What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?

[Deks]

Where would someone get all of the raw materials to build such a structure? If it has the surface area of that many worlds….it seems massively unrealistic that something like this could be built.

I think you may be overestimating the requirements here.
Sure, the amount of raw material is huge... BUT, we're not talking about difficult to produce materials which require huge reosurces.
A Dyson Swarm or even a Sphere would have to be made from superior synthetic materials which can be made in sustainable abundance.
Now, better materials would have incredibly high strength, flexibility, etc... carbon based composites might do the trick... such as combining carbon nanotubes with synthetic diamonds and graphene (for example).

Mining Mercury with self-replicating automated bots would already provide more than enough material/resources to construct a full fledged Dyson Swarm (which would be made at exponential speeds) ... and it was projected it would have taken 50 years to do so... but, actually, much less time than that would be needed when you think about the premise the self-replicating bots would also be researching new materials and science, self-upgrade, etc... so newer sections of the swarm would be comprised of much better materials which take less time and resources to make.

And because science and technology evolve exponentially, building a Dyson Swarm would no longer take 50 years, but probably less than 25 years... I'd say closer to 15 years perhaps because the method by which you construct the said swarm would be improving all the time.

Already we are using adaptive algorithms to do R&D of new materials... and to look for new drugs (which is woefully underused).

Automation is key here.

So when it comes to an actual Sphere I think the whole Solar system would need to be dismantled along with the asteroid belt and Oort Cloud (however, a Sphere remains impractical atm because of impacts of gravity and other things that could mess up the structure).

A Swarm we can make with just Mercury (much easier and less destructive while providing pretty much most of the benefits a Sphere would provide).

 

[Vger23]

Ok. And then the water, land, atmosphere, etc?

I don’t know.

Controversial Opinion: seems like a heap of crap to me.

but…I do love the concept

 

[fireproof78]

Controversial Opinion: seems like a heap of crap to me.

Strikes me as the same or so far beyond the average person as to be next to worthless in terms of setting. See also how often Trek struggles with interstellar distances. Space is big, but the audience will struggle to fathom the scale so it is simplified.

 

[Vale]

Ok. And then the water, land, atmosphere, etc?

I don’t know.

Controversial Opinion: seems like a heap of crap to me.

but…I do love the concept

Oh sure, the way the Dyson shell is depicted in "Relics" is a heap of crap – although the most popular version of a Dyson sphere shown in fiction, the solid Dyson shell is physically impossible, and Freeman Dyson himself hated what he regarded as a soft-science bastardisation of his concept. But the basics of a Dyson sphere are grounded in solid science.

If you're dismantling an entire star system for raw material and star-lifting more material at the same time, then you'll accrue vast amounts of water, atmospheric gases, and rock as a byproduct – comets would be an excellent source of water and gases in particular, for example. In fact you'd likely end up with more than you could ever possibly need simply as part of the process of acquiring enough material to build the framework of a Dyson shell, especially if you have no capacity for nuclear transmutation (i.e. turning one element into another). If you have Star Trek magic replicator technology then you can simply go to town and don't need to be fussy about what matter you have, especially as the main reason to build a Dyson sphere is to capture the entire energy output of a star. And if you have Star Trek magic gravity technology you can use the entire inner surface of a Dyson sphere without having to worry about generating gravity through spinning the sphere, and you can use magic inertial and forcefield technology to keep the star centred. The crazy amount of energy required, vastly more than even the largest fleet of the most powerful starships could hope to generate, would be a trivial percentage of a Dyson shell's reserves.

 

[ScottJ85]

Speaking of controversial Trek opinions and DS9, I prefer Babylon 5 over Deep Space Nine. There I said it.

Agreed. They're both great but for me, Babylon 5 just barely wins out over Deep Space Nine.

 

[shapeshifter]

I loved seeing Doohan take Scotty to the future, but I never could figure out how something so huge, and so close the regular route to the retirement colony, was never discovered before. If real, we could probably see it in Earth based telescopes.

 

[Vale]

I loved seeing Doohan take Scotty to the future, but I never could figure out how something so huge, and so close the regular route to the retirement colony, was never discovered before. If real, we could probably see it in Earth based telescopes.

It's not surprising that it wasn't seen until it was effectively stumbled over. Dyson spheres would not be particularly easy to see, even if you're a couple of lightyears away – especially if you're not looking for them.

First – while enormous in absolute terms, the mass of a Dyson shell is spread out over its entire surface area, and it's still a tiny fraction the mass of the central star. The "mass" of a Dyson sphere when you're next to it in space would be negligible. Gravitationally, being next to a Dyson shell with a diameter of 200 million km would be almost indistinguishable to just being 100 million km away from a regular star.

Second – by design a Dyson sphere intercepts radiation from the central star; and a full Dyson shell would intercept 100% of that radiation. The only detectable emissions would be the waste heat of the Dyson shell itself; it would radiate mainly in the far infrared, and not be terribly reflective. It would, in other words, be very dark. They would be virtually invisible to conventional telescopes. In fact there are projects today to look for Dyson spheres in the galaxy specifically by looking for unusual far infrared sources.

Third – it's also worth considering that supergiant stars are far larger than a typical Dyson shell, and they still appear point-like to us. For example, the star Betelgeuse in the constellation of Orion has a diameter of around 1.2 billion km, versus the "Relics" Dyson shell diameter of only 200 million km. Betelgeuse is approximately 600 lightyears away, and while it's so big that we can resolve its disc with our most powerful telescopes, it's also much, much brighter than a Dyson sphere would be.

 

[Orphalesion]

Controversial Opinion: seems like a heap of crap to me.

but…I do love the concept

Again, I wouldn't really say that it's that much more crap than many other clearly impossible things we see in Trek.

 

[eschaton]

Ok. And then the water, land, atmosphere, etc?

I don’t know.

Controversial Opinion: seems like a heap of crap to me.

but…I do love the concept

The hardest thing about a true Dyson sphere is you'd need to have gravity generators, since the spin alone wouldn't result in high enough gravity to retain an atmosphere outside of the equatorial band. Which is why IRL something like a Dyson swarm/ringworld is way more doable.

That said, Trek already has artificial gravity, so within universe, this is no biggie.

 

[Orphalesion]

Personally I think even the writers of Relics knew that the popular Dyson sphere idea is a misunderstanding of the Dyson Swarm, they, like a lot of pop-culture just chose it because it just looks a lot more impressive and mysterious as a whole sphere than as a swarm.

 

[shapeshifter]

I agree @Vale , you are correct about not visually seeing it.

I am still not convinced it's gravity would not have given it away sooner though. Any mass there would have stuck out like a sore toe because nothing was visible. The question, what is that invisible mass sitting out there? would have spurred closer inspection.

 

[fireproof78]

Again, I wouldn't really say that it's that much more crap than many other clearly impossible things we see in Trek.

The line for crap is different for everyone.

 

[GNDN18]

The line for crap is different for everyone.

Are you saying that the line must be drawn here? This far, no further?

Spoiler: And…

Will you make them pay for what they've done?

 

[fireproof78]

Are you saying that the line must be drawn here? This far, no further?

Spoiler: And…

Will you make them pay for what they've done?

Nah.. I will bill them for the inconvenience.

 

[GNDN18]

 

[Vale]

I agree @Vale , you are correct about not visually seeing it.

I am still not convinced it's gravity would not have given it away sooner though. Any mass there would have stuck out like a sore toe because nothing was visible. The question, what is that invisible mass sitting out there? would have spurred closer inspection.

Depends how close ships were passing. Compared to, for example, the Bajoran wormhole, where there were a number of reports of anomalies in the vicinity dating back centuries, it looks as though only the Jenolan had been anywhere near it for over 75 years; the Enterprise-D was investigating the Jenolan's automated distress signal specifically, which nobody else had noticed in decades, and didn't themselves spot the Dyson sphere until they were almost on top of it despite having vastly more capable sensors. From a couple of lightyears away the gravitational pull of a single star would not be significant. We also know that there are many uncharted systems within the Federation's borders, particularly away from busy shipping routes.

 

[eschaton]

If we're talking about the real world, I know that scientists argue the absence of any indication of Dyson spheres is evidence of their absence. We should be able to detect them fairly easily since they would have to shed waste heat in the infrared spectrum, but should be opaque to visible light.

 

[Lord Garth]

This is a Spoiler-Filled Controversial Opinion. And, no, it's not about Discovery. It's not about Picard either. It's about Kirk. "What's so spoilery about Kirk?" Nothing spoilery about Kirk or Star Trek. But something from The Matrix Resurrections gave me an idea. If you haven't seen that movie yet and don't want to be spoiled about what happens, please don't click on this.

Spoiler

Neo and Trinity were revived and in the Matrix for 60 years even though they only ended up aging 20 years due to everything involved with resurrecting them. I don't think Kirk could be resurrected from his remains on Veridian III. But I have to wonder if only a version of Kirk left the Nexus to go help Picard in Generations. If his echo could be retrieved from the Nexus, then Kirk could be retrieved. If he was somehow convinced that his life in the Nexus was real, the same way Neo and Trinity were convinced their lives in the Matrix were real, then Kirk could be the same age William Shatner is now if he were rescued from the Nexus. Kirk would've lived out the last 30 years in The Nexus and he'd come out of looking like how he thinks he'd look like.

Anyway, it took The Matrix for me to figure out something with Star Trek. That's my controversial opinion, that I'm fully behind. Rip into it, but there it is.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

If we're talking about the real world, I know that scientists argue the absence of any indication of Dyson spheres is evidence of their absence. We should be able to detect them fairly easily since they would have to shed waste heat in the infrared spectrum, but should be opaque to visible light.

But how efficient of a Heat Sink would a Dyson Sphere be at radiating excess heat out into the void of space?

I'm going to assume that some of the residents within the Dyson Sphere don't mind SOME of that heat energy keeping them cozy.

 

[Vale]

If we're talking about the real world, I know that scientists argue the absence of any indication of Dyson spheres is evidence of their absence. We should be able to detect them fairly easily since they would have to shed waste heat in the infrared spectrum, but should be opaque to visible light.

They'd shed waste heat in the far infrared spectrum (~10μm); effectively they'd be very close to being blackbodies. And their being opaque to visible light only matters if you can resolve them, which would be very hard to do since they won't radiate in visible light. A 200 million km diameter Dyson sphere would only be resolvable to our most sensitive interferometers at a distance of about 40 lightyears; any further than that and they'd be visible only as a point source.