Among the disturbing – but predictable – news for mankind is the fact that it is in imminent danger of being faced lack of energy. Moreover, this is not a new sign: already in 1960, British-American theorist Freeman Dyson worry about it and find a solution for this problem.
The physicist then proposed a kind of megastructure, “Dyson Circle”: built around a star, it will allow to exploit its energy. But the scientist didn’t leave behind the clues needed to achieve what he just described “inhabitable shell”.
From then on and to this day, Freeman Dyson’s theories have never ceased to amaze the most ambitious scientists. According to Popular Mechanics, German astrobiologist Dirk Schulze Makuch would even be very close to the achievable conceptualization of the well-known field.
Imagine all of our solar energy that is available and usable by humans. Without a doubt: at us move to stage II of the Kardachev . scale, it will make it possible to respond to the energy crisis in the very long term and dream bigger. Why not, for example, use this energy to propel us to exoplanets, and perhaps find extraterrestrial life forms?
A swarm of flying objects
Dirk Schulze Makuch is a professor at Berlin Technical University. Fascinated by the hypothesis of extraterrestrial life, he became interested in the Dyson field about ten years ago.
Together with Brooks Harrop, one of his former students, he identified several problems in his generally accepted design. Most importantly: the risk of the ball collapsing under the tremendous weight of gravity, as no material currently available can withstand such a force. The engineers who proposed the resistive structure indicated that it would use up too much, if not all, of the central star’s energy.
If we succeed in breaking this first obstacle, the question of asteroid and the fire of the sun which must also hold the structure.
Dyson himself found a possible solution: a discontinuous structure in the form of a swarm of flying objects placed in independent orbits around the star. Then it will take about 10 million.
Therefore, Dirk Schulze Makuch and his apprentice proposed a design to meet this challenge, which they mentioned Solar Wind Satellite (SWPS). Their idea: a satellite that uses not visible light energy, but electrons, which use half of the solar wind.
These satellites, each weighing about 3.7 tons, will each meet the needs of the equivalent of 1,000 US households. They can be constructed with relatively inexpensive materials, such as copper wire.
On the other hand, even though they require a bit of maintenance, these satellites will not clean themselves and run the risk of deteriorating over time. Another obstacle remains the organization needed to deploy several million – or even billions – of satellites into orbit.
If this challenge has not been adequately addressed, the hypothesis put forward by Dirk Schulze Makuch is that the other forms of life beyond the earth development is achievable.
According to the physicist, when a life form appears on a habitable planet, it eventually evolves and becomes intelligent, the basis of this argument being that major evolutions on Earth appear to have occurred several times independently of each other.
According to Dyson himself, if an alien life form has manifested the Dyson sphere, we can track its whereabouts. Could it be that the inhabitants of other planets have come to the same conclusion as researchers, namely that it may not be the most practical discovery for responding effectively to the energy crisis?
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