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Comment by jlebrech | Hacker News Reader

so there are in the middle of building the dyson sphere?

That's the idea. Or the dyson sphere is made of a mesh network of multiple parts with varying levels of density.

we could build own own dyson sphere, just (sic) start off by turning ISS into a solar collector and making it face the sun 24/7. then add more to it.

Elon Musk just needs to merge SolarCity with SpaceX and were in business.

This was in fact the original concept as envisioned by Dyson. He pointed out that a solid sphere would be mechanically impossible but the logical way to build such a structure would involve a "swarm of objects".

Or we're seeing one fall apart.

(I still think that Dyson spheres are an idiotic thing to build. If you're worried about getting energy for your civilization, and you can do stellar-scale engineering, there are better things to do with a star's mass than let it waste its fuel in a big, uncontrolled trash fire, collecting it with solar cells or whatever).

Such as?

Nuclear fusion is the most energy dense process in the universe. If the reaction is already going, why mess with it?

Actually, antimatter-matter annihilation is about 500 times more energy efficient.

Not really; the energy density in the core of our sun is about 100 watts / cubic meter. (Energy density is a LOT higher in more spectacular events, like supernova and the first few milliseconds of a hydrogen bomb's fun-time).

Smaller stars burn fuel more efficiently. Our sun is good for about 4-6 billion years; a much smaller star will last several trillion years.

My issue with the whole "alien civilization" idea is that we are seeing what happened around that star some 1,400 years ago, which means if they were building a Dyson sphere that long ago, it's unimaginable what tech they have today. I have a hard time accepting that an intelligent species could be that far ahead of us technology wise, but I could be wrong!

1,400 years is really small compared to the history of life on Earth. It doesn’t seem all that unlikely that other planets might have had millions of years of head start.

Why do you have a hard time with that? Are we some sort of special snowflake? Was life formed all at the same time everywhere? For all we know alien civilisations have been around for a billion years already.

The universe is billions of years old. There's no reason to think that our arrival (as an intelligent species) is uniquely tied to this particular time period.

If they were building a Dyson sphere today, it would still be unimaginable. A construct of such complexity and magnitude, that we have almost have trouble _thinking_ about it.

I have a hard time thinking that any intelligent life we were to encounter would be on "our scale", in either direction. They would likely be vastly superior or vastly inferior. Think "they are ants, we are human" or worse "we are ants, they are human".

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