The Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that encloses a star to harness all its energy. It was first proposed by physicist Freeman Dyson in 1959 and could provide enough energy to sustain a population trillions of times larger than ours. The original proposal was for a Dyson swarm of objects that collectively absorb the star’s energy. Buckminsterfullerene is a potential building material. The Dyson sphere is often mentioned in the Kardashev classification scheme, which classifies civilizations by their energy sources. Building a Dyson sphere would place a civilization in the type II category.
The Dyson sphere is a hypothetical structure of immense size. It is a sphere that completely (or almost) encloses a star, exploiting all the energy radiated by the fusion reactions that take place in its core. The idea of a Dyson sphere was first formalized and popularized by the famous physicist Freeman Dyson in a 1959 article in Science entitled “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infra-Red Radiation”, although it originally took the idea from a 1945 science fiction novel by Olaf Stapledon called Star Maker.
Our sun has an energy output of about 4 x 10^26 watts, or about 100 million times humanity’s total energy consumption over the past century each second. If this energy could be harnessed via a Dyson sphere, we would have enough power to sustain a population trillion times our current population for many eons.
The original proposal for a Dyson sphere was not for a solid sphere, but a collection of ~10^5 objects that collectively absorb most of the star’s solar energy. Sometimes called the “Dyson swarm,” this would allow for the system to be built incrementally, with subcomponents orbiting independently of the star. From the outside, such a swarm would appear black, emitting only infrared radiation. Some of our orbiting infrared telescopes have been looking for bodies like Dyson spheres or swarms for decades, with no luck. If reflectors were used inside objects, the radiant energy could only be directed one way, making it difficult to spot from a distance.
Preliminary calculations have shown that our solar system contains matter rigid enough to build a Dyson swarm, but probably not a rigid Dyson sphere, which would need to be about a million km (600,000 miles) thick to be stable. A good candidate building material would be buckminsterfullerene, an allotrope of carbon with immense strength.
The Dyson sphere is often mentioned in conjunction with the Kardashev classification scheme, a method used to classify hypothetical civilizations by their energy sources. According to this classification scheme, a type I civilization would be one that uses the energy sources of an entire planet, a type II civilization would be one that uses the energy produced by an entire star, and a type III civilization would be one that uses an entire galaxy for power. A more speculative Type IV civilization would be one that harnesses the power of an entire universe. Building a Dyson sphere would place a civilization squarely in the type II category.
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