Eli5: What facts are holding humanity back from creating a Dyson sphere in reality?
In: 0
1) We don’t know how to build something on that scale in space. Building stuff in space is hard and a Dyson sphere would be the single biggest engineering challenge in the history of man by several orders of magnitude. We don’t even know where to start yet.
2) We don’t have the technology to efficiently launch all of those materials into space. Rocketry is still a nascent science and we are limited in how much we can launch at any point in time.
3) We don’t have the funding. At its cheapest, it costs $3k/kg to get something into space (more to get it positioned like it would need to be for a sun). That seems cheap, but a Dyson sphere would be beyond huge, and would likely cost trillions in launches alone, which says nothing of the cost of the technology itself. The ISS cost more than $150B – a Dyson sphere would likely far exceed global GDP to build it.
Latest Answers