Hey everybody, welcome back to explain recommendations seeking to meet their gigantic energy needs building something around this earth? Sounds very ambitious how would a Dyson sphere theoretically harness early energy from the star. So you can basically imagine building a shell structure around the Sun this shell would capture solar energy directly preventing it from escaping into space. The energy could then be used to power anything from city to to the entire planet's or even for interstellar travel building a structure like this kind of sound mining materials and technology we even need.
Well currently we do not have to know the toxic We need materials that can withstand extreme temperatures and radiation plus a way to maintain such a structure It's way beyond our current capabilities, but it's pretty fun to think about future possibilities, right? Okay, so while we're imagining there are some other terms and types of dicens fields that have been thrown around maybe you can touch on a few of those Oh, yeah, although I'm pretty fun lots of different ideas And of course they're all theoretical instead of one solid shell you can have a dicens swarm for instance Which consists of a large number of individual solar collectors basically orbiting the star This is a little bit more feasible with our current technology And then there's the Dyson bubble which uses lightweight solar sails that stay aloft by the pressure of the star's radiation Which is also pretty fun. So when you think about such massive potential energy gains What could a Dyson sphere practically be used as a solution to with kind of humanities future energy needs? What could you apply it to?
Yeah, the energy output from a star like our Sun is intense. It's it's gigantic I mean harnessing even a fraction of it could power human civilization for millennials the scale of construction and resources needed are However, still vast as just not currently practical But that doesn't stop you from dreaming of harnessing the immense energy possible from a Dyson sphere and things like interstellar travel could then be Confeasible we could potentially see aircrafts or as spacecrafts power directly by this energy exploring further into space and we ever ever Have before we've been wondering if there could be any other civilizations that have built a Dyson sphere already Are there any well, you know, we haven't discovered any other civilizations, right? But in October of 2015 Planet hunters is citizen scientists discover some of the usual life fluctuations of the star Kic 846 to 852 And that actually raised some pretty fun press speculation that I think swarmed may have been discovered everyone was pretty excited I did generate quite a lot of excitement I remember that but the excitement unfortunately did not last what did it turn out to be no no unfortunately some subsequent analysis Showed that the results were consistent with simply the presence of some dust So we've got to keep looking then If you did send us an email we are at the live five podcast at gmail.com We love hearing from you Especially when you've got ideas and comments and suggestions for us And if you are a regular listener of this podcast, please do take the time to leave us a review or rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify It only takes a minute or less and it really does help other people to find out show So me and Kevin really appreciate that as always thank you to the community at r-slash-extendacle-5 and we will see you all next week