Eli5: What facts are holding humanity back from creating a Dyson sphere in reality?
In: 0
Funding. Even the biggest space programs don’t get much funding, proportionally speaking. It would require more money than we’ve ever spent on anything in space to get that going. A Dyson Sphere would have to be huge–many orders of magnitude bigger than anything we’ve ever built.
It would also be completely inefficient to have to launch all the requisite parts into space, so first we’d have to figure out how to build things in space, and ideally how to harvest the materials directly from space (maybe from the Moon, somewhere easier to launch from) so we don’t have to launch those either. Unless we can circumvent the problem by building a space elevator or something like that, but that’s a whole new source of difficulties.
Latest Answers