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Frumpagumpus t1_jct8gx1 wrote

hi malthus, allow me to once again repost this:

http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/intergalactic-spreading.pdf

paraphrase: "The easiest design (for a dyson swarm) would use mercury as the source of material, and construct the swarm at approximately the same distance from the sun"

to further elaborate on the paper one could imagine that with the solar mirrors one could liquify a small but growing section of the dark side of mercury and thereafter perhaps magnetically (seems reasonable given the planet's very high iron content) accelerate it into space (also with energy collected from redirected sunlight) where it would cool via blackbody radiation and thereafter be relatively easy to refashion. Also that would look super cool.

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IntroVertu OP t1_jcta53c wrote

bro, wtf did i just read (^^) (thanks for your answer, i'll look at the article)

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cloudrunner69 t1_jctsjii wrote

If humanity ever reached a point where it was advanced enough to build a Dyson sphere then wouldn't humanity also then have technology advanced enough so we wouldn't need to build a Dyson sphere?

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Frumpagumpus t1_jcttyih wrote

process of building a dyson swarm only works because it's also a recursive feedback loop.

even if you are only interested in existential risk mitigation or not burning earth up with ever increasing computational waste heat, the time cost difference between a recursive process like dyson swarm planet disassembly vs non recursive process like mars terraforming is so large the recursive process is the clear choice

more energy = more compute = better reasoning, including ethical reasoning, ability to seed the entire universe with von neumann probes, better simulations and modeling, etc.

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cloudrunner69 t1_jctvvr4 wrote

But you don't know what other technology might come along in the future that could make a Dyson sphere obsolete.

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Frumpagumpus t1_jctz1kp wrote

there are only so many places you can get energy in our current (often extremely accurate) model of the universe. star is most obvious one.

unknown unknown are useless to speculate on

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