Okay im not sure if this belongs in ATM or BABBling but i chose here as it is more out there. Also it might help people take it more seriously then in the BABBling as things in there can break down into jokes... so i'll behave myself.

What i want is other peoples help on my idea as its for a Sci-Fi story but i want to keep it as much science possible then bobo the monkey has a laser gun and has enslaved mankind.

The construct would be of a dyson type 1 sphere which could then join into a type 2 solid shell. My idea is that earth builds several panels of the dyson sphere which has built in manufacturing capabilitys which can later be removed when it forms into a type 2 sphere in which a habitat could be formed.
Earth builds 8 or so panels which can then self replicate. They build one and it joins it below, then both build another which join to the other sides so you have 2x2 then they build above and below so 4 high 2 across, then they build so that it is 4x4 again. This carrys on getting bigger and bigger converting the suns energy into more material. The middle 2x2 now cut off from the replicating can be turned into habitats for people to live on and instead of having to build a super strong material the energy is used to "replicate" food and life support until eco systems can be set up.

At the point where it is 4x4 im not sure exactly how it would go about it. Would it be better for all the sections to build into a Ringworld first or just keep building all ways until they make a full dyson sphere.

As its for a Sci-Fi novel i dont really need to worry about the extreames of what materials to use etc as they would be able to make it. My story specifics are if i can't explain it don't explain it. Im not going to make up some nonsense about tachyons and space-time flux's to explain a time machine, if i can't explain it i wont explain it.
Its a story and im telling the story im not a woo woo inventor, Im already writing about a time travel story and i've explained nothing about how it works and i have clearly stated its a modification on the tipler cylinder which is a relatively small one (IE big enough to fit a few people in) but i use the "modification on the tipler cylinder" so that it is still scientificly possible today as tipler was the only person to propose a time machine which as far as we know can work.

The Dyson sphere comes into the second book in which the "hero" doesn't go back in time which is explained in the first one or will be in the back as i dont want to confuse everyone with everett interpretation on the 4th page.

So any help is most appreciated

One little problem is that conversion of sunlight into mass does not have a very high yield (even if it were possible; we do not know of any method at the moment);

by my very rough calculations, after a million years, a Dyson shell 1AU in radius made of matter converted from sunlight would only be a few centimetres in thickness...

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Just a thought about Dyson Spheres. A civilization that can build a dyson sphere wont need one.

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NCC 2000 - USS Excelsior. Commanded by captain Hikaru Sulu.

I agree with that in many ways; but the more realistic dyson swarm concept is something that seems not only sensible but inevitable.


Our sun puts out a billion times more energy than is intercepted by the surface of the Earth; converting uninhabitable planets like Venus and Mercury into a solar power collector swarm would allow a much greater proportion of that energy to be gathered.

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eburacum, make some pictures of these things and put them on OA. We need more pictures.

Well all of the energy we can presently make is microscopic compared to the amount of sunlight that hits the surface of the planet which keeps it at a hospitable temperature.
Building a dyson swarm is sensible and in my opinion also inevitable, the construction of the dyson shell is the development from that inevitability. If you have billions of free orbiting solar collectors each one having to be moved about and regulated so as not to collide with each other, for maintanance etc the next step would be to join them together and create a solar hub.

Once you have the dyson type 2 sphere then on the habitability of earth it would mean there is 390,000,000 times more room for people to live but that figure was taken for an interior like a ringworld which i dont plan so the habitability for my dyson sphere would be complete. Also the poles would have horizontal floors in so that people could live/work there.

I know that little problem and i've done some thinking over it, mecury and venus would be used in the construction of the dyson swarm and so would the asteroid belt, the Kuiper Belt and the Oort cloud. This would give a lot of mass to the construction process.
Im unsure of what part saturn, uranus and neptune would have but i think the orbitals of jupiter would already have been colonised or used to build a ringworld around it or a similar concept to the suprajupiter.

The idea is that we never developed FTL travel or not as such as when the story is set, there has been many STL stasis ships sent to other solar systems one being "orions belt" which was sent out to Gliese 876's second planetoid which has 1.9 jupiter masses. As the name surgests its going to be a ringworld around the planet also the orion part because the god orion was thought to be fat.
The "hero" of the story was meant to be on the orions belt ship but there was too many people and he wakes up about 50 years later on the jupiter station instead of on earth and then gets short listed after several months for a move to the dyson sphere.

A civilization has learned how extract energy from its star by taking a percentage of energy from each photon that is emitted. It surrounds the star with a Dyson Sphere that does this. The energy it extracts is used to accelerate electrons and thus generate electricity. The result is that the star looks like a regular star, but since each photon emitted from it has less energy, the each photon has a longer wavelength. The star has a big red shift! It looks exactly like a quasar. The mechanism the civilization uses is the Compton effect.

Oh, maybe we don't need a civilization, maybe the quasar has a red shift that just naturally occurs. Maybe there is no Dyson Sphere, just a cloud of electrons.
Or, maybe not. Maybe there really is a civilization there. With red shift of 4, the quasar is having the civilization extract 80% of the star's energy for it's own use..

We're talking dyson sphere here not a galactic dyson sphere in which black holes are given in everything that is waste and energy is collected from the hawking radiation along with the light emitted from the acceleration disk that would be formed.

Someone's had your idea already :wink:

You misunderstood. I'm talking a Dyson Sphere around a star like our sun. From the outside it would look just like a quasar. A quasar looks just like a star. That's why they are called quasars, or quasi-stellar sources.

It has nothing to do with black holes or galaxies.

The civilization could be using the energy extracted to jet out away from the star into interstellar space, like the jets seen squirting out from quasars.

Look at the two bright objects in this picture. One is a quasar the other is an ordinary star. See how they look alike?
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/new...eases/1996/25/

I believe i did ops:

I went by a definition which says:
That defenition did have something to do with black holes and galaxies.

Do you mean using the dyson sphere like a nozzle on a rocket thruster?

Edit: and the two stars do look similar

I suppose you could figure out some way. You're idea is as good as any. Maybe they ride a wave of ejected electrons like a surfboard sorta like Project Orion on one of the jets that squirt out of quasars.
http://www.angelfire.com/stars2/projectorion/

Im familiar with the project orion concept and its one i find interesting but also disturbing.

The only way i can think of a way to turn a quasar into a thruster is that if half of its 'squirt' is directed back into it IIRC the quasar produces two poles of ejection one could be used to be redirected back into the quasar to add momentum as two thrusts would cancel out if they were both in opposite directions.

The quasar on its own would act more like a laser pulse engine not actualy help with it as you would need to take the thing with you to draw energy from it for productive reasons.

For the story though i only need on how one would be best formed in a relatively short time.

The orion belt project is already in place in the first story as the "hero" of the book wants to transfer onto it but complains that it will be even longer then the jupiter project. About 10 years for the construction workers before being put into stasis and then another group of workers builds their sections and so on. The process could go on for a long time as the main characters in it would be in stasis as the builders are allowed to take some friends/family with them.

The book starts in 2059, he would be frozen in 2069 so when in theoretical times does anyone think the earlyest he should be woken up to be able to go to the dyson sphere while its relatively complete.

Also anyone got construction idea's that seem science possible like the light to mass converter i surgested. I'd preffer a way that doesn't involve mining the whole of the solar system to build one.
One advancement on this is that E=mc^2 gives antimatter aswell as matter and the antimatter could be used to feed production efforts by mixing it in antimatter reactors with waste products.

Just a continuation from the reason why one would be needed is that we like our planet, we like our solar system and we have a tie to this place. There would also be possibly trillions of people living in the solar system on jupiter ring and on earth, the moon and several large habitats in earths orbit. The whole of earth is urbanized in the start of the first book except for the north pole as it can't easily be urbanized unlike the south which has land under it also the ice from the antarctic was used else where.

So for the civilization in my book it is needed. BTW this isn't pointed at Excelsior its just clarification of the point.

well getting to the question: have them keep multiplying to build the sphere. IN a sense once started it wont stop till complete 4x4 then 16x16 then 256x256 and so on. Then various factions or groups create a habitat they way they wish, so with greater living space comes greater diversity of ways of life, enabling mankind to prosper and grow from the strength of its diversity.


ouch my head hurts

here's a thought... someone mentioned a dyson sphere would make the star appear as a quasar. i'm not sure i buy that, but it brings up the point that the creation of a dyson sphere or something like it could change the apprearance of the star in some noticeable way. given that it's a big universe, it's not only possible, but probable, that (if a dyson sphere is actually a good idea), perhaps some other civilization has already done this to their star. would this be detectable in some way from afar?

They have tryed searching for it any star 1 billion years old so there is no creation disk. It also has to produce an excess of IR radiation. If it was a solid shell it would produce only IR radiation.

The problem with the dyson sphere rotating quickly is that 1 it would become highly uninhabitable and 2 it could deform the star and make it possibly explode. A dyson swarm would exert no real force on the star and it would be equal in all parts.
A ring world orbiting like earth does if it is close enough say venus' orbit and rotating to give 1g of force could possibly expand the star making it "fatter" around the waist. (this depends on the mass of the ringworld) A way to combat this is to make several and have them rotate in all different directions to cancel out the force on the star.
One solution is build one ringworld and have it rotate to produce 1g of force and build it with high bulkheads so that an atmosphere will stay in. Then build a second slightly larger one and rotate it in the other direction to produce 1g of force and build this one more solid incase of any bumps with the otherone. Ram jets or ion drives or something could be used to maintain the rotation and the positions of the ringworlds.

But a dyson sphere solution i haven't thought of yet other then it to be far enough out so as not to disturb the sun. But i have no idea how to calculate this.

Just some quick math I did in my head...

Assuming about 10 billion people is the max population density of the earh, and a ring world strip would have about the same width as diameter of earth and the rings diameter would be about earth orbit.

A ring world could hold about 50 trillion (that trillion with a T) people on it with lots of extra elbow room.

With those kind of numbers, why would they bother to build a sphere at all? Developed technologically advanced civilizations (at least human ones) tend to have fewer children, rather than more.

Wouldn't more advanced civilizations simply use birth control? Whats happend to womens rights now that governments are planning on there being 50 trillion mouths to feed? To get to 50 trillion people every generation of women has to have like 10-15 children for like 10 generations. What if the women are not up to the task of spending their lives as ambulatory uteruses for the next 500 years?

Thanks Dok for a sphere on the current habitability of the planet it would hold over 390,000,000 times as many people or 3,900,000,000 billion people for 10 billion people been the max. With total urbanization of the planet earth could hold billions of people and with longer life spans and better health care even to the point of conciousness swapping into a clone body (if the process can be speeded up). imagine if there was a way that your conciousness could be "recalled" before the point of death and implanted into a new body it would remove population shrinking under the age of about a month old.

The population growth would be exponential even if they were having one child per family it would still be a huge growth curve as a couple could have kids for as long as they wanted (for ever?) as they could always be in bodys at the age of say 20 or 30 years old.
If no one dies and everyone could reproduce and the old population double statistic of 37 years is true then say we had 10 billion people alive now by 2041 we would have 20 billion by 2078 20 billion, 40 billion, 80, 160, 320... see the problem.

Also there would be a huge need for all the jobs etc that they would be doing and if manufacture was going on the scale of building parts as thick as the earth they would need a lot of space. Also the whole of the Orion's belt ship would have to carry all the hull sections to build a ring around a planet twice the size of jupiter which is an extreamly large space. Also one for jupiter itself etc.
Once you go into Stellar communitys you need Stellar size building plots.

[electromagneticpulse said that

"[t]he population growth would be exponential even if they were having one child per family it would still be a huge growth curve as a couple could have kids for as long as they wanted (for ever?) as they could always be in bodys at the age of say 20 or 30 years old."

No. If every family had only one child, there would be a mathematical growth rate. Ten billion people mate, and only have one child, five billion Children would be the result. Next generation,two point five....If every generation only has one child, down the road there will be the last family. Starting from ten billion, if everyone lives for ever, and all couples have only one child, the numbers will only be a few more billion: hardly trillions.

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Didn't you read the quote you made?
Even on your working out 10 billion would make 5 billion, 15 billion would make 7.5 billion, 22.5 would make 10.125 billion etc. Even though western civilization has an average of 2 children per house hold.
So it would be 10, 20, 40, 80...

Most people choose life then kids or kids then life and still have about 2 children per couple, once you can have kids whenever you want you can repeat it for however you want and by human psyche they will its why women of any age get the maternal instinct and they would much preffer their own child. Its built into our psyche and our genes to be parents its that in the west we have more to do to provide for our children.

How would anything stay on the surface of the sphere? If it is a perfect sphere, the gravity on its interior would be zero.

You could rotate the sphere to provide a centrifuge effect, but the 'gravity' would fall off towards the poles. It might also provide some dynamic stability for the system - as well as giving the inhabitants a lifestyle choice ("we moved to the 0.7G latitude last year - much better for sports")...

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Well i was thinking the poles would be of more use for people who couldn't walk. The biggest problem for wheel chair users is that they have to get around things, we can just 'slip' by or climb over them. I have to help them as part of my course so i know the problems they have, i mean how much room do you have between things when your in a restaurant. Sometimes your almost sat on the table behind you.

But the insides of the poles you could have it so it's decks instead of one surface as the floor so people could live inside the poles and still have gravity while on the surface there wouldn't be any gravity. My world caters for any person

Also the very poles of the station may not exist but more be like docking terminals for spaceships so this docking station bit would have its own gravity for its own settlements. I haven't really thought about the stellar travel aspect of it yet as there would need to be travel between Earth, Jupiter and the Dyson Sphere at least along with a shipyard to build any interstellar colony ships. Maybe i should start thinking of this

1) why would a spinning ring world cause the sun to become fatter?

2) given a swarm rather than a rigid sphere, wouldn't the cancellation of gravity still be a problem, and would this affect the orbits?

3) if you can live forever, clone new bodies, download minds, etc. why are people still needing wheelchairs?

4) if you had so much room, would restaurants still crowd the tables?

--John

Thanks John i'll try and give some reasons

1) The planets already exert some force on the sun, IIRC its how they discovered mercury as they found that the sun's wobble wasn't right for the amount of mass we had accounted for. But then again i could have heard it wrong.
A constant sphere around the sun in earths orbit would constantly provide a force onto the outside of the sun and the amount of energy the ringworld has would be proportional to the Mass times the Velocity. So depending on how fast the ringworld rotates depends on how much force it exerts onto the sun. Just one would make it get fatter around its "waist".
(i could be wrong on this BTW but i think im fairly close)

2) A swarm wouldn't have to move in the slightest as they would repel from the concentration of the suns energy on them against the pull of gravity etc. So if the swarm isn't too "heavy" compared to the force pushing it away. Also swarms could be made to naturaly orbit the sun so their mass could be larger while still collecting sunlight efficiently. The gravity shouldn't be a problem, theres an equation to work it out somewhere.

3) People like their own bodys, i know several people who like been in a wheelchair as it is their "individuality". Also people would refuse the treatments like Jehovah's witnesses refuse blood products of any kind so i doubt they would support the idea of a whole new body. So you might always have to cater for people like this. Or what about people born on another planet IE mars or the moon if no artificial gravity was made they would have weaker bones and be incapable of standing in a 1g area as it would be too difficult.

4) To say everyone would probably be able to have several acre plots of land hopefully not. But im sure someone will find a way, on the good side of this by 2010 (i think) everyone in the UK has to comply to the disability act, so restaurants wouldn't be allowed to have big crowded areas where its impossible to move between tables. I'm all for it i don't like some Joe Blogs sat behind me hearing the intimate details of my life.

Hope this helps with them, ask anymore if you want

To first order, this is incorrect. A rotating sphere is no different than a stationary sphere for gravitational effects in traditional Newtonian Gravity. In GR, you will have some slight corrections, but these are extremely minor. I'm not sure you will get an oblate effect, either. I'd have to work out the math.

This is just what i read and why a Multi-Ringworld was proposed by Escher.
http://www.tabletoptelephone.com/~ho.../EschrDys.html
Its actualy one cool drawing by Escher IMO, im no art biggie though it either looks good or it doesn't.

I found one. At least it looks like one.

In Newtonian mecahincs at least, surely the forces would cancel out, and a complete ring (or sphere) would exert no net force on a start at its centre?

As to my understanding gravity is proportional to mass and mass is proportional to energy. This then means that something orbiting at roughly at 770m/s (ringworld rotation speed IIRC) would have one hell of a lot more energy then one sat still.
If you rotated a solid dyson sphere around a star at 770m/s you would likely cause it to go nova inside the shell. The actual dyson sphere would exert little gravitational force on the star as it isn't designed to be rotated but rather float.

I am curious as to why the Dyson Sphere/Ring world would need to be built around a star. Wouldn’t it be Smarter to have an energy source that you have control of. An advanced civilization could build Dyson Spheres of any size with an artificial Sun tuned to the needs of the construct. Essentially allowing for swarms of Dyson spheres used as vessels for interstellar travel. Take the Entire population on a trip through space to me this would be a better investment of resources then relying on the unpredictable nature of a natural star. I can picture swarms of spheres moving from system to system Exploiting resources and moving on.

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