Dyson Sphere

Submission 27,395

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About

A Dyson Sphere is a hypothetical energy-absorbing structure built to encompass a star to provide power for an advanced civilization. While some have imagined the sphere to be a giant solid enclosed framework, others have speculated that the structure would be made of orbiting satellites sometimes referred to as a "Dyson swarm."

Origin

In 1937, the novel Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon was released, in which several disembodied travelers discover a future civilization that use large structures to absorb solar energy. In 1960, physicist Freeman Dyson wrote a paper titled "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation,"^[1] in which he speculated that advanced alien civilizations may create megastructures to encapsulate local stars to provide enough energy to support themselves. While Dyson referred to the structure as a "shell," the term "Dyson sphere" was subsequently popularized.

Spread

On October 12th, 1992, Season 6 Episode 4 of Star Trek: The Next Generation was broadcast, in which the crew of the Starship Enterprise discovers a large Dyson sphere in space (shown below, left). On December 7th, 2010, YouTuber jasquatch uploaded a video speculating that the planet Earth is actually a Dyson sphere controlled by the Illuminati (shown below, right).

On April 17th, 2012, the science fiction blog io9^[4] published an article outlining several hypothetical ways to construct a Dyson sphere. On July 17th, Redditor Creature_From_Beyond submitted an artist's rendition of a Dyson sphere to the /r/Futurology^[2] subreddit (shown below).

On September 15th, 2015, the SciShow Space YouTube channel uploaded a video titled "Building a Dyson Sphere," discussing the various astroengineering issues with building the hypothetical megastructure (shown below).

WTF Star

On September 11th, 2015, astronomer Tabetha Boyajian published the article "Planet Hunters X. KIC 8462852 – Where's the Flux,"^[9] describing changes in brightness coming from star KIC 8462852, also known as "Tabby's star" or "WTF Star." Some scientists speculated the reductions in light could be explained by a newly created asteroid field or a could of comets orbiting the star. Additionally, others speculated that the changes in brightness could be caused by a swarm of Dyson sphere-like satellites. On October 13th, The Atlantic^[8] published an article about the star titled "The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy," which included a statement by astronomer Jason Wright about the potential extraterrestrial origins of the anomaly:

"When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked. Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build."

On the following day, Slate's Bad Astronomy^[6] blog published an article expressing skepticism toward extraterrestrial explanations for the star's irregular dimming. On October 15th, Wright published a blog post^[7] about the Internet reaction to his statement, which criticized online media coveragefor being sensational and embarrassing.