The Plan to Destroy Mercury
And a good chunk of the rest of our solar system, too.
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The idea of a Dyson sphere is a fascinating one. It’s a megastructure built around a star that would be capable of harvesting the star’s entire energy output. This sort of radiation-absorbing shell would provide enormous amounts of energy to a more advanced civilization. It was named after the astrophysicist Freeman Dyson who suggested that these future civilizations would need much more energy than their planet could provide. They would need to mine energy from new places in order to maintain and grow their infrastructures. The concept is innovative and futuristic, and has been appearing in works of science fiction for several years. So why did Freeman Dyson ever lament the fact that the idea was named after him?
Well, because it just isn’t possible.
The sun, the closest star to our planet, is 109 times the diameter of Earth and weighs 300,000 times more than our small planet. Building a shell around it would require unimaginable amounts of resources, energy, time, and money. It would require more resources than are available in our entire solar system, and that’s just the first problem. There’s no material we know that could be built on such an immense scale and which would be able to withstand the stresses on its structure. It would be completely unstable, in danger of colliding with the star with any nudge from the debris around it.
There’s also the problem of gravity. If the Earth is built outside of the sphere, the gravity from the sun would be too weak to keep our current orbit. If the Earth is inside the sphere, the gravity would be too strong and would pull us towards the sun.
To give you an idea of just what scale we’re talking about, it’s estimated that the framework for the sphere alone would require 1.7 x 10²⁰ cubic meters of material, or about 2 dozen planets’ worth of resources. And after that you’d still have to assume that life on Earth can continue without sunlight, gravity, and the 2 dozen planets we’ve now destroyed.
So is the idea of a Dyson sphere complete fantasy? No, not exactly. You see, there’s a way to resolve all of these problems with a simple change in geometry.
