Star Trek: Dyson
- Thread starter Ragitsu
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There was a novel...
Considering how huge a Dyson sphere is, a multitude of series could be made. Just drop a quantum flux inhibitor into that star, rendering it stable for the next 100,000 years (a mere heartbeat in the life of a star). Boom, you've got the equivalent of a couple million class M's to have fun with.
A kinda crappy one that I could barely understand.. It was bad..
I think disco should return to it, maybe was used as a refuge during the burn.
It still can be basis for a spin-off series. Just exploring the impossibly huge scale of it.
The only logical place to build a Dyson sphere would be a red dwarf star, for several reasons...
1. MUCH smaller habitable zone, so much less material needed.
2. Much longer usability. A star like the sun will be too hot in one or two billion years at most. A red dwarf could remain habitable for a couple trillion.
Also, you'd probably be building rings and cages before you could graduate to a sphere. Even a ring world around a red dwarf would probably have a few hundred class M planets worth of space on it, and could have remained usable for all 13.7 billion years of the universe's current history, and 500 billion more afterward.
1. MUCH smaller habitable zone, so much less material needed.
2. Much longer usability. A star like the sun will be too hot in one or two billion years at most. A red dwarf could remain habitable for a couple trillion.
Also, you'd probably be building rings and cages before you could graduate to a sphere. Even a ring world around a red dwarf would probably have a few hundred class M planets worth of space on it, and could have remained usable for all 13.7 billion years of the universe's current history, and 500 billion more afterward.
Have to find a good red dwarf. Most are flare stars, so bad for habitation. Plus a red dwarf wouldn't be a "white light" be alot dimmer, more like twighlight
But wouldn't the dimmer light be cancelled out by the fact that you'd have to build the dyson sphere closer around the star in order to be within the habitable zone?
Like I know it wouldn't magically make the star more luminous, but from closer up it would appear brighter than from far away wouldn't it? Like even in the real world the sun appears dimmer on Mars and the outer planets than it does on Earth?
But would it even appear orangey? I mean when you ask most people they'd say sunlight appears colourless rather than yellow...
Red dwarfs emit most light in infrared or red spectrum. At most 10% of lightfrom our sun. You can't get closer since you have to be in the habitable zone.
But a habitable zone for a red dwarf is very small radius. A sun like ours is 1AU 97 million miles. A red dwarf is from .03 to .25 AU. So less than the orbit of Mercury.
A Dyson Sphere around a red dwarf can work that you have to find an older stable red dwarf and just be used to low light and infrared.
But a habitable zone for a red dwarf is very small radius. A sun like ours is 1AU 97 million miles. A red dwarf is from .03 to .25 AU. So less than the orbit of Mercury.
A Dyson Sphere around a red dwarf can work that you have to find an older stable red dwarf and just be used to low light and infrared.
But that's what I mean by "you'd have to be closer around the star", the habitable zone around a Red Dwarf would be closer to the star than the Earth is from the sun.
Actually, there are no old red dwarves. The universe is only 13.7 billion years old, and even a large-ish red dwarf would have a lifespan of a quarter trillion years or so.
Older.. Like our sun age, a young red dwarf under 1.5 billion is more active.
Even a billion years is an extremely long time though, unless we are talking about a species that has become functionally immortal they are likely to disappear long before a sun-like star becomes inhospitable. And even if they endure, they could probably just create a new dyson sphere.
Plus if they find a sun-like star from earlier in its life cycle they'd have several billion years longer.
Plus if they find a sun-like star from earlier in its life cycle they'd have several billion years longer.
It's an odd story anyway. Here's a species that is advanced enough to build a Dyson sphere, a construction effort probably several orders of magnitude beyond what the UFP is capable of.... and they build it around an unstable star? You'd expect better prospecting abilities from such a race, or the Dyson sphere is extremely old and built in a time when that star wasn't unstable yet (and wouldn't become so for the foreseeable future).
Then, what happened to that race before or after? They might have 'transcended' since - possibly they never even abandoned the sphere because the star became unstable, but simply because they were ready to go to the next level. Even so, they probably would have been a space presence many millennia even before building this sphere, and there probably would be small and large scale artifacts to be found elsewhere, too. Unless this species was extremely reclusive, and never left their home system to begin with.
Could the sphere perhaps have been built by a species we already met? Say, the Organians?
Then, what happened to that race before or after? They might have 'transcended' since - possibly they never even abandoned the sphere because the star became unstable, but simply because they were ready to go to the next level. Even so, they probably would have been a space presence many millennia even before building this sphere, and there probably would be small and large scale artifacts to be found elsewhere, too. Unless this species was extremely reclusive, and never left their home system to begin with.
Could the sphere perhaps have been built by a species we already met? Say, the Organians?
Yes, there should be a series based on the Dyson Sphere…set in the 25th century.
Research on it has to still be going on a century later.
Research on it has to still be going on a century later.
Yeah, there's a lot they could do with the Dyson Sphere. Like, considering how huge the habitable space would be...wouldn't it be likely that there'd be some "squatters"? I can't remember exactly what the episode said about possible inhabitants, but there might be cultures/species/creatures in there that found the sphere thousands of years ago and just decided to settle parts of it.
I think it's fairly certain that when the Dyson Sphere was built the star was stable, and that it's just extremely old. As to what happened to the builders. Well, Star Trek has its fair share of lost, ancient empires. If they existed millions or billions of years ago then all traces of them outside the Dyson Sphere might have decayed or been destroyed already.
Star Trek also seems to operate under the idea that species die out or ascend after a long period of time.
The precursor aliens form the Chase disappeared too, after all.
Maybe the Dyson Sphere was even the reason they disappeared; maybe they worked themselves to death creating it, or worked others to death and the resulting rebellion and/or civil war destroyed them.
I wonder...would the interior surface necessarily be uniformly Class M or might there be zones of varying habitability (relative to your typical humanoid species)?
I don't think it would have climate zones caused by latitude like Earth has, since the angle of the sun from everywhere in the Dyson sphere would be equivalent to the equator on a planet (during an equinox); the sun would always be straight above you, and that at all times.
But I think terraforming the various sections of the sphere could create various climates, since there's more factors to it than just latitude.
Something interesting to think about would be whether they'd have something like floating shields to simulate a night cycle, or whether they'd just learn to sleep during the perpetual day. Such shield might also be used to create colder climates.
Or maybe they'd have, like giant biodomes that simulate varying climates.
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