Okay but where does the invisible hand dryer go?
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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Would recommend Orion's Arm for "theoretical" but fiction takes on structures like this:
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/5067d430e6021
That article is not comprehensive either, their universe is quite expansive.
Two of my favorites may be "W-brains," computing structures with very carefully arranged wormhole pairs serving as data buses to overcome the latency of communicating at such scale, and "neural stars," another take which is a computational structure inside a neutron star sized volume/mass (again, to overcome latency issues).
There are much smaller megastructures too, depending on where in the timeline you are looking.
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You might like this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A about how to build one from Earth.
Wait! The same problem Larry Niven’s Ringworld have also applies to Dyson Spheres? Huh! Saving to read later.
We will be lucky to have Dyson vacuums at the end of this century
Wait until you learn about the even bigger ones:
I've played that Stellaris mod, pretty sweet
It's a pretty cool concept, and I enjoyed building one in Dyson Sphere Program, but I don't really understand how you would transport that amount of energy to where you need it. Are they like mirrors that redirect and focus light to some point?
I think the main goal is to power structures around the star and stockpile energy. End end goal would be to create a stellar engine so you can move the solar system itself
Split into several laser beams targeting a bunch of big-ass converters in line around the equator. But it would have to be extremely accurate and route a fraction of total power unless you want to pulverize earth
I guess you would store it in chemicals like oil or create radioactive substances that are optimised for specific energy decay rates
Presumably superconductors are a given at that level of technology. But also at megastructure scale, we could easily talk about very exotic energy transfer methods. Mirrors, microwave transmission antennas, kilometer wide conduits of highly conductive "ground" material, large scale production of fusion fuel, maybe usable power from heat difference is such an efficient process at any scale that the sphere just has a hot side on the inside (towards the sun) and a cold side on the outside (towards cosmic background) and anyone who needs power just patches in a heat pipe to the inside surface.
Actually there's a lot there on that last one. Large efficient power plants could be built anywhere where people needed them hooked with big heat pumps into the inner surface and outer radiator surface, smaller applications could just hook into the inner surface and radiate heat passively and let the climate control deal with it. Rogue energy thieves could be tracked down by scanning for unregistered cold spots on the inner surface.
Most of them use Gap Transmission to get the power from the plants to the users. That's when they use microfolds in space to transmit power across large distances.
Some of them more exotic methods than that though. One of them uses neurotissue harvested from Chuck as a transmission medium.
Any civilization that needs that much energy would have long ago exhausted their planet's resources and gone extinct.