbabe 2y agoI’m less intrigued by the Dyson sphere than I am about what a civilization would actually do with all that power? Create tiny worm holes?
- z3phyr 2y agoSure, create worm holes, travel dimensions and all that
- deadbabe 2y agoIsn’t it kinda dangerous to observe a civilization that has figured out how to know it has been observed and then instantly wormhole their way to us?
- z3phyr 2y agoI mean, Its dangerous to exist in the same space as a potentially advanced aliens. Might as well observe them.
- mr_mitm 2y agoYou cannot create wormholes instantly, their creation is still bound by the speed of light. Also, the energy requirements for wormholes are well above of what one measly star can provide, not to speak of a host of other issues.
- cletus 2y agoThree big possibilities: 1. Interstellar travel: people don't realize just how large the energy budgets are to get to even the nearest stars, even with pure matter-to-energy conversion. This is, of course, the theoretical upper limit of efficiency but we have nothing remotely close to it. Chemical rockets are complete nonstarter becasue of the mass of the fuel makes the entire thing nonviable, even in a theoretical sense, beyond a travel time of hundreds of thousands of years. Even then you need energy to survive so it's unclear if you have enough. So what do you do? Well, if you can reach interstellar speeds without using fuel you've solved so many problems. How do you do that? You focus energy from the Sun onto effectively a solar sail. You still need to slow down at the other end but you get some of this for "free" with resistance from the interstellar medium. 2. Computers. Our ability to utilize extra computing power shouldn't be underestimated. One possibility is virtual worlds. One estimate I've seen is that you need about 10^15 operations/second to simulate a human brain. A Matrioshka Brain (basically a Dyson Swarm that's essentially a giant computer) gets to (IIRC) ~10^80 operations/second. AIs that are basically people could live an entire virtual existence. 3. Weapons. Basically, if you have a Dyson Swarm you could sterilize the galaxy in about 100,000 years if you wanted to with a so-called Nicoll-Dyson Beam. Or use relativistic kill missiles taht are just basically lumps of metal or rock at near light speed.
- dghughes 2y agoImagine if a Type II civilization built a Dyson sphere around a star but a Type I civilization was on a nearby planet. Then again I guess at that point the Type I and III would be aware of each other. I wonder could the Type I planet stop the Type III civilization? The Type III would be like gods to the Type I's but the Type I's would be nothing more than a nuisance if even that to the Type IIIs.
- m3kw9 2y agoDyson Sphere seem like what we would do based on our understanding of physics would do, and of course how else would you theorize such device? My theory is that an advanced civilization would not need to brute force such methods and use novel physics to gather energy, fusion is a start but there has to be even more advanced methods.
- rthnbgrredf 2y agoThe current total world-wide production of anti-protons in a period of a year is in the range of nanograms. Maybe we will never see a dyson sphere because all far advanced civilisations have antimatter reactors.
- micw 2y agoI wonder if the material of all the stuff in our sun's orbit would be sufficient to build a dyson sphere. Afaik, 99% of the mass of our solar system is the sun itself...
- andsoitis 2y agoWhich begs the question, how do you obtain sufficient energy to go scouting for material beyond the solar system in order to construct something that encircles the sun…
- baq 2y agoYou figure out how to put a fusion reactor on a spaceship without melting the whole thing into a blob of metal and use a particle accelerator as a super high isp engine. Sci-fi but mostly in the ’not melting down’ part.
- micw 2y agoCould you elaborate this? Is the melting because you suddenly have lot of energy and no way for cooling?
- baq 2y agoYeah you need to work very hard to lose heat without losing mass in space. Basically you can only radiate it away, which is slow; there are ways of concentrating heat in one spot so it is radiated more efficiently, but that’s where you get to the melting part.
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- cletus 2y agoTo build about a billion O'Neil Cylinders, which is about the number you'd need for a full Dyson Swarm around our Sun, would consume (IIRC) 1% of Mercury's mass.
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- TheLoafOfBread 2y agoWhole concept of Dyson sphere/swarm is anachronistic. It is like trying to build the Internet based on carrying pigeons, while you have available fiber optics and advanced radio communication. Because the moment you have enough technological advancements to build and deploy such a thing, you can already build fusion reactors by million units a year and maybe you already have even better ways how to manage energy. In the end the matter itself is just a different form of energy.
- javcasas 2y agoThe sun burns around 600 million tons of hydrogen per second https://cosmicopia.gsfc.nasa.gov/qa_sun.html https://cosmicopia.gsfc.nasa.gov/qa_sun.html I don't think you building a million new fusion reactors per year so that each of them burns maybe 100kg of hydrogen per year even starts to be comparable in a few thousand years. The energy emitted by the sun is just several orders of magnitude beyond what you can source from a planet. It's just that huge.
- TheLoafOfBread 2y agoBut I can carry such reactor into Oort cloud and beyond. I can power my ship in a shadow of a planet or asteroid and most importantly I am not dependent on one megastructure, which can fail, be destroyed or taken over by hostile forces.
- floxy 2y ago¿Por qué no los dos?
- javcasas 2y agoThe dyson sphere can power a huge factory, capable of making thousands if not millions of warships per second. It can also power a star-sized laser capable of vaporizing pretty much any incoming army, or even bigger objects like small planets. Your dyson sphere will be safe to everything but civilizations capable of playing marbles with stars and black holes. Also you can use your star-sized factory to make starships with fusion reactors. Not a problem.
- Zigurd 2y agoNot that I think speculation is bad, but the concept of intelligences expanding by building space structures so immense needs some push-back: Is there enough time in the lifetime of a star to build and use those structures? Are there plausible social arrangements stable enough to last the duration of such a project? Are there intelligent beings with a drive to limitlessly expand their population? A lot of the ideas behind hypothesizing swarms of space structures, each orders of magnitude more massive than Earth, feels very 1970s population/energy-crisis inspired.
- sockaddr 2y ago> Is there enough time in the lifetime of a star to build and use those structures? If a brown dwarf, most certainly > Are there plausible social arrangements stable enough to last the duration of such a project? Could just be an unterminated machine process initiated by living beings at some point > Are there intelligent beings with a drive to limitlessly expand their population? This one, I agree. I think once we start expending enough we'll realize there's only so much that extra matter and energy will get you and it doesn't bring you closer to "solving" the universe or escaping it and you just stop going for more.
- cletus 2y ago> Is there enough time in the lifetime of a star to build and use those structures? Easily. Sci-fi has misconstrued what a Dyson Sphere is to the point where the preferred nomenclature is "Dyson Swarm". A Dyson Sphere was never a rigid shell around a star. Such a thing isn't possible with any known or theorized material. And it makes no sense even if you could. So a Dyson Swarm around our Sun would be approximately a billion O'Neil Cylinders (orbitals 2-4 miles in diameter and 10-20 miles long). You don't have to build them all at once. Build them as you need them. The more you build the more industrial capacity you have. They can all be built independently too. I imagine it would take less than 10 years to build one once you have the capability. > Are there intelligent beings with a drive to limitlessly expand their population? Population is only one concern. A more driving force may well be the desire for energy and raw materials. Raw materials, and in fact most problems, can be reduced to being an energy problem. Some things will require a truly mind-boggling amount of energy eg interstellar travel. Our Sun won't live forever. It's estimated to go into a red giant phase in 4-5 billion years, that will end up swallowing the Earth most likely. Long before then, life won't be able to exist on Earth as the Sun's solar output is increasing by about 10% every billion years. Earth as it stands now to us as we are now will be uninhabitable in ~1.6 billion years. So to be truly long-lived we're going to have to do something about that. There are lots of options. Those include reducing the energy that hits the Earth, moving the Earth or moving our species to a different system. The last one is particularly attractive because white or red dwarves will likely exist for trillions of years. Every one of these options requires a vast amount of energy. > ... swarms of space structures, each orders of magnitude more massive than Earth That's not what a Dyswon Swarm is.
- mrtransient 2y agoNo carbon based life in our universe has had enough time to build the Dyson swarm yet. Evolution needs time: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9#disqus_thread https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9#disqus_th...
- beaugunderson 2y agoif the author is here: your site breaks pinch zoom in/zoom out and the smooth scrolling behavior feels bad
- robotguy 2y agoIs anyone else here old enough for this comment section to trigger nostalgia for alt.rec.science-fiction.science?
- v3ss0n 2y agoWhen we are looking at Dyson Spheres we are thinking about harnessing solar energy , what if it is not just solar energy , but also orbital energy?