Building a Dyson sphere Whats the payback time of disassembling a planet?

News Summary

  • So we’re going to see how long it will take to recoup the energy investment of building one and what the optimal design might be to minimize the initial investment.To get at some numbers, we’re going to make a lot of assumptions.
  • How much energy would it cost us to rearrange our solar system, and how long would it take to get our investment back?
  • They would then go on to use that enormous amount of energy to mine bitcoin, make funny videos on social media, delve into the deepest mysteries of the Universe, and enjoy the bounties of their energy-rich civilization.But what if the alien civilization was… us?
  • Here, we just want a general sense of feasibility—will building a Dyson sphere take a (relatively) small, medium, or extreme amount of energy?
  • If they want to move a mountain-sized solar panel into a different orbit, that also takes energy.For these and many other reasons, a Dyson sphere costs energy.
  • Can we actually achieve a net gain in energy by building a Dyson sphere?I’ll state from the outset that I'm a theoretical cosmologist, not an engineer.
6 with In 1960, visionary physicist Freeman Dyson proposed that an advanced alien civilization would someday quit fooling around with kindergartenlevel stuff like wind turbines and nuclear reactor [+3591 chars]