Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
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7:49 · 25M views · Dec 20, 2018
A Kurzgesagt animated explainer on how humanity could build a Dyson sphere, a swarm of structures capturing the sun's energy. It covers using Mercury's materials and a step-by-step construction approach.
HN links it as a nice intro to what a realistic Dyson swarm would require, and as a companion to megastructure discussions.
7 comments from Hacker News
Nice intro video on what may be realistically required to build a Dyson sphere: this video By Kurzgesagt, all their videos are excellent and informed by the literature.
And yet the capability is there within the technologies on display in various books. In Use of Weapons a Mind replaces one character with a machine duplicate that exactly replicates her personality and physiology, complete with memory dumps before and after so that when she gets back she will remember having been in both places. In the same book, the main character is a non-Culture mercenary who got the Culture to make him immortal as his first payment. He can be killed, but he’ll never age. Everyone in the Culture thinks that he’s really weird for doing so. Everyone in the Culture uses their drug glands to consciously tweak their mood and mental capabilities, and when they sleep many of them spend subjective weeks playing adventure–fantasy computer games. With all of that ready to hand, you would think that at least a few Culture citizens would have themselves scanned and uploaded into a computer where they can spend eternity doing whatever they way, including learning how to expand their mind into a Mind. Instead most of them choose to die after 400 years. I think Banks just wanted to write a particular type of story, and so he just air–brushed that possibility out so that people would stay people. Also, don't lose sight of the fact that this utopia is really only possible because energy is literally free, in that any quantity of energy can simply be summoned into existence at any time, for no cost. And they never seem to have to plan for how to dissipate the waste heat, ei
Extracts: The machine would use a Dyson sphere to collect mass, separate out helium to push the sun, and fire hydrogen at the sun to avoid crashing into the sun. It could push the Sun at a speed of about 50 light years per one million years. Matthew Caplan from Illinois State University designed the machine at the behest of Munich-based YouTube channel Kurzgesagt. The channel then created a stunning video to illustrate the device, which it dubbed the Caplan Thruster, and a paper Caplan wrote describing the machine has also been published in the journal Acta Astronautica. Video links: Kaplan thruster: [LINK] Dyson sphere: this video
A Dyson Sphere is not a solid object. Instead, it's many small objects each of which is in a stable orbit. this video Also, a huge laser can certainly direct energy in a direction that nobody will notice. Unfortunately, creating the laser beam also creates waste heat, and that waste heat can be seen. Even collecting waste heat generates waste heat that you cannot collect. On the other hand, if you want a huge laser for some other purpose (such as vaporizing distant planets), then a Dyson Sphere is the ideal way to create one. [LINK]
heh [LINK] made me think of the recent Universal Paperclips thread, to which I will not hyperlink in order to spare the audience from the productivity virus :-) But, in the spirit of fun productivity degradation, I love, love, love this game: [LINK] Also relevant, from Kurzgesagt: this video