Eli5: What facts are holding humanity back from creating a Dyson sphere in reality?
In: 0
Dyson spheres are orbitally unstable. They look interesting but they won’t “work” fundamentally (unless there are HUUUGGE engines that can correct unstable orbits).
There is no known material that has sufficient tensile strength (and orbit/rotate fast enough to generate 1G) to construct it with.
The material required to make one would consume all of the mass of all of the stuff in the solar system if the sphere would be anything thicker than a few meters (roughly). That is a lot of stuff.
That is assuming we have the energy harnessing capability to even get it started
Where would we stay while we built one?
Why would we need one in the first place? By the time sufficient technology is available to do this, we might as well terraform Venus and Mars – far “simpler” and certainly more redundancy. The “habitable” ring of a Dyson sphere would fit many quadrillions of people very easily – we’re not likely to get there.
Latest Answers