Could Humans Actually Build A Dyson Sphere? | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by curiositystream hey did you hear they found another wow signal yeah wow signal it kind of got missed in the chaos of december but there was a story that came out in the guardian about a signal that was found at the parks observatory in australia back in april of 2019 that some people are thinking could be extraterrestrial in origin so they're calling it the new wow signal in reference to the signal that was found in 1977 that has never been completely fully explained i've done a whole video about it you can go check that out if you want or not just you know just be that way if you want but there's a few things about this one that make it particularly interesting for one thing it occurred in a very narrow band of frequencies specifically at 982.002 megahertz which is very unnatural yeah natural sources of radio signals usually cover a wide band of frequencies narrow bands or frequencies like this or what we do to use for communication and it did tend to pitch up throughout the signal which could indicate that it was coming from a planet that was orbiting its star kind of coming toward us and the star that it came from or at least it came from the direction of this star was proxima centauri one of the closest stars to us it was found as part of the breakthrough listen initiative uh they were actually studying proxima centauri at the time so it's been designated blc1 which stands for breakthrough listen candidate one now the most likely explanation for this is probably still something mundane that's usually the case but there are a couple of papers coming out in the next year so we'll be keeping an eye on that but finding strong or unexpected signals is not the only way we can find et there's also the lack of signals this is what got everybody excited about tabby's star back in 2015 because it seemed to dim up to 22 percent of very irregular intervals now there are a lot of stars that dim irregularly but most of them are older or a different type of star than tabby's star so it was thought that it must have been something occluding the star something like a an asteroid cluster or a destroyed planet or something else [Music] dyson spheres come up a lot in futurism and science communication circles which is why it's kind of amazing that somehow i've never actually done a video on dyson spheres i've covered the potential dyson electric car which has now been squashed but that's that's a different thing so what better way to start off 2021 than to do a video on a subject that i should have covered a long time ago but before we jump into the dyson sphere itself we need to talk about the kardashian scale i'm sorry the kardashev scale it's a different scale the kardashev scale is named after the russian astrophysicist nikolai kardashev who proposed a scale that could be used to measure advanced civilizations back in 1964. kardashev scale imagined three types of civilizations which he called type 1 type 2 and type 3. type 1 civilizations can utilize all the available energy on their homeworld type 2 civilizations can utilize all the energy produced by their home star and type 3 civilizations can utilize all the energy in their galaxy now obviously when you start talking about a species being able to harvest all the energy in the billions of stars in the galaxy not to mention the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy you're getting into some pretty unfathomable technology at that point but some people have taken it further while kardashev stopped at three levels some people have expanded it to six with type 4 civilizations able to tap all the energy in the universe type 5 able to tap all the energy in a multiverse and type 6 able to tap all the energy in all of space and time i think it's easy to see why carter should have stopped at 3 really anything above type 2 and the technology gets pretty speculative at that point i mean type 4 and above things get pretty metaphysical i mean we don't even know if there is a multiverse and i mean for somebody to control all that we're basically talking about gods at that point in fact science fiction barely has any examples of type 4 civilizations because i mean how can an audience relate to a character who could solve all of his problems with just the snap of his finger [Music] okay i guess there is one example so where you might be wondering do we fit on the kardashev scale well it's been estimated that the total amount of energy on the earth is somewhere in the ballpark of 10 to the 16th power watts so with that in mind as of 2018 the earth has been estimated to be at about a 0.73 on the kardashev scale which sounds like we're pretty close but in fact we would have to increase the amount of energy production by a hundred thousand times to actually get to type one we're talking hurricanes volcanoes earthquakes ocean currents we would have to tap into all of that to reach a level one status now we don't have to actually tap into all that we just have to produce an equivalent amount of energy some methods we have could possibly get us there but there's some on the way that could get us even closer at our current rate of technological advancement we could probably reach type 1 status in a century or two which would be a huge accomplishment for our species and assuming we don't destroy our planet in the process it's totally possible reaching type 2 is also totally possible and that my friends is where dyson spheres come in freeman john dyson was born on december 15th 1923 and died only recently on leap day 2020. he was a physicist and mathematician among other qualifications and a fellow of the royal society that puts him in the same class of scientists as isaac newton and stephen hawking and the other famous dyson sir james dyson the vacuum cleaner guy this mega structure that bears his name comes from a 1960 paper on advanced civilizations where he wrote quote that one should expect that within a few thousand years of it entering the stage of industrial development any intelligent species should be found occupying an artificial biosphere which completely surrounds its parent star now to most of the readers of this paper that kind of conjured up images of a of a sphere that encompassed the entire star with mirrors on the inside like an inverted disco ball or something but that's not really what dyson had in mind in response to a reader he stated that it would consist of a loose collection or swarm of objects traveling on independent orbits around its star this concept has since been given its own name dyson swarm while the disco ball approach is sometimes called a dyson shell but the goal is the same to harvest as much of the sun's output as possible and that output is an estimated 400 septillion watts per second or almost as much as my ac uses in august collecting that much energy means that our species would never have to worry about producing energy again like ever which is why sci-fi authors been talking about this since before dyson was even a teenager the 1937 novel star maker by ola stapleton called them light traps 19 years later isaac asimov referred to machines that could harness light on a local and later universal scale in a short story the last question long after dyson's famous paper an episode of star trek the next generation had the enterprise crew encounter scotty on the surface of an alien dyson sphere and that last one is actually pretty appropriate because aliens were kind of dyson's point he said that one way that we might find them is to look for the mega structures they would build around their stars the fact that we never found one is proof to some people that we're alone in the universe or that you know we're just being shunned by the intergalactic cool kids and judging by the last year we've had that's probably smart on their part but let's just say we want to build a dyson sphere ourselves the first problem is of course it would take a lot of material how much material well if we wanted to build a solid shell the disco ball idea at roughly the distance from the sun that we are right now it would require 550 million times the surface area of our own planet to put that in another way it would require us to dismantle mercury venus mars the moon all the asteroids in the solar system and um earth we'd have to destroy the earth now aside from all the problems associated with destroying earth there's also some problems with the shell concept in general that we should probably consider in the first place for one thing a solid shell would have a tendency to drift inward as in toward the sun even if it could be stabilized corrective measures would have to be applied pretty much constantly not to mention the solar system debris like comets could knock the shell off its axis there's also the cosmic wind to deal with in 2018 nasa announced that voyager 2 had officially hit the heliopause the area where the sun's solar wind collides with the interstellar medium what they found was pretty striking according to edward stone an astronomer at caltech who's worked on the voyager program since 1977 this heliopause acts as a shield that stops about 70 of cosmic radiation from breaking into our solar system yeah it turns out that supernovas are pretty much flinging stuff towards us all the time but this solar wind that comes out from our sun hits against it kind of combats it and keeps it from coming in and going into the inner solar system it kind of works the same way as the earth's magnetic field protecting us from the solar wind so if we put a shell around the sun that shell would be constantly bombarded by interstellar wind which could make it unstable plus it would make it extremely dangerous to travel outside of the sphere plus the mass of the shell at any given spot would be far less than that of the earth so gravity on the surface would be next to nothing so you would need to rotate the shell in order to keep everything from floating up toward the sun but that would only work around the inner equator so what you would basically have is a ring world embedded in a vast photovoltaic desert it's technically feasible but seems to waste a lot of space so a dyson swarm would that be better well maybe a type 2 civilization is supposed to be able to harness all the power of its star but before you can get to type 2 you have to get to type 1 and this is where a swarm could actually be really helpful not only would it greatly reduce the amount of materials that we need if we aren't capturing all of the radiation from the sun that rest of it can still protect us from the interstellar wind the key to building efficiently would be to deploy our swarm close to the sun because of the inverse square law the further away you get from the sun the more power you lose one way that we could build the swarm is with something called statites or static satellites these could float really close to the sun collect the energy and then beam them out where it can be used with laser beams a statite is basically a non-orbiting satellite that holds its position with solar sails or solar-powered thrusters it would take a swarm with a total mass of about 91 million kilograms to capture enough energy to reach type 1 status this particular swarm in question could be deployed at about 2.5 million miles from the sun but if a swarm could be deployed a million miles closer it could absorb the same amount of energy at half the mass again the inverse square law the planet mercury has 3.285 times 10 to the 23 kilograms total mass so mining 46 million kilograms for statite building would barely scratch the surface of course these statites would be vulnerable to solar flares making sails that are light enough to flow to statite without you know being destroyed by a solar flare would require some pretty advanced materials graphene and carbon nanotubes are often proposed as possible solutions but those are prohibitively expensive right now anyway especially when you consider how big these things are gonna have to be i just now realized i haven't mentioned how big these things have to be yeah one proposal said that it would need to have a diameter equal to the distance between san francisco and kansas city so uh that big if some of this is starting to sound familiar i did do a video a while back about creating solar shades to block the sun's light from hitting the earth in order to cool the planet it's sort of the same idea only in this case it's actually collecting that light and using it as energy but a big enough dyson swarm a million miles from the sun could both collect energy and probably block some of that light from hitting earth as well so win-win but let's just say we decide we want to collect all the energy because you know humans are so good at restraint that would mean the end of all the inner planets including um earth and the idea of the dyson shell we could live on the inside of the shell like i talked about earlier but if we go with the swarm idea we're going to have this slight problem of not having a place to live so if we want to you know live we're going to have to get pretty creative two futurists who got creative with this idea are dr stewart armstrong and dr anders samberg who published the paper on dyson swarms where they proposed that humans could live on o'neill cylinders if we're still humans at that point because it's far more likely that by the time we're dismantling planets and building megastructures like this we've already uploaded our minds to computers so technically we could just code a planet to live on or millions we could all have our own planet the marmots were right as for the details of how we go about creating this swarm their paper suggests building a swarm of satellite mirrors using hematite this is a lot less complicated than advanced materials like graphene or carbon nanotubes and it's thought to be abundant on mercury these mirrors would then redirect light to solar power generators at strategic locations in the swarm so it would start with mining bases on mercury that dig up the appropriate metals step two would be von neumann machines these are machines that build other machines or as john von neumann himself called them universal assemblers these uas would convert mercury's metal into swarm satellites as well as the launch facilities or rail guns that would launch them out into the solar system these satellites would then gather energy and then use that energy to make other satellites which would make other satellites and this goes exponential at this rate it would only take 40 years for those satellites to completely dismantle mercury at that point they would move on to venus and the moon and mars the asteroids and earth keep forgetting that one assuming of course that were uploaded to computers at that point otherwise it would be a fun little man versus machines terminator situation but either way even if we just want to create a swarm to reach type 1 status mercury's pretty much toast futurists and dyson swarm advocates pretty much have it in for mercury but let's just be honest is anybody going to miss it i mean look at it basically begging to be taken apart so we spent a lot of time thinking about how we could turn our own solar system into a giant machine it seems almost inevitable in some ways that should we survive long enough that we would do something like this but wouldn't this apply to other intelligent civilizations in the universe some consider this to be an answer to the fermi paradox you know why don't we see alien civilizations in the universe why don't we see alien signals coming from all over the place maybe it's because they've closed themselves off in dyson shells in fact it might be a matter of life or death stars don't last forever in about 5 billion years our own sun will finish fusing hydrogen it'll swell up to swallow the inner planets if our machines haven't swallowed them first then it'll cool beginning a slow progression to an inevitable death any advanced alien civilization would know that about their own star would probably have taken steps to use the planets as a resource while they had the chance eventually finding a refuge on a megastructure so astronomers and alien hunters look for more than wow signals they also look for evidence of alien megastructures which brings us back to tabby's star unfortunately tabby's star has mostly been proven to just be a star that dims at random intervals you know the more we look around out there the more we find that there are a lot of stars that do that so this is the 50 000th time that something looks like it's aliens and then turns out that it's not you know i make fun of this guy a lot but i gotta say his world seems a lot more fun than mine of course who's to say that those other stars aren't mega structures as well fact of the matter is we don't have the technology to see close enough to really conclusively prove otherwise but ultimately the allure of the dyson sphere is being able to collect energy like massive amounts of energy like more energy than we could possibly ever use in a million lifetimes so let's hope that we could possibly do that without having to destroy the uh earth i'll get it eventually but until we can create these kinds of megastructures the fact of the matter is the need for energy is going to define the politics and societal needs of our species for a long time to come if you want to get a better idea of how electricity guides how we do things around the world you should check out the documentary juice how electricity explains the world on curiosity stream hosted by robert bryce this film takes a big step back and looks at not just how we generate and use electricity but the way electricity has changed the world accelerated the growth of technology and defined the social and political struggles that shaped the world today this is of course 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 567,638

Rating: 4.9153676 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott, dyson spheres, kardashev scale, freeman dyson, nikolai kardashev, alien structures, megastructures, tabby's star

Id: _ahAm6G39ek

Length: 17min 52sec (1072 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 04 2021