The term "Dyson Swarm" is preferred because it is a cloud of orbitals, not a rigid sphere. A rigid sphere was never the idea proposed (by Freeman Dyson). This i

The term "Dyson Swarm" is preferred because it is a cloud of orbitals, not a rigid sphere. A rigid sphere was never the idea proposed (by Freeman Dyson). This idea comes from science fiction misunderstandings of the term "Sphere". Think of a Dyson Swarm ("Sphere") as the water droplets in a fog. Collectively they absorb the light going through but the water droplets (and the orbitals) are relatively sparse. So a billion orbitals around our Sun at a distance Venus and Mars would still have a mean distance between them of over 100,000km. So how much material do you need? One estimate I've seen for a billion such orbitals is less than 1% of the mass of Mercury. Why Mercury? Because it's metal-rich and its proximity to the Sun means energy is incredibly abundant and cheap. That's to build billions of O'Neil Cylinders. Even if you don't need that much living room, here's something else you can build: statites. That's a portmanteau of "static satellite". Instead of orbiting the star, they are so light that the solar wind is sufficient to counterbalance the gravity. These things would simply collect energy and/or just reduce the amount of solar energy hitting something like a planet (eg to cool the EArth).