What would a dyson sphere look like . . .
- Thread starter backstept
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How would you even achieve gravity in a Dyson Sphere?
Re: day/night cycles - there's always the possibility that the builders' original homeworld was tidally locked, and they don't even know what a day/night cycle IS.
Those worlds are extremely windy, I read once.
If I were to build a physically solid Dyson Sphere like shown in the episode, I'd simply place the habitation on the outside. I'd also choose the sphere radius so that the star's gravitational pull would match my preferred pull; even a fairly small shell would still give me gadzillion times the surface area I could ever plausibly need for habitation, while trapping 100% of the star's output, and being cheaper to build than a sphere with 1 AU radius.
However, artificial gravity seems to be dirt cheap and reliable as death and taxes everywhere in Trek. Not only would that tech give me the gravity for the inside habitats, it would probably make construction work much cheaper, so that I could afford a 1 AU sphere with it if I could afford a 1 gee sphere without it...
Probert's sketch is impressive as all hell, but it seems to omit the mountain range that would keep air from escaping through the entry gate.
Unless those are very hardy high-altitude trees, of course...Timo Saloniemi
one would think there would also need to be a network of magnetic field generators to control the solar wind . . . maybe funnel it into collectors instead of letting it bombard the whole inner surface . . . Earth's magnetic field protects us pretty well, so I would hate to see how direct solar wind would affect us
Good point about a habitable area on the outer shell. With grav plating you could effectively double your 'floorspace' by colonising both sides. Day on the inside, night on the out, depending on what takes your fancy.
I guess that means if the Valley Forge from Silent Running passed through, it would look like a big cell phone tower...
I loved the novel Dyson sphere, where you had scale models of it that were moon sized, the the home planet which mirrored the interiot surface which collided with and rolled inside the sphere.
A dyson swarm of statites to capture sunlight is more plausible.
Another thought just occurred. How would seasons be controlled within the sphere? If all areas are an equal distance from the centre star at all times then surely only 1 season would be possible seeing as there would be no variances as there are on Earth due to the tilt in it's axis. Again I suppose any day/night field in the upper atmosphere could also filter heat aswel.
Rett Mikhal
Captain
I remember Ringworld using a series of blackout bars that turned slightly faster than the ring itself, creating day and night cycles. For a sphere, it would have to be a series of dishes spinning in all directions at specific speeds so as never to allow gaps and also give an accurate day/night schedule.
The Dyson Ring is still so, so much more plausible than the Dyson sphere in so, so many ways.
Good point. A ring would be far more practical to construct etc. However, given the choice I would still rather stand in/on the surface of a sphere, just to see what it would actually look like when you looked up. I'm intregued by many of the responses in this thread.
If the builders can create artificial gravity, they can probably also create a second pseudo-solid sphere around the star, a swarm of light-absorbing particles held by artificial gravity and forcefields and malleable so that any variety of day/night windows of any size and shape can be opened into it. Physical shadow disks of fixed size would be too cumbersome for a Trek culture...
OTOH, the outside of the sphere could also be lit fairly easily, by using a series of orbiting mirrors (or their forcefield-generated equivalent) for reflecting light that emerges from a series of dedicated openings in the shell. If the orbiting mirrors are a nuisance (say, to free movement of spacecraft), then the mirrors could be placed on a range of tall "mountaintops" or other such masts and still create pretty much the same effect. Indeed, a series of "volcanoes" with holes through the shell for letting the light through might be nice to have in any case, serving many other purposes besides letting daylight through.
A culture that can build a solid Dyson shell like the one in Trek is probably not going to need to capture the energy output of a star. A Dyson swarm would be of no interest to such a culture, then; they'd have built their solid sphere for some other purpose, such as an impermeable fortress. (The Ringworld was speculated to have been built for that purpose, too - being edge-on to a galactic tsunami of armageddon energies.)
Timo Saloniemi
OTOH, the outside of the sphere could also be lit fairly easily, by using a series of orbiting mirrors (or their forcefield-generated equivalent) for reflecting light that emerges from a series of dedicated openings in the shell. If the orbiting mirrors are a nuisance (say, to free movement of spacecraft), then the mirrors could be placed on a range of tall "mountaintops" or other such masts and still create pretty much the same effect. Indeed, a series of "volcanoes" with holes through the shell for letting the light through might be nice to have in any case, serving many other purposes besides letting daylight through.
A culture that can build a solid Dyson shell like the one in Trek is probably not going to need to capture the energy output of a star. A Dyson swarm would be of no interest to such a culture, then; they'd have built their solid sphere for some other purpose, such as an impermeable fortress. (The Ringworld was speculated to have been built for that purpose, too - being edge-on to a galactic tsunami of armageddon energies.)
Timo Saloniemi
Except, as already discussed above, "The Ringworld is unstable." Its center of mass lies within the star rather than orbiting it, so there's nothing to keep it from drifting off-axis (except for the kind of attitude-control system introduced in The Ringworld Engineers, a book that was written to correct that oversight in the first book). Of course, the same goes for a Dyson shell, but the difference is that if a Ringworld goes off-center, the forces will conspire to accelerate it further off-center, whereas if a Dyson shell goes off-center, the forces will be neutral and it'll just drift. So there would be less urgency to correct the problem.
Come to think of it, if you could manage to keep a DS off-center from the star in a semi-stable way, with its center of mass orbiting the star, that could answer the question of how you get seasons. They'd be short seasons, though.
Of course, the kind of seasons we get in temperate climates aren't a universal thing even on Earth; there are regions whose only real seasons are dry and rainy. Life can adapt to a variety of seasonal regimes, so there's no reason to assume that the life within a Dyson shell would require a seasonal cycle of any kind. And life could probably adapt to a lack of a day-night cycle as well. The best kind of life to thrive within a DS might be the kind that evolved on a tidally locked world's sunward side.
Lack of day has seldom been a problem for ecosystems that get their fundamental energy-providing nutrients either from some sort of a light-free chemosynthesis or then from an outside source that enjoys photosynthesis. Lack of night does seem to present problems for advanced vertebrae, but they can get their vital bit of sleep if there's some sort of physical cover from the light available: say, a cave, a burrow, even a bit of foliage.
What Earthly life might have trouble adjusting to is a world where zones of darkness or changing angles of incoming light don't provide thermal gradients to drive convection currents. What sort of a climate does one get on vast plains where sunshine is constant and where the only major temperature gradients come from the altitude variation provided by landscaping? Perhaps one would need "shadow squares" simply for managing the heat distribution?
Of course, there's the issue of managing the total heat accumulation, too. How is all that output eventually radiated to the outside of the sphere? Are there absorbing structures on the inside, "cold fingers" sucking up heat and then radiating it to the outside? Are there advanced thermal management engines such as those entropy-twisting "computational coolers" sometimes speculated upon in scifi? Or does Treknology allow for complete dismissing of the laws of thermodynamics and "full utilization" of every last bit of heat?
Timo Saloniemi
Only if you buy into the fallacy that the purpose of a Dyson sphere is habitation. What Dyson actually proposed, as we've discussed earlier in the thread, was a cloud of solar-collector satellites or statites that would capture 100 percent of a star's energy output in order to fuel the energy needs of a Kardashev Type II civilization. In that case, such a society might very well need Dyson spheres/clouds in order to power technology of a sufficient level to enable interstellar colonization.
It still doesn't sound convincing: anything approaching a complete englobement of the star with physical objects would be an engineering project to completely overshadow a simple exploratory or exploitatory flight to other stars...
(Perhaps literally so, since blocking the radiation of the star cuts off the most direct way of using the star's energy for interstellar flight, namely using sunlight pressure for an initial boost!)
And once the art of interstellar flight is there, how much of a scale-up does the civilization really need to meet its regular interstellar commerce or migration needs? A starship (or starfleet) capable of moving a hundred billion people would still be a fraction of the size of the energy collector swarm. And if such a population really needed to leave in a hurry, would they stop to build a Dyson swarm first?
Moreover, one probably needs regular interstellar travel first before one can start building a systemwide radiation collector, because one has to fetch the raw materials for the collector from other systems. Unless one learns to transmute what's available insystem by using the energies initially available, at which point it becomes rather redundant to build the energy collector.
Naah, it still makes more sense to use the englobing structure for habitation or defense, or perhaps camouflage, communication or even pretty decoration, than for a stepping stone for interstellar flight... Perhaps an interstellar empire will proceed with shrouding all of its stars with such swarms or shells as it expands, though.
Timo Saloniemi
(Perhaps literally so, since blocking the radiation of the star cuts off the most direct way of using the star's energy for interstellar flight, namely using sunlight pressure for an initial boost!)
And once the art of interstellar flight is there, how much of a scale-up does the civilization really need to meet its regular interstellar commerce or migration needs? A starship (or starfleet) capable of moving a hundred billion people would still be a fraction of the size of the energy collector swarm. And if such a population really needed to leave in a hurry, would they stop to build a Dyson swarm first?
Moreover, one probably needs regular interstellar travel first before one can start building a systemwide radiation collector, because one has to fetch the raw materials for the collector from other systems. Unless one learns to transmute what's available insystem by using the energies initially available, at which point it becomes rather redundant to build the energy collector.
Naah, it still makes more sense to use the englobing structure for habitation or defense, or perhaps camouflage, communication or even pretty decoration, than for a stepping stone for interstellar flight... Perhaps an interstellar empire will proceed with shrouding all of its stars with such swarms or shells as it expands, though.
Timo Saloniemi
The original idea may have been a swarm but the concept has evolved since then. It would make sense for a civilisation or collective of species to work together to create such a structure. After completion the struggle for land and energy would be over. The sphere could help bring peace by offering (effectivly) limitless tracks of land to anyone who wants it. That is unless the civilisation I question consisted of trillions upon trillions of individuals.
In regards to the construction of such a structure I initially envisioned vast planet sized machinery but then considered the oposite, nano tech. Swarms of machines might prove more effective at slowly building up the superstructure over X amount of years. A self replicating workforce, programed correctly could exponentially decrease the amount of time needed to complete the sphere.
I see a sphere as a sort of galactic hub, ideal for comerce and a place for species and civilisations to interact.
In regards to the construction of such a structure I initially envisioned vast planet sized machinery but then considered the oposite, nano tech. Swarms of machines might prove more effective at slowly building up the superstructure over X amount of years. A self replicating workforce, programed correctly could exponentially decrease the amount of time needed to complete the sphere.
I see a sphere as a sort of galactic hub, ideal for comerce and a place for species and civilisations to interact.
Please excuse the poor spelling/grammar in the above. Trying to type on a phone screen at work while avoiding the Q like gaze of my manager is nigh impossible.
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