Physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, author of the famous concept of "Dyson spheres" and participant in the development of the nuclear starship Orion, died at the age of 96 last Friday.
He worked with Richard Feynman and Hans Bethe and was engaged in quantum electrodynamics. His most significant achievement in this area is considered to be the unification of three versions of quantum electrodynamics created by Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga.
Dyson later participated in research projects related to nuclear power, solid state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics and biology. About 50 years ago, he was involved in the Orion nuclear explosive project, a ship for interstellar travel. It was assumed that if this starship was equipped with a thick protective plate and detonated one after another hydrogen bombs behind it, then it could reach a speed of 10 percent of the speed of light.
The scientist was also actively involved in the search for extraterrestrial civilizations, and it was in this area that he put forward his most famous idea - the idea of "Dyson spheres", hypothetical giant cocoons around stars, which could be built by highly developed civilizations to collect all the energy of the star.
According to Dyson, such a megastructure will be an inevitable consequence of the growing demand for electricity. Thus, the creation of the Dyson sphere corresponds to a new level of advancement on the Kardashev scale - the transition of civilization from Type 1 to Type 2.
This is a very large-scale project, even a hyper-scale one. To implement it, our descendants will have to place many solar collectors around our star, each of which will be located in its own independent and stable orbit.
Thus, the Sun will gradually be surrounded by a large number of giant structures that will absorb almost all the energy emitted by our star.
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To accomplish this, it will be necessary to disassemble entire planets and asteroids in order to obtain the required amount of material that will be needed to complete this colossal task. According to theoretical calculations, for the construction of the Dyson sphere around the Sun, it will be necessary to collect matter with a mass of the order of the mass of Jupiter.
For example, it will be possible to smash Mercury with thermonuclear explosions and use its massive iron core to produce incredibly large amounts of hematite. This highly reflective substance could be turned into giant polished mirrors that would serve as solar collectors in the Dyson sphere.
By then, giant build space projects will be commonplace. Teams for robotic extraction of matter will collect the necessary resources throughout the solar system, and low gravity will make assembly in outer space very efficient. Over time, solar collectors will be built on orbiting objects faster and faster. The reflective surfaces of the collectors will be very thin, like aluminum foil, but at the same time very large, several kilometers in diameter. Each collector will reflect light from the Sun into a small solar power plant, which will then use a laser to direct the energy to where it is needed.
At the first stages of the creation of a mega-structure such as the Dyson sphere, it is logical to limit ourselves to only one of its elements - a ring of collectors located in the circumsolar orbit. Such a ring was described by the American science fiction writer Larry Niven (Laurence van Cott Niven) in the series of science fiction novels "Ringworld"
Such use of radiation from a star will allow trillions of times the current energy capacity of one planet, for example, the Earth.
Of course, the creation of the Dyson sphere will be a mega-project and it will take more than one decade to make even a prototype and get closer to development. But, each new mirror-collector in orbit will increase the efficiency of space construction, since the robotic collectors will be able to use the received energy in the right place in the circumsolar orbit.
Perhaps such an exponential process will allow the rapid formation of a Dyson-like megastructure less than a century after the creation of the first mirror.
Time will tell…
