![]() Making a full Dyson Swarm that would catch nearly all of the sun’s rays, though, would require dismantling perhaps the entire inner solar system-Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. The small planet would have been converted into a horde of mining and manufacturing robots, powered by fleets of Dyson Swarm solar collectors. ParamountĪfter 40 years of getting worked over, Mercury would be kaput. "A population living on the interior surface would have virtually inexhaustible sources of power." - Captain Picard. The material is rocketed into orbit (not too tough, given Mercury’s weak gravity), then fabricated into an energy-collecting Dyson Swarm unit.Īnother view of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s proposed Dyson Sphere. His plan relies on exponential returns from a virtuous cycle beginning with robots mining material from Mercury. Like a dense cloud of bees buzzing around a hive, a Dyson Swarm largely shrouds the sun from external view, capturing most of the available solar energy.Īrmstrong says that a robot-driven manufacturing process could build up a Dyson Swarm in as little as several decades. ![]() “The Swarm is the more realistic model,” Armstrong says.Ī Dyson Swarm consists of thousands of relatively small mirrors or solar panels in an array of orbits around the sun. A related concept-the Dyson Swarm-is more promising. ![]() Okay, so the fanciful Dyson Sphere appears to defy the laws of physics. If oceans, continents, and clouds were to be individually visible along the habitable band stretching upward from either horizon, they’d have to be monstrous. According to a Dyson Sphere FAQ posted by Armstrong’s Oxford colleague, Anders Sandberg, Earth would be about the size of a pea glimpsed at a distance of 100 meters (or, to Americanize the reference, from one football end zone to the other.) The “sides” of the inner Sphere would seem to contain the observer within a bowl-like tunnel, with the sun, constantly overhead, appearing as a light at the tunnel’s “end.” Astonishingly, along those sides, an object the size of the Earth would look miniscule. If the Dyson Sphere were possible, its residents would be treated to an awesome vista. But this rotation would wrack the megastructure with yet more destructive stress. By spinning the whole sphere, you create gravity in the form of centrifugal force along an equatorial band. However, comparatively little of the surface would be habitable on account of a lack of gravity. If it could be stabilized, a Dyson Sphere built at 93 million miles from the sun, the same distance as Earth, would contain about 600 million times the surface area of our planet in its interior.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |