Published on July 3, 2024 5:27 PM GMT
I disagreed with a bunch of the implications of this comment, but I was curious about the specific question "Would a dyson sphere made our of the solar system necessarily cover (most of) the sun?" (and therefore block out a substantial fraction of light coming to Earth).
The subquestions here seem to be (at first glance, not a physicist)
- What are efficient Dyson spheres probably made of?What percent of the solar system can be converted into Dyson-sphere material?How long would it take to harvest that material?What would the radius of a Dyson sphere be? (i.e. how far away from the sun is optimal). How thick? If the sphere is (presumably) lots of small modules, how far apart are they?
I don't know if there's already been a canonical answer written up somewhere. The motivating question is "if an AI is moderately 'nice', leaves Earth alone but does end up converting the rest of the solar system into a Dyson sphere, how fucked is Earth? (also, on what timescale?)
Discuss