The mother of all megastructures: this is the huge (and theoretical) sphere designed to harness all the energy of the Sun

Human beings love exorbitant projects. And not only do we imagine them, but many times, however difficult and impossible as they seem, we make them come true. It is enough to go back a few pages in our history to surprise us with the monumentality of the Chinese Great Wall or with the synonym of greatness and power that the Roman Colosseum printed. And, if we move closer to our times, the engineering wonders of the Eiffel Tower or the Burj Khalifa.

But our ideas are sometimes so ambitious that they flirt with wit and fantasy. A clear example of this is the Dyson sphere, which due to its qualities could be considered the mother of all mega-structures, surpassing all the projects we have built. We are facing a project that, despite its excessive proportions, has captured the attention of curious people, scientists and even screenwriters. So what’s so special about this sphere? Let’s see.

Dyson’s Sphere, a shell for our Sun

The Anglo-American theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson first proposed the concept in his scientific article from 1960 called ‘Search for artificial stellar sources of infrared radiation’. As the headline suggests, the scholar’s theory revolved around the growing energy need. According to his reasoning, there would come a time when a technologically advanced civilization would need to drastically improve its energy harvesting systems to meet its needs and continue to evolve.

Solutions such as harvesting energy from the air, as proposed by Nikola Tesla, or building solar power plants in space did not appear in Dyson’s plans. If you had to think big, this scientist didn’t mess with little girls and literally went all out. In his article, he proposed the idea of ​​harvesting energy directly from the local star of the civilization in question, which in our case would be the Sun. But aren’t we already doing that? The idea was one step beyond anything known, and it was about circling the star to collect more energy than was usable from the planet’s surface.

In the case of the solar system, the amount of energy produced by our parent star would be enough to supply billion times Earth’s current energy needs, according to a Universe Today article. To take advantage of all the benefits of our star up close, as we say, we would have to build a structure large and strong enough to surround it, possibly lined internally with solar panels or other energy harvesting technology, the so-called Dyson Sphere.

The thing about this scientist did not end there. Building such a structure around the local star would require an immeasurable amount of materials and resources. Starting from the plan that this civilization had the necessary technology to build it, it should dismantle part of its neighboring planet or planets to fulfill its mission. Consequently, he could no longer live in it. This is where current ideas of becoming an interplanetary species and colonizing Mars when we can no longer inhabit Earth seem meaningless.

Dyson made this very clear, at least on paper, in his article from the 1960s. “One should expect that, within a few thousand years of entering the stage of industrial development, any intelligent species will find itself occupying an artificial biosphere that completely surrounds its parent star. Precisely, in this artificial biosphere the members of this civilization would end up living, and of course, they would no longer have to worry about the lack of energy to continue evolving.

A negative aspect of the Dyson Sphere is that the starlight would be partially dimmed for distant cosmic observers (if any). Infrared radiation, however, would not disappear, so it could be detected even light-years away. “If infrared telescopes detect a warm object, but nothing appears at visible wavelengths, it could be a Dyson sphere,” said Carl Sagan in 1966. Interestingly, this phrase has not gone unnoticed by some scientific researchers.

Dyson sphere in ‘Star Trek Next Generation’

As New Scientist magazine points outa team led by Jason Wright, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Pennsylvania, is using data from the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope to search for Dyson spheres from other civilizations. The researchers believe they can detect these objects thanks to measurements of the infrared spectrum. They are confident that if a Dyson Sphere were circling a star equivalent to our Sun they could easily detect it.

Dyson’s Sphere has also found its way into the world of science fiction. In one of the episodes of ‘Star Trek Next Generation’, the USS Enterprise ship meets one of these space megastructures. Crew members are struck by this metal chest that emits infrared radiation, but is visually opaque. Captain Jean-Luc Picard seems to be the only one who knows exactly what they are looking at. To try to explain the functionality of the mysterious object, Picard cites physicist Freeman Dyson and his paper from the 1960s.

Images: kevin gill | ioerror

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