What Would Happen If We Built a Real Dyson Sphere?

hey 42 here the ability to harness energy from the world around us has quite literally fueled the technological development of the human race for millennia and every time we've got our hands on a newer shinier more powerful way of utilizing energy it's acted as a kind of level up for our species for our ancient ancestors energy extraction was a life or death kind of situation that went no further than eating plants and animals in order to stay alive and it wasn't until we finally mastered the tricky business of fire that things started to pick up for the human race for the first time we were able to release stored energy at will to keep ourselves warm fend off predators and cook food that had previously been too difficult to digest eventually we figured out how to harness the energy of other animals without first sticking a spit through them by putting them to work in our fields and using them for transportation we learned how to capture the energy of the wind in ships sails enabling us to cross oceans and colonized the world at some point a bright spark realized the water running downhill generated energy we could use through water wheels to grind our grain and power saw and textile mills next we got our heads around steam power which catalyzed the industrial revolution and these days we extract huge quantities of fossil fuels from beneath the earth to light our homes and power our cars these different ways of generating energy are so diverse it's easy to forget they all come from a common source the sun when sunlight shines on the earth some is captured and converted into chemical energy by plants by eating or burning those plants we're simply converting that energy into a form we can readily use whether for nutrition heat or just to get high fossil fuels those incredibly convenient but annoyingly environmentally unfriendly sources of energy that so much of our modern worlds depends on are nothing more than the remains of plants and animals deposited over millions of years even water wheels and ship sales are ultimately powered by solar energy liquid water only exists here on earth in the first place thanks to heat from the sun which also causes water to evaporate rise into the atmosphere and fall back to earth as rain the mechanical energy of water rushing downhill in streams and rivers that powers the humble water wheel is essentially stored energy from sunlight the same is true for wind energy which is created by differences in air temperature and density that form as the sun warms the ground to varying degrees it isn't quite true to say all the energy we use here on earth comes directly from the sun icelandic favorite geothermal energy is derived from forces at play during the formation of the planet and the decay of radioactive particles in the earth's core nuclear energy comes from splitting atoms and tidal energy is created by the interplay of gravity between the earth sun and moon but at least for now they make up a small percentage of the total energy we use with energy generated by sunlight being dominant as our civilization continues to grow more advanced our energy needs will increase that's partly because there'll simply be more of us almost 10 billion by 2050 according to current estimations and partly because the things we do require more energy with every passing year with our computers tablets and mobile phones we're all using more energy more of the time and as a society we're using our ever-increasing technological capabilities to make some seriously power-hungry toys take fugaku which sounds like a kind of sushi but it's actually the world's fastest supercomputer it uses enough energy to power 20 000 homes when pushed to its prodigious limits then there's the large hadron collider at cern in switzerland which has an annual energy consumption equivalent to that used by three hundred thousand homes in the last two hundred years or so the total energy consumption of mankind has increased almost two thousand five hundred percent compared to a population increase of about seven hundred percent and we're showing no signs of slowing this trends down anytime soon but there's a problem the energy available to us here on earth is not an infinite resource and sooner or later we're going to start running out earth overshoot day is calculated as the date each year when humanity's resource consumption exceeds the levels the earth is capable of regenerating the following year it isn't an exact science but it's a good illustration of how much we're eating into unsustainable reserves of things like fossil fuels think of it like a doomsday clock but for key resources instead of the total annihilation of mankind when it was first calculated in 1987 earth overshoot day landed on the 23rd of october since then the date has been steadily creeping forward each year and in 2019 overshoot day came at the end of july in short our energy needs are rapidly increasing whilst our energy reserves are slowly decreasing this means at some point in the future there's going to come a time when the energy available to us here on earth simply isn't going to cut it anymore so what happens then well it just so happens that in 1960 a man named freeman dyson asked himself that very same question and the conclusion he came to was both startlingly ambitious and incredibly simple instead of collecting our star's energy second hand in the form of fossil fuels or wind power we just cut out the middleman and harvest all the energy we need directly from the sun and that's exactly what you can do in stellaris galaxy command who've kindly sponsored this video i tell you i've been absolutely glued to this game for the past few weeks i've always been a fan of paradox interactives games i've put hundreds of hours into solaris on pc in stellaris i always enjoy building mega structures such as dyson spheres which is what this video is all about and in stellaris galaxy command you start out with a huge space station nexus which is your very own mini mega structure if you like but you can carefully upgrade with shipyards research institutes decorative items and much much more i have to say one of my favorite parts about this game is the intergalactic shootouts because the graphics and sound effects are fantastic there's an entire galaxy out there to explore you can colonize other planets forge alliances and trade on the galactic market there's so much to explore in this game that you should get started today so click the link in the description to download and play stellaris galaxy command and if you use my code 42 you'll get these amazing in-game bonuses 144 speed ups 5 flagship materials and 200 credits don't miss this one guys now you might be picturing mile upon mile of solar panels in some dusty desert here on planet earth at this point but the thing is only a tiny fraction of the total energy produced by the sun ever comes our way stars are after all spherical and they radiate energy pretty much equally in all directions meaning any earthbound solar panels no matter how large and efficient will never come close to tapping the entirety of the sun's total energy output if we want to do that dyson realized we're going to need to get a hell of a lot closer and build something much much bigger the technology he conceived to harvest all of the sun's energy is today known as a dyson sphere a megastructure that would completely encompass the sun inside a giant shell now fair warning we're about to enter that strange grey area that exists between science fiction and science future here current estimates suggest we won't be capable of building such a structure for a few thousand years yet but some scientists believe dyson's fears of some variety are a logical perhaps even inevitable step in the technological evolution of any advanced civilization the kind of dyson sphere most often depicted is a solid shell-like megastructure that completely envelops its star with the interior surface lined with solar panels that would absorb 100 of the total energy output of that star which is about 385 yatta watts in the case of the sun okay so a yottawatt sounds kind of made up but to put that figure into perspective it's about 22 trillion times humanity's total power consumption today that means if we were to imagine every single one of the 250 billion stars in our galaxy was home to an advanced civilization with equivalent energy needs to our own a single dyson sphere surrounding our sun would provide enough energy to power all of them indefinitely in fact even if we added a trillion civilizations from the stars of our neighboring galaxy andromeda into the mix our solitary dyson sphere would still have enough energy to power every single one of them without even breaking a sweat everlasting energy with enough left over to lend to the neighbors sign me up the problem is even as far as hypothesized solar megastructures go a dyson sphere would be kinda tricky to build the radius of these theoretical spheres is typically assumed to be one astronomical unit that's about the distance between the earth and the sun with the idea being that sunlight hitting the interior of the dyson sphere would be of the same intensity as we're used to here on earth meaning we could happily live on it but let's take a second to think about how ridiculously big this thing would be we're talking a colossal sphere with a radius of 93 million miles completely encircling the sun not to mention encompassing the orbits of mercury and venus such a megastructure would have a surface area about 550 million times larger than that of earth assuming we are able to make the whole interior surface habitable which would require overcoming several technical challenges that we won't even get into here and that we spread everyone out with a similar population density to that which we currently have on earth there would be room for almost four quadrillion people to live there if you wanted to take a road trip around the equator to take in the sights even traveling at 100 miles per hour non-stop in your fancy car of the future it would take you almost 700 years to get back to where you started hell even traveling at the speed of light it would take you almost an hour so yeah this thing would be on the large side so large in fact that we would have to literally dismantle every single planet in our solar system just to get our hands on enough raw materials to build it putting aside the morality of destroying the solar system in our endless hunt for energy i mean we're basically doing the same thing here on earth so i'm sure we'll get over it when the time comes even if we tore up all the planets including the gas giants we would only have enough materials to make a dyson sphere between 8 and 20 centimeters thick depending on the density of the outer shell oh and speaking of materials as of today no building material known to man would even come close to being strong enough it's also worth mentioning that something this big would be an absolute asteroid magnet so we're almost certainly going to have to install a screen protector right out of the box now you might be wondering what exactly we would do with 22 trillion times as much energy as we need right now and that's a fairly good question first up we'll naturally have greatly increased energy needs by the time we're technologically advanced enough to actually build a dyson sphere so we'll be able to power all that lovely future tech no problem i'm sure the ps5 million is going to be quite the energy hog but even taking that into account it's likely we're going to have a little bit of headroom scientists science fiction authors and under-qualified youtubers have all spent time pondering just what the human race could do with near-limitless energy and it turns out the possibilities are well near limitless it's even been theorized we could use dyson sphere-like megastructures as solar system scale engines designed to complete specific tasks one such engine known as a matriasca brain would use a series of nested dyson spheres to funnel the total energetic output of its parent star towards one single purpose computation some people have hypothesized that a solar system-sized computer drawing on this much energy would have the capability to challenge the very laws underpinning our universe whilst others have theorized that it would almost certainly be able to run crisis probably the most popular hypothesis is that a matriarchal brain will be able to run perfect simulations of human minds inside entire virtual worlds perhaps even universes allowing us if we wanted to to digitize the entire human race making ourselves an entirely new and effectively immortal species in the process who knows we may even be living inside the memory banks of a matriarchal brain right now okay so all this is really interesting and everything but why should we care i mean even if dyson's fears really are the inevitable energetic evolution of mankind none of us are ever going to come close to seeing one these things won't be built by humans for thousands of years and cryogenic freezing is probably not to mention obscenely expensive so we'll all be long dead by then but it turns out dyson spheres are actually extremely relevant to the human race right now not because we have a snowflakes chance in hell of building one anytime soon but because someone else might if you've watched my video on why we haven't found aliens yet you'll know one of the biggest challenges facing our hunt for extraterrestrial life is the frankly inconvenient size of the universe there are so many places to look and all of them are so damn far away that searching for alien life out there is a bit like staring up into the night sky in the hopes of spotting a gnat wearing the world's tiniest spacesuit buzzing around the moon most of our efforts to find aliens focus on radio waves because they're pretty good at penetrating our atmosphere and because we know alien technology might produce them for the simple reason that ours already does but even with some of the most powerful radio antennas on the planet the kind of radio leakage from our own transmissions here on earth would only be detectable a few light years away which is less than the distance to our nearest star proxima centauri and that's where dyson's fears come in because if other civilizations have already built them we should be able to track them down and from potentially galaxy spanning distances whilst the sphere itself probably wouldn't be visible to us the waste radiation emitted by a dyson sphere probably would be as it would look very very different to most other stars being heavily weighted towards the infrared end of the spectrum this was actually the point of freeman dyson's little thought experiment in the first place by the way he wasn't trying to help mankind solve its future energy woes he was brainstorming ways to track down other intelligent civilizations in the endless reaches of space science is taking the possibility of detecting dyson spheres seriously with seti incorporating dyson's assumptions into their search criteria and fermilab in the u.s conducting their own search based on data from an infrared specific space telescope known as iris for a couple of months back in 2015 we even thought we'd found a dyson sphere around what is now known as tabby's star in the constellation cygnus amateur astronomers noticed that tabby's star appeared to have significantly dimmed in the space of a single day suggesting something large was somehow obscuring part of the star small fluctuations in a star's luminosity aren't uncommon but this was no small fluctuation a planet the size of jupiter passing in front of a star of this size would reduce its luminosity by about one percent but tabby's star appeared to have dimmed by a staggering 22 percent clearly whatever was obscuring it was big very big a half-built dyson sphere perhaps scientists were starting to get pretty excited by this point and telescopes around the world were trained on the cygnus constellation where tabby's star continued to display unusual behavior and what exactly was causing tabby's star to dim like some kind of stellar disco ball the truth is we still aren't quite sure but sadly whilst there was genuine hope this might have been humanity's first sight of extraterrestrials and alien megastructure seems to have fallen a long way down the pecking order in terms of potential hypotheses with some kind of unusual ultra fine dust cloud apparently the most likely explanation so the search goes on and unfortunately that may well be the case for some time yet the trouble is in reality a dyson's fear is unlikely to be a solid all-encompassing shell at all instead it will probably be made up of a mass of individual satellites commonly in what is known as a dyson swarm this kind of megastructure probably wouldn't be able to tap into a hundred percent of the star's energy but it would be far more practical to actually build than a shell ever could be it would need far fewer resources would be immeasurably simpler to construct and would be more asteroid proof and it could more easily be built in stages over a period of hundreds even thousands of years the problem from our perspective is whilst the dyson swarm would still dim the star around which it was built the effect would be far less dramatic than it would be with a dyson shell meaning we would be unlikely to be able to detect one with our current technology although if we're completely honest that might not be such a terrible thing after all any civilization capable of building a dyson sphere would be much much more advanced than we are and it might just be for the best if we don't bump into each other for a good while yet in some ways trying to track down civilizations with their know how to build a dyson sphere is a little bit like a tiny fish swimming around a vast ocean in the hope of bumping into the megalodon finding one would certainly be very interesting but interesting in a kind of soil yourself terrifying kind of way thanks for watching thanks again to stellaris galaxy command for sponsoring this video make sure you download and play today using the link in the description below thank you

Channel: Thoughty2

Views: 811,674

Rating: 4.9187412 out of 5

Keywords: dyson sphere, dyson, freeman dyson, science fiction, kardashev scale, what if, solar energy, dyson swarm, solar system

Id: ms1NC8BeN3s

Length: 22min 0sec (1320 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020