What is the purpose of A Dyson Sphere?

this article is all about building this huge structure around the sun, and harnessing all of its energy.

A couple of years ago, scientists suggested that a star named Tabby star was actually surrounded by a Dyson sphere, a huge mega object built around a scar to harness as much of its light as possible.

This hypothetical structure could help power and advanced civilization. The reason why scientists suggested that was because the star was dipping in brightness, sometimes by just 1% and sometimes by up to 20% for days and weeks at a time. But recent studies have pointed to more down to earth explanations, such as clouds of dust or comet fragments.

However, such a mega structure has been proposed back in 1960, by a British American theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson. In a science paper search for artificial stellar sources of infrared radiation.

He was imagining a solar system size solar power collection system, not as a power source for us Earthlings. But as a technology that other advanced civilizations in our galaxy would inevitably use. One should expect that within a few 1000 years of its entering the stage of industrial development. Any intelligent species should be bound occupy an artificial biosphere, which completely surrounds its parent star, Dyson road and the 1960 science paper.

Dyson proposed that searching for evidence of the existence of such mega structures might lead to the discovery of advanced civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy.

This mega structure is usually imagined as a gigantic shell enclosing the sun lined with mirrors or solar panels designed to collect every bit of a stars energetic output.

In the case of our sun, that colossal failure is 400 septillion watts per second, which is on the order of a trillion times our current worldwide energy usage.

If you’re on our planet, the amount of energy available to us is determined by the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth’s surface.

at Earth distance from the Sun, that equates to approximately 1300 watts per square metre, which drops to around 1000 if you forced the light to go through the atmosphere.

For most of human history, energy consumption was pretty modest. Humans relied on caloric energy by consuming food and used animals to perform daily tasks. Burning biomass such as wood was the biggest source of energy. But in the 18 hundred’s, the Industrial Revolution began, and humans started to use coal, natural gas and petroleum, all of which are non renewable fossil fuels. But that’s a big problem.

Researchers estimate our current annual global energy consumption is estimated to be 580,000,0. 80% of this energy comes from fossil fuels, a leading source of global warming pollution, damaging the planet like never before.


The extraction of fossil fuels done mostly through mining or drilling, damages land and causes water and air pollution, and threatens the health of miners.

But the solution to Earth’s energy could come from outside the earth, only 1,000,000,000th of the sun’s total energy output actually reaches the earth. Of all the energy that does reach are slightly less than 34% is reflected to space by clouds.

The Earth itself reflects another 66% to space. our need for energy will increase as humanity evolves, and advances in technology, so the world will eventually have to come up with an effective way to deal with this growing energy demand.

The answer to this problem could be the Dyson sphere, a highly advanced piece of technology, able to harness the power of the sun.

This sphere can be the size of Earth’s orbit around the sun. We orbit at a distance of 93 million miles 150 million kilometres or one astronomical unit. You would never ever run out of livable space and such a mega structure.

We’re talking several billion times the inhabitable surface of humanity would be able to power itself for generations. But what would a Dyson Sphere be like?

There are four types you should know about Dyson rain, a Dyson swarm, a Dyson bubble at the Dyson shell. A Dyson ring would be a gigantic ring around the sun, comprised of a huge number of solar sails, which would wirelessly transfer the energy of the sun back to Earth.

Secondly, a Dyson swarm model is a collection of countless rings full of solar panels ready to collect energy and transfer it back to a Dyson level would be similar to the previous ideas composed of many independent constructs, and likewise could be constructed incrementally.

But unlike the previous ones, the constructs making it up are not an orbit around the star, but would be static satellites suspended by use of enormous light sails, using radiation pressure to counteract the stars pool of gravity.

The idea of creating a Dyson Sphere definitely sounds like a science fiction movie made by Arthur Clarke. But it is very much possible and could become a reality once technology catches up with this ambitious idea. And as you know, technological progress is advancing at an ever accelerating pace.