Building a Dyson sphere around the sun would be easy if we used Jupiter as raw materials

It can take humanity to the next level.

Disassembly is required

We would need an astronomical amount of resources to build a Dyson sphere, a theoretical giant shell that would harvest all the energy of a given star, around the sun.

Indeed, as science journalist Jaime Green explores in her new book “possibility of lifeWe have to go further than demolishing a planet the size of Jupiter to build such a giant structure, a concept first pioneered by physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960.

“If you want enough material to build something like this, you basically have to take apart a planet, not just a small planet — like Jupiter,” Green writes in her book.

It’s a great brain teaser that explores the basic drivers of a species – are intelligent beings essentially motivated to expand and consume more energy as they grow?

And it’s not just about humanity. Some astronomers have taken it upon themselves to search for signs of extraterrestrial life by scanning the skies for Dyson fields lurking in other star systems. So by thinking about what our descendants might build, maybe we can learn what to look for in the universe.

Megastructure obsession

Such a field could allow a civilization to pass from Type I to Type II at any rate Kardashev scaleA way to measure the progress of a society. In simple terms, instead of harnessing energy using all the existing surfaces of a given planet, it uses all the available energy from a star, or type II.

Not everyone agrees that building a Dyson ball will end up being a huge undertaking. In an interview with Green, astrophysicist Jason Wright compared such an effort to Manhattan, a human, interconnected “superstructure”, which is built up over a long period of time, bit by bit.

“It was somewhat planned, but no one was ever like, ‘Hey, let’s build a huge city here,’” Wright told Green. “Every generation has made it a little bit bigger.”

In the same way, a Dyson sphere or swarm of satellites could be built up over time to harness all of the star’s energy.

“If the energy is there for you to take and it’s going to fly away into space anyway, why isn’t anyone taking it?” Wright told Green.

More on Dyson balls: Scientists have said that aliens may create black holes to store quantum information