Dyson Sphere

[Thomas Kirby]

It seems like, given the vast internal surface area of a dyson sphere, even if the technology did exist to supply artificial gravity to the entire inner surface it would probably take a significant amount of the power generated by the star just to maintain it. If this were the case it would make the entire process pretty pointless, since the only real reason to build a dyson sphere in the first place is to harness the energy of the star within it - there are far easier ways to just get more living space.

 

When you are talking about millions of millions of square miles of living space, it could become very cost effective if someone could even figure out where to buy the stuff. Artificial gravity would simply be one of the things that we harnessed the power of the star for.

[CPL.Luke]

it would most likely take far more energy than the star could produce to make the sphere in the first place.

[Thomas Kirby]

1400 watts per square meter adds up pretty fast. The energy it takes to move materials decreases tremendously if your pipeline is a few years long instead of a few hours long.

[CPL.Luke]

you still have to process all of the materials

 

in all likelyhood you would need to make the sphere out of a specific material set not something that could vary from part to part, this would result in large portions of the planets being discarded as waste, furthermore in order to make the 80% of the planet that you keep useful you have to mine it, and process it into bars and such. my guess is that that is more energy than a star produces in 1000 years, making it pointless to construct the sphere as whoever was capable of producing enough energy to build it in the first place, would have no use for the energy extracted from the star.

 

It is theoretically possible that whoever built such a sphere would need it for the large amount of surface area it woul provide, in order to live on

 

how many miles are in an AU, as the surface area a sphere would provide would be equal 4/3 pi, square AU's

[Thomas Kirby]

About 93 million miles in an AU.

[CPL.Luke]

so a dyson sphere would have about 36,228,846,481,197,496 square miles of living space

 

for comparison the earth has about 45,836,623 square miles of living space

[ydoaPs]

for comparison the earth has about 45836623 square miles of living space

that seems kind of low. is that just land, or do you cound water as well?

[CPL.Luke]

thats the total surface area of the earth, (assuming the earth is a perfect sphere)

 

I used 24000 miles as the circumference of the earth, found the radius, then put it into the equation for the surface area of a sphere, 4/3(pi)(r^2)

 

I aslo ignored all sense of significant figures in the calculation

[Daymare17]

Just for living space, I'd stick with ringworlds rather than spheres ... using just the Earth's mass you can get 1500 ringworlds with 1 AU diameter, each of which has a larger interior surface area than the total surface of the Earth. In addition to the aforementioned problems of creating gravity on the inside of a sphere, which wouldn't be an issue since you would have thousands of spinning ringworlds each with their own artificial gravity created by the centrifugal force.

 

Perhaps ringworlds could be a transitional stage to a Dyson sphere ... once we have built several tens and hundreds of thousands of ringworlds enclosing the sun, then we would, in effect, gather up all of the Sun's energy.

 

Ah, speculation ...

[ydoaPs]

Just for living space' date=' I'd stick with ringworlds rather than spheres ... using just the Earth's mass you can get 1500 ringworlds with 1 AU diameter, each of which has a larger interior surface area than the total surface of the Earth. In addition to the aforementioned problems of creating gravity on the inside of a sphere, which wouldn't be an issue since you would have thousands of spinning ringworlds each with their own artificial gravity created by the centrifugal force.

 

Perhaps ringworlds could be a transitional stage to a Dyson sphere ... once we have built several tens and hundreds of thousands of ringworlds enclosing the sun, then we would, in effect, gather up all of the Sun's energy.

 

Ah, speculation ...[/quote']i doubt that. actually do the calculations. remember that it can't be made of just anything. also remember that it isn't just 2-d.

[[Tycho?]]

The reason to spin the sphere or ring is to generate artificial gravity. This is so old that it's new again. The enthusiasm for Jerry Pournelle's and Larry Niven's Ringworld stories apparently is well past its natural expiration date.

 

Niven did the Ringworld series solo, you might be thinking of the Mote in Gods Eye series, or other works they did in collaboration.