Number of asteroids required = Mass of Dyson sphere / Mass of average asteroid Number of asteroids required = 5.03 x 10^5 kg / 1.7 x 10^19 kg = 2.96 x 10^-14 asteroids. Transport the metals: Once the metals have been extracted, they need to be transported back to Earth or to a construction site for use in building the Dyson sphere. Is a copyright claim diminished by an owner's refusal to publish? Electrons etc cannot maintain their identity. Include specific examples of spacesuits, life support equipment and medical equipment. In 2015, astronomer Tabetha Boyajian spotted a mysteriously dim star, its light flickering irregularly in a way that scientists had never observed before. It has a differentiated interior, which means that it has distinct layers of different materials, making it an interesting target for scientific exploration and mining. Of course, you did specify "significant IR" so there is some wiggle room. It is the largest object in the asteroid belt, and it is thought to contain significant amounts of water, carbon, and other valuable minerals. Spaceship orbiting a black hole under the event horizon - a prison where no one escapes. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Even as this advanced alien civilization soaked up all that energy, they could not help but bleed off excess heat into space, lest their platforms melt entirely. Solving for the radius of the sphere R gives $$R = 3\times 10^{15} meters$$ What would it take to mine asteroids for procuring this material? The composition of this material would include silicon, carbon and metals. Honeybee Robotics Planetary Deep Drill: This is a lightweight, compact drill designed for deep drilling on other planets and asteroids. Copyright 2007-2023 & BIG THINK, BIG THINK PLUS, SMARTER FASTER trademarks owned by Freethink Media, Inc. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. It has a drilling depth of up to 1,000 meters and a hole diameter of up to 5 inches. There are quantised zones where orbits are possible or not possible, so dont take other answers at face value if they involve relativistic speeds or distances within a few radii. .css-v1xtj3{display:block;font-family:FreightSansW01,Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif;font-weight:100;margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}@media (any-hover: hover){.css-v1xtj3:hover{color:link-hover;}}@media(max-width: 48rem){.css-v1xtj3{font-size:1.1387rem;line-height:1.2;margin-bottom:1rem;margin-top:0.625rem;}}@media(min-width: 40.625rem){.css-v1xtj3{line-height:1.2;}}@media(min-width: 48rem){.css-v1xtj3{font-size:1.18581rem;line-height:1.2;margin-bottom:0.5rem;margin-top:0rem;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-v1xtj3{font-size:1.23488rem;line-height:1.2;margin-top:0.9375rem;}}All You Need to Know About Supernovae, Everything You Need to Know About Wolf-Rayet Stars, Meet the First Woman Astronaut on a Moon Mission. Which 'annihilation' processes dump energy to the cosmological plasma? Honestly. A global coalition of scientists are in pursuit of the answer, analyzing six different types of energy that we could hypothetically harness from a black hole. The next surrounding Dyson sphere would absorb this waste heat and use it for its computational purposes, all while giving off waste heat of its own. Hsiao and his collaborators from the Institute of Astronomy in Taiwan, brings us to the very edge of possibility itself. Life finds a way particularly if it has a moon. Ganymede: Ganymede is the largest moon of Jupiter and is known to have significant deposits of various metals, including iron, nickel, and aluminum. The basic component is like a little brick, and we know how to build bricks to build solar panels and load them into space. Think about the energy required to carry more and more people into space as the world's billionaires venture outside of our planet, plus the energy demands for NASA's own ambitions to install people on the moon. All trademarks are property of their respective owners in the US and other countries. $\begingroup$ Building a Dyson sphere is about capturing energy output and using that to power to run the civilisation inhabiting the sphere. Probably ONLY when you research the final tech, aka, Looping. Copper Copper is relatively rare in the solar system and is mainly found in the crusts of the rocky planets. For the uninitiated, prolific scholar Freeman Dyson first described his namesake Dyson sphere concept in a landmark 1960 paper. The energy doesn't have to be visible radiation - it can be anything output by the enclosed object.. The mass of an average asteroid can vary widely, but we can use the mass of the largest known metallic asteroid, 16 Psyche, as an estimate. The estimated cost for a new DM30 II is around $1.5 million. Maybe have something that's mentioned in this video by Kurzgesagt? Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. This makes me wonder: If the black holes in other galaxies were covered in dyson spheres Could we detect that currently? (I was especially impressed by the level of detail, including equipment type and cost, that chatGPT included in its answers). A Type III civilization could combine them. | by Gunnar De Winter | Predict | Medium 500 Apologies, but something went wrong on our Additionally, the cost of actually constructing the Dyson sphere would likely be much higher than just the cost of materials, as it would involve a massive engineering and construction effort on an unprecedented scale. Blackholes don't work like this. Get counterintuitive, surprising, and impactful stories delivered to your inbox every Thursday. To learn more, see our tips on writing great answers. You don't want the elements of your swarm colliding with the accretion disk, so they will need to orbit well clear of it, much farther out than the minimum orbital radius. As for how your managed BH Dyson sphere might fare, have you ever seen a Chinese lantern catch fire? To subscribe to this RSS feed, copy and paste this URL into your RSS reader. And that's challenging.. No, I don't think so. In principle, no, you cannot make a Dyson sphere which is indistinguishable from the CMB. The reason is fairly simple. Let's start with a blackbody A: Here are a few examples of drilling equipment that could potentially be used for mining on Psyche, along with their estimated costs: Its worth noting that the cost of drilling equipment for use on Psyche would likely be much higher than the above estimates, as the equipment would need to be specially designed and built to operate in the unique environment of an asteroid. A black hole is a region of space with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing can escape its influence, not even light itself. A: Building a Dyson sphere would require a variety of metals for various purposes, such as constructing the framework, providing structural support, and facilitating energy transmission. [24], Dyson spheres appear as a background element in many works of fiction, including the 1964 novel The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber where aliens enclose multiple stars in this way. Dyson speculated that such structures would be the logical consequence of the escalating energy needs of a technological civilization and would be a necessity for its long-term survival. Now, all of this is obviously the purest of pure speculation. Valve Corporation. Spacesuits: A high-quality spacesuit can cost anywhere from $2 million to $12 million. The Dyson sphere is the ultimate end goal of the Dyson Sphere Program. @Innovine: I wasn't considering a rigid shell! The Human Research Facility (HRF) on the International Space Station includes equipment for studying cardiovascular function, muscle and bone loss, and other medical issues. But constructing a sphere around a star sounds tricky enough civilizations would need materials that would not tear themselves apart or gravitationally attach themselves around any nearby objects. Assuming an average metal content of 10% by mass, this would give us around 2.8 x 10^20 kilograms of metal available from the asteroid belt. The recent study suggests that instead of building a Dyson sphere around a star, a civilization can build the same megastructure around black holes. Q: Ok. Lets reduce the size of the Dyson sphere. [2][3] They are sometimes used as the type of plot device known as a Big Dumb Object. The estimated cost for the Scarab project is around $1 million. Originally, the scale numbered from I to III, with Type I being a civilization capable of harnessing all of the energy of their home planet (humanity isn't even close to this stage yet). In principle, no, you cannot make a Dyson sphere which is indistinguishable from the CMB. Imagine doing it by mistake first time. 3 Quarks Daily started in 2004 with the idea of creating a curated retreat for everything intellectual on the web. You'll also have to arrange for occasional gaps in the swarm to allow more matter to be fed to the accretion disc, but that is much easier than the other challenges of this project. I was thinking of a radius of 2 AU. Time would move slower. It could be used for the framework and support structure of the Dyson sphere. The estimated cost for a new Kaldo furnace is around $10 million. These robots would need to be able to operate in the low-gravity environment of the asteroid and withstand the extreme temperatures and radiation levels. I know it's a thought experiment now, but these are practical problems that must face any possible society capable of building these structures. Theres little doubt to me that we are in a new regime of machine intelligence here, one that surpasses anything we have seen before. A: Assuming a constant annual GDP growth rate of 2.5%, we can use the formula: where FV is the future value (i.e., $6.117 x 10^33), PV is the present value (i.e., the current world GDP, which is approximately $85 trillion), r is the annual growth rate (i.e., 2.5% expressed as a decimal, or 0.025), and n is the number of years. The wavelengths of such re-radiated energy may be atypical for the star's spectral type, due to the presence of heavy elements not naturally ocurring within the star. Multi-junction solar cells: These are a type of solar cell that use multiple layers of semiconductor material to absorb a wider range of wavelengths of light, resulting in higher efficiency. WebThe innermost Dyson sphere of the Matrioshka brain would draw energy directly from the star it surrounds and give off large amounts of waste heat while computing at a high temperature. This difference in speeds is precisely that referred to above by ceiling and floor observers. Building one in the extreme environment around a binary system with a black hole would be even harder, especially if you wanted to capture energy from the jets. When NikolaiKardashev later devised a scale for classifying advanced aliens based on their capacities to harvest energy, he used the Dyson Sphere as a signature of a Type II civilization. Give me some details on the kind of rocket or launch vehicle that would work. I suggest asking about orbits near a BH on. or at least your mech upgrades. Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), the world's billionaires venture outside of our planet, Your Privacy Choices: Opt Out of Sale/Targeted Ads, Extraterrestrials could use Dyson spheres to harvest. 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