Dyson’s Sphere: Beyond Planet Earth

Dyson’s sphere is a hypothetical megastructure enclosure to harness nuclear energy of star. Being

constructed around a star converting, storing and utilising star's energy output, it is a foundational step for human civilisation for becoming multi-planetary species across the galactic expanse.

Figure : Dyson’s Sphere

In an apparent bid to gauge alien’s whereabouts scientists have been using telescopes, analysing radio signals, deep delving visible and infrared light waves, and more recently technosignatures. Technosignatures can be Dyson’s sphere, space mirrors, polluted clouds due to industrial activities in exoplanet, energy source etc. 

Dyson’s search for alien life pivoted around a ginormous megastructures whose signatures are detectable due to it’s sheer size from light years away. 

Unless we can overcome Fermi Paradox a futuristic civilizations should belong to at least Type 2 category to build a megastructure such as this. 

FOR CLASSIFICATIONS ON CIVILIZATION REFER HERE-CIVILIZATION CLASSIFICAITON

Within this scale achievement of Dyson’s sphere will be key for transition into Type 2 Civilisation. 

Existing advanced instruments used will be unable to detect a Type 1 civilization due to mega interstellar distance. Type 3 civilizations are expected to change the signatures emitted so dramatically and drastically that the planet's location would be very hard to detect from appearance in the sky. The likely candidate would be Type 2 civilisation whose technosignatures would be on par with our advancement of instruments. 

The civilisation would occupy a habitat surrounding the star and using, for its own purposes, the star's entire output of starlight. The flux of energy carried by the starlight would then be radiated as waste heat from the outer surface of the habitat. From the perspective of the twenty-first century a Dyson sphere built from the shards of Mars would be one of the biggest mega project a human civilsation needs to undertake on the order of ten billion trillion times heavier than the International Space Station. 

A self replicating robot undertaking the tasks to build the next clone robots would be the most efficient means of building a Dyson Swarm. If one kilometer of robots takes one month to build it would take a decade to complete the super mega project.

Literary Origin

The true progenitor of the idea of an artificial biosphere was the science-fiction writer Olaf Stapledon. In his novel, "Star Maker" (Stapledon, 1987, page 179), he described the appearance of a galaxy in the far future occupied by a type III civilization and seen from a great distance. "Not only was every solar system now surrounded by a gauze of light traps, which focused the escaping solar energy for intelligent use, so that the whole galaxy was dimmed, but many stars that were not suited to be suns were disintegrated, and rifled of their prodigious stores of sub-atomic energy". The novel was published in 1937 and Dyson read it in 1945. Unfortunately he neglected to refer to Stapledon when he published his paper (Dyson, 1960). If Dyson had given proper credit to Stapledon in that paper, then the artificial biospheres would have been called "Stapledon clouds", and would never have been given the misleading name "Dyson spheres".