Dyson Swarm, Dyson Sphere

The Dyson sphere (or Dyson shell) was originally proposed by the Information Age physicist Freeman Dyson in the article "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation" as a way for an advanced civilisation to utilise all of the energy radiated by their sun. It is a shell of solar collectors or habitats around the star, so that all (or at least a significant amount) energy will hit a receiving surface where it can be used. 

Dyson Swarms collect vast amounts of energy, which can be used to support many small habitats, or a number of larger habitats or inhabited megastructures. Often, however, the energy is used to support computation, and most of the high Archai use Dyson swarms or shells as parts of their processing substrate.

Many people, even in the Orion's Arm civilisation in the eleventh millennium, still think of a Dyson sphere as a solid shell, with living space on the inside facing upwards to the star; this configuration is impossible even using Orion's Arm technology. However many dyson shells (especially those associated with the Efficiency Maximisation Paradigm) contain virtual worlds, including the famous Impossible Dyson, which has a simulation of a full-sized inverted dyson sphere with trillions of virtual inhabitants..

A G class star like Sol has a energy output of around 4e26 Watts, of which most would be available to do useful work.

There are four main types of Dyson shell in the Orion's Arm civilisation:

Dyson Swarm

Dyson bubble or statites

Suprastellar Shells

Partial Dyson Shells

---------

Dyson Swarms
 Dyson's original idea was a swarm, not a shell, containing enough solar collectors around the star to absorb the starlight, containing at least 10,000 elements and around a million kilometers thick ; here is one, radiating away the waste heat after the swarm has utilised the star's energy.

Note that waste heat is emitted as redder wavelengths; Freeman Dyson recommended a search for such emission in his original article, and in fact over the millennia such thermal signatures have been detected in numerous locations throughout the observable universe. This indicates that intelligent life is widespread, if not common.

A close-up of the pyramidal swarm elements in Oikumene dyson. (click for larger image)

Dyson swarms vary in distances from the primary, as well as individual hab or structure density.
As far as reasonably comfortable (baseline friendly standards) habitats are concerned, most of the swarm might be a distance out equivalent to the position between the orbits of Venus and Earth, or Venus and Mars, in SolSys. Since part of the purpose of all this is to maximise interception of sunlight, most tend to be the former size.

The average distance between the two orbits is roughly 1/3 of an AU or about 31 million miles. This is enough to fit some 3875 earths edge to edge. This volume extends completely around the sun in all directions. So even for really large Bishop ring style habitats there is still plenty of room. Even when using Banks orbitals one could still fit between 3 and 30 rings edge to edge in the space from one orbit to another.

Often the swarm is organised into two or more concentric tori at right angles to one another, a configuration which gives longer term stability while allowing most of the energy to be captured.  

Many swarms have few, or no habitable elements at all, and are simply used for processing by the Archailects and other high toposophic entities; the most efficient form of mind-swarm is the Matrioshka Brain, which has many concentric shells, each one designed to exploit the waste radiation of the shells closer to the star than itself.

Other swarms are used to provide power for starlifting projects; the energy collected is used to power massive superconducting magent rings, which stimulate the star to expell matter in the form of controlled polar jets. Once a considerable amount of matter has been extracted, it may be used to create a Matrioshka Hypernode , a very efficient form of computronium mrgastructure.

-------------

Dyson Bubble, Dyson Statite

A second type of Dyson uses lightweight sails to float on the light pressure from the star; these floating satellites are called statites and can support the weight of photovoltaic cells- these dyson statites are basically an energy collection device, but as they are close to the star they can be quite efficient. The collected energy can be beamed to remote locations for use in life support, industry, computational processing, or transport; these beams can also be used for defense or communication. Energy can also be stored using antimatter or other storage media.

A partial statite bubble surrounds the giant yellow star Sadalmelik (click for larger image)

-------------

Suprastellar Shells

These shells have solid surfaces which are actively supported by dynamic orbital beams; the local gravity is towards the stars, so inhabitants live on the outside. A proportion of the energy collected by the shell is used to mainatain the dynamic rings which support the shell, but the rest is available for computation, manufacturing  or life support.

The Dreamspheres in the Umma Shell are dynamically supported shells surrounding  brown dwarf stars; (click for larger image)

-----------

The Kiyoshi Dysons at Xi Scorpii have several concentric dynamically supported shells
with habitable surfaces sandwiched between them.

----------

Virtual Worlds

Some suprastellar shells are not inhabited by bionts but contain vast processing substrates, some of which, particularly those associated with the Efficiency Maximisation Paradigm and the Panvirtuality, contain vast simulated worlds.  

(click for larger image)
Particularly notable among these virtual worlds is the one contained within the so-called Impossible Dyson

The Impossible Dyson at 18 Scorpii  contains a simulation of an inverted living space on the underneath of the shell, complete a surface area 600 million times that of old Earth, and a current population of twenty two trillion virtual inhabitants.

-----------------------

Partial Dysons

A habiatble megastructure can be built as a Partial Dyson which intercepts only part of the star's energy. This sort of megastructure can still be very large, and can be either in orbit around the star or supported dynamically.

(click for larger image)
The multiple topopoli of Cableville are examples of an orbiting megastructure which encompasses the star, and rotates around its long axis to produce centrifugal gravity. 

---

---

(click for larger image)
Other partial dyson shells such as Kepleria support themselves using drive sail technology or by other exotic means.

Communication Links within Dyson and Matrioshka Brains

A Dyson shell can support vast amounts of processing power, especially if arranged in conentric shells as a so-called Matrioshka Brain. Many of these megastructures contain intelligent entities of high toposophic level. However the great size of the shell or swarm means that coordinated thinking would be a very slow process, as information takes several minutes, moving at the speed of light, to pass from one side of such an object to the other A brain the size of a solar system can be a very slow thinking entity indeed, but a number of measures can be used to speed the thought process up somewhat.

 Unlike a biont or vec brain, the neurons or individual processing elements are constantly moving relative to each other. Because the individual structures and habitats are moving in this way, there is the need for maintaining lines of communication ("synapses" in the case of a Dyson Node) to be maintained between them for the greatest amount of time possible, to allowing for efficient operation and memory storage and retrieval.

There are several solutions, which are generally used together.

For 'conventional' data transmission the best way to keep everything linked would probably be a combination of radio broadcasting and laser communications. Broadcasts, especially if relayed thru spaced repeaters, would be largely immune to line-of- site issues. Use of multiple frequencies would allow lots of different types of info to be sent simultaneously.

Using lasers, different habs/nodes can maintain links through sets of relay sats. As long as any two or more nodes were within line of site of a series of relay sats they could maintain contact. As each relay or node moved along in its orbit, it could 'hand off' data transmissions between components such that the replacement data link would be established with a relay that was approaching before contact was lost with the relay that was moving away.

Finally, using wormhole buses a lot of this issue can be mitigated since wormhole linked comm stations would be able to remain in continuous, instantaneous contact with each other without regard to their relative positions in space. In principle you could actually use a combination of 'normal space' and wormhole based comm relays that could act to maintain contact thru out the system and permit rapid data transfer without concern for the relative locations of each station. The design of the wormholes concerned is necessarily very advanced, as the region of asymptotically flat space around each hole (which is necessary because of wormhole geometry) has to be minimised by non-trivial amounts of negative energy. These compact wormholes are generally known as 'Hayward wormholes' and are very small but very massive; more details here.

Home | Search | Site Map | Glossary | Encyclopaedia Galactica | Intro | Timeline | Galactography | Sophonts | Topics | Voices from OA | Extras | Community | Top of Page | Parent Node/Parent Node

Unless otherwise specified,
this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.