popularmechanics | Name: Dyson Sphere or Dyson Swarm
Named for: Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson, who proposed the megastructure concept in a 1960 Science paper, "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation"
Selected Science Fiction Portrayals: Across a Billion Years, a 1969 novel by Robert Silverberg; the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Relics," which first aired in 1992; and the 1995 novel The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter.
Humankind
is energy hungry. As our civilization has industrialized over the last
couple centuries, global energy consumption has spiked more than
twentyfold with no end in sight. When demand outstrips what we can reap
from Earth and its vicinity, what will our power-craving descendants do?
A
bold solution: the Dyson Sphere. This megastructure—usually conceived
of as a gigantic shell enclosing the sun, lined with mirrors or solar
panels—is designed to collect every iota of a star's energetic output.
In the case of our sun, that colossal figure is 400 septillion watts per
second, which is on the order of a trillion times our current worldwide
energy usage. What's more, the interior of the Dyson Sphere could, in
theory, provide far more habitable real estate than a measly planet.
Physicist Freeman Dyson
speculated that a technologically advanced race, reaching the limit of
its civilization's expansion because of dwindling matter and energy
supplies, would seek to exploit their sun for all it is worth.
"One
should expect that, within a few thousand years of its entering the
stage of industrial development, any intelligent species should be found
occupying an artificial biosphere which completely surrounds its parent
star," Dyson wrote in the 1960 Science paper that led to his becoming the namesake of this megastructure.
