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How Many Legos Would it Take to Build a  Dyson Sphere Around our Solar System?

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2374

This is the first time I’ve used a footnote in a title and the first time I started out any piece with a footnote—there’s a first time for everything, and then some, like what immediately follows: a  footnote to a footnote of a title.

Footnote 1: Freeman Dyson has often said over the years that he really doesn’t think that the Dyson sphere should be named for him, but rather for Olaf Stephenson, whose 1937 scifi adventure opened the door to his idea.²

In our house we sometimes work in silence and sometimes with distraction—the distraction recently has been in the form of Star Trek the Next Generation, and the episode in question was one where there is the discovery of a Dyson Sphere. The “sphere” by quantum electrodynamics Nobel Prize genius and (very) long-time resident of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton Freemnan Dyson first envisioned it back in 1959/1960 was a structure necessitated by a terrifically advanced civilization and its need to utilize all of the energy produced by a star. All. So a “sphere” of some sort (spherically symmetric thin shell object) would be constructed to do so, and in the original version by Dyson it would be built via an astroengineering feat of pulverized planet bits:

“Intelligent beings in another solar system could have hidden their sun by knocking their planets apart and using the pieces to build a hollow ball around their sun”³

At another level Dyson envisioned making this a more “fluid” environment for our solar system by knocking up Jupiter and distributing its mass to form a spherical shield. In the Star Trek episode, however, Enterprise just about bumps into the invisible sphere which is of god-like construction, solid complexity, and according to what I heard was the size of our solar system. That’s a big thing.

And who would make such a thing? Gods? Certainly they would be so to us. Luckily the astronomer Nikolai Semenovich Kardashev⁴ came up with a way of classifying civilizations in a way that makes them conversationally accessible without the godlike qualities making a major entrance.

The original scale of technological development ranked civilizations on a scale of I to III—our own place on the ride according to Dyson is about .7 It might be easier to describe Type I by describing what it isn’t, which is a Type II, where according to Kardashev there is the possibility of interstellar travel and stellar engineering, which is where the folks from Star Trek the Next Generation live. Type II is not Type III, where the change and influence can be brought to bear on a galaxy-wide order. And so Type IV is III expounded to the level of the universe, which gets us to Type V, wielding control and power on the multiverse level, which are civilizations that can make changes/control universe-sized domains. (In the speculative existence world such entities would be the Q from Star Trek, or the lovable and inexplicably powerful source of a magnetic anomaly near the center of the lunar crater Tycho, represented in the form of a curious black monolith.)

Dyson’s gedanken experiment is overpowered by Star Trek—I’m not sure how to even begin to think of such a thing, or what the effort could come close to feeling like. The scope of it is something along the lines of constructing a hollow model of the Earth out of Legos, and then making it bigger. The Earth is 8,000 miles wide—if we made a sphere of Legos two orders of magnitude larger, we’d be making the Sun, which is about 800,000 miles wide. To make the Star Trek Dyson sphere out of Legos we’d need to make the thing 7 billion miles wide, which means the surface area would be 8×10^20 miles. Or in terms of Legos: 16×10³⁶. 16,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is a big number. (Caveat: this is just a guesstimate, so please Lego folks don’t take me to the mat on this.) The real question would be how many layers of Legos would be necessary to perform the function of retaining that solar energy.

What kept nagging at me though was the depiction of the sphere in Star Trek—they give a sense of the thing’s MASSIVENESS, but it is a question of how far away the starship Enterprise was from the structure. I do not recall anyone mentioning the distance of ship-to-sphere, but given the curvature of the object in relation to the Enterprise I would say that the distance would have to be measured in terms of solar system widths. The tv show failed me at this point—they could’ve made some pretty interesting comments about their distance and the size of the great beast, which may have gone some way in making the utter enormity of such a engineering sensation more comprehensible; but still I would think that our puny vocabulary would still come up short with the necessaries to describe it properly. It would be as unutterably difficult to describe as the Grand Canyon—though in this case the canyon’s size would be extended to be Earth-sized. There’s something else unresolved that whispers to me—in another episode that I saw they missed a teaching/”wow” opportunity by not making it abundantly clear that in all of the adventures of the Star Trek clan that they never left the Milky Way under their own power. I think at some point they wind up in M31 through some other power not their own. Perhaps it is not well known though that for all of their Warp 9 travel that they are still somewhat “local”, staying in their own galaxy, one of 225 billion galaxies in the universe–this universe.

So when the narrator begins each episode calling space “the final frontier”, it is being pretty presumptive—all things considered, space is probably their first frontier, and then some.

Footnotes:

1. See above.

2. Olaf Stephen was evidently the first to describe this energy-retaining structure built around a star—pretty impressive stuff from someone who was 13 years old in 1899—in his 1937 novel The Star Maker. The vastness for such an undertaking is in place, the result of a universal/cosmic consciousness and millions of years of higher development. Dyson has always credited Stephenson with this idea and suggested that the creation be better termed a “Stephenson Sphere”.

3. A short contemporary review: “Shells Around Suns May Have Been Built”, in Science News,  June 18, 1960, page 389.

http://www.islandone.org/LEOBiblio/SETI1.HTM

See also: Freeman John Dyson, “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation” Science, Vol. 131, June 3, 1960, pp. 1667-1668. ABSTRACT: If extraterrestrial intelligent beings exist and have reached a high level of technical development, one by-product of their energy metabolism is likely to be the large-scale conversion of starlight into far-infrared radiation. It is proposed that a search for sources of infrared radiation should accompany the recently initiated search for interstellar radio communications.”

http://www.islandone.org/LEOBiblio/SETI1.HTM

And this from Robert Bradbury, “Dyson Shells: A Retrospective”, Aeiveos Corp, 2001:  “In June of 1960,2 Freeman Dyson, proposed that growing civilizations would eventually have to harvest all of the power produced by their star. He suggested that even at the low growth rate of 1%, civilizations would require only 3000 years for this process. This would require the dismemberment of the planets to provide sufficient material to expand the living space of their biosphere”. He argued that we could do this to Jupiter using the power available from the Sun over 800 years…” 

And this:  C. Sagan and R. G. Walker, “The infrared detectability of Dyson civilizations,” Astrophysical Journal 144, pp. 1216{1217, 1966.

4. Kardashev, Nikolai (1964). “Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations”. Soviet Astronomy, volume 8: 217

Since the Dyson Sphere would be basically invisible on some levels, see Richard Carrigan’s paper “IRAS-Based Whole-Sky Upper Limit on Dyson Sphere”, on how to find one, in the Astrophysical Journal, 698:2075–2086, 2009 June 20

http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/698/2/2075/pdf/0004-637X_698_2_2075.pdf

And just because you can, consider this: Nemanja Kaloper, Antonio Padilla, Norihiro Tanahashi. “Galileon hairs of Dyson spheres, Vainshtein’s coiffure and Hirsute Bubbles “ Journal of High Energy Physics, October 2011, 2011:148.

Also:

Adler, Charles L. Wizards, aliens, and starships : physics and math in fantasy and science fiction. 2014

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Sometimes the future of the past looks a little, well, dodgy, or at least it looks a little too quickly assembled. 

I have a few robots to add to this blog’s collection of robots–both are from the same volume of Popular Mechanics for 1928.  The first features a large manikin-like robotic cut-out, with a few swivel joints, and performs a couple of tasks. More than likely this was all that it could do.