So You Want To Build a Dyson Sphere

I like how current tech biases the pictures we make of the future. Like, imagining photovoltaic cells being used in a future so far away that a Dyson Sphere is plausible. It's so similar to how people in the mid to late 1800s imagined the most futuristic stuff being powered by steam. I wonder if by then we'd have some cool art with "photovoltaic punk" aesthetics.

Not holding my breathe on that one getting built.

Evertime I hear Dyson Sphere. I automatically go back to TNG...and the host is absolutely killing it. Awesome work everyone who makes this possible.

I know these videos are just for fun, so let me go off on a bit of a tangent: if you scoured the solar system for every bit of usable material, you could empty the Kuiper belt and you still would not have a tiny fraction of what would be required for a Dyson Sphere. I don't know if there would be enough material in the Ort cloud. Presumably, any such structure would need to extend well beyond one AU since it is capturing most of the Sun's energy. If you had the materials you needed, the time it would take to construct your sphere could me measured in millions of years. As Doug Adams famously said, "Space is big!"

Thank you very much for mentioning Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker. This author (and philosopher) did not get enough recognition for his truly visionary science fiction novels, even though his first novel Last and First Men is considered a classic of SF.

0:11 just wait till Strongbad hears about this.

slaps Dyson sphere this baby can boil so much water!

Something I find interesting with these kinds of questions is that it doesn't really matter whether we ever decide to build a Dyson sphere. Kind of like a thought experiment, what really matters is trying to figure out how you would solve each challenge. Solving a problem in a thought experiment can give you a clue to solving an actual problem in real life.

My Dyson Sphere has been stuck in permitting hell for years.

To be fair, you don't need a full Dyson Swarm. Just 1% completion of one (with mirrors placed around where they won't block light reaching the earth, which is easy as only something like 4% actually reaches us) would be more energy we can fathom have uses for at least with our current tech and society levels.

2:53 "So for this video, we're going to set those existential questions aside, and figure out what it would take to actually build the dang thing."

So you've become preoccupied with whether or not you could, you chose to stop to thinking if you should.

It's pretty cool that the aptly named game Dyson Sphere Program does exactly all of the proposed theoretical options, i.e. rail guns launching dyson swarms consistently.

If we ever get to build something like this, I think it will be long after we start asteroide mining

Building a Dyson Sphere: 1% planning, 99% figuring out where to put all the space debris.

13:30 I don't mean to brag, but I've unlocked all 128 achievements for Dyson Sphere Program

Screw it, I'll do it. I've got 10 years of experience in the Solar PV industry, work as a project manager, and have watched the Kurzgesagt video on Dyson Swarms probably like 20 times now.

Man, imagine being a 2 on the Kardashev scale. We could boil SO much water.

I ordered a dyson sphere off temu , will be here in a week

Edit: I did not get a picture next to a banana for scale , tho it came with pretty convincing specifications..

Measured in standard fruit lengths (18cm per banana ) , the Sun has a width of 7.74 billion bananas. This Temu Dyson sphere spans a diameter of 1.66 trillion bananas that could easily accomodate a G2v class yellow dwarf star like Sol.

Some assembly required

It’d be funny if the Dyson sphere ultimately just boils water

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