Sufficiently and feasibly
Im all for planning ahead, but but you’re a few centuries too early for feasibility studies.
I don’t think so, but we could possibly put a ring around the sun large enough to fit every human being to ever live on comfortably.
This would make both Apollo and Beyonce very happy.
There are a couple of physically feasable versions, yeah. The sci-fi solid shell with an Earthlike environment magically glued to the interior isn’t possible, but that’s not what any serious physicist or futurist was ever talking about to begin with.
A Dyson swarm in particular is quite easy, as it can be assembled piece by piece is immediately useful from day one. Just start manufacturing solar power satellites, and keep doing that until the orbital space around the Sun is full. There’s plenty of raw materials in the solar system to support building that.
I like Dyson Spheres/Swarms in concept. Is it possible on paper, yes. Is if feasible to accomplish? No. Not even a little bit, imo.
Any Dyson sphere or even swarm would demand an unfathomable amount of resources, time, and manpower. It would be a mega project that would take thousands of years. You’d need to totally disassemble a cosmic body like Mercury or the Moon to even have enough materials. Even with wildly more advanced tech, you’d end up using an incredible amount of energy to build this, and the EROI would take hundreds more years to ever come to fruition after it’s completed.
I’m of the opinion that any civilization advanced enough to theoretically build such a megastructure has likely figured out a much more feasible energy source by that point.
Do you think the risk can be adequately and feasibly underwritten?
Not currently. We have no plan to make one.
If it were to be technically feasible, what would that have to look like? If you found a way for every insurance company on Earth to jointly underwrite part of the risk, is it theoretically possible?
I wonder if there would even be enough accessible matter (on Earth) to manufacture such a crazy thing and I havent even considered or am unaware of how it would even be possible to manufacture even if we technically could
Not enough resources exist currently that are accessible to us, and not enough money exists to pay workers to get the job done.
On earth? No, not by a long shot. We would need to get into the deconstructing planets business.
Or at the very least, the entire asteroid belt would put a good dent in it.
For a power-collecting Dyson sphere you don’t actually need all that much matter. Most of the sphere’s area can be thin metal foil that just acts as a mirror to concentrate light on power converters, for example. You could build it with asteroidal material.
If you really want to get massive, then Mercury is usually the first target people propose for demolition. Lots of heavy elements and already close in to the Sun. And nobody cares much about Mercury.
Do you think the risk can be adequately and feasibly underwritten?
I mean, I suppose that technically a lone satellite with solar panels in orbit around the Sun is probably an extremely limited form of a Dyson sphere — it’s not as if there’s some firm lower bound on what percentage of energy output from the star that needs to be captured. One could presumably scale up incrementally.
So, in that technical sense, sure.
Could humanity in 2025 aspire to build enough infrastructure to capture something like 1% of the Sun’s output? No, that’s just way beyond our capabilities now.
I mean, I suppose that technically a lone satellite with solar panels in orbit around the Sun is probably an extremely limited form of a Dyson sphere — it’s not as if there’s some firm lower bound on what percentage of energy output from the star that needs to be captured. One could presumably scale up incrementally.
By that definition the solar panels that are already on the Earth are a tiny Dyson swarm. And honestly, I approve.
They aren’t in orbit, and they aren’t in orbit around a star, so not really part of a Dyson swarm (and also technically don’t add to the energy available to our civilization), but I still approve of your solar panels. You could argue that the ISS or the few solar orbit satellites we have are the start of a Dyson swarm even if they don’t add to our energy pool.
Well, I’m pretty sure the Earth is in orbit around a star [citation needed], so I would think solar panels on Earth would also be in orbit around a star.
Sure, what would be the obstacle? You start by building a single solar energy collector. Then build another. Then another. And so forth.
We don’t even have the technology to beam solar efficiently down to earth from earth orbit, yet.
