Developing better nuclear reactors, or even fusion power, seems like a much easier task, and essentially makes solar power satellites redundant.

Fission-based nuclear, sure. That’s a fairly mature technology. Fusion is still wishful thinking; and in any case it’s still dirty as buggery unless you use helium-3 as your fuel. Which is not a very common isotope of an element not much found on Earth.

The amount of capital investment required to do it is gargantuan, and the payoffs decades into the future. The only plausible mechanism by which this could be done is by governments.

Developing better nuclear reactors, or even fusion power, seems like a much easier task, and essentially makes solar power satellites redundant.

Dyson didn’t initially say that people would build a single spherical structure. He said that an advanced civilisation would ultimately capture all the output of their sun; that the best way to find such a civilisation is to look for waste heat rather than radio waves etc.

So yes, a bit like the bicycles of death thing. The concept of a spherical megastructure came later and was named for Dyson’s original observation.

I have always been amazed by it. The guy’s an astronomer but I cannot see how it can possibly work.

Bits of stuff (like hunks to live on) must orbit; they don’t stay in one place. An orbit is a great circle (or ellipse), not a small circle. So the narrow band of the shell that was actually orbiting would stay in place. Just as a guess it might be possible to make it a mile wide. Or maybe with futuristic materials it could be a 100 miles wide before the stresses of not orbiting with the star at the precise centre cause it to crack up. 100 miles is, relative to the sphere, infinitesimal. Imagine the poles of this shell - all they want to do is fall straight into the star.

The only way anything can remain at a constant distance from a star is to orbit it so every point in this Dyson sphere would have to be orbiting. It would have to consist of hunks whizzing around all at different angles to each other like those blokes do on motorbikes inside the “sphere of death” or whatever it’s called that you see at carnivals. Only there’d be millions of hunks, not just two.

You see this Dyson sphere illustrated quite often. Since the guy is a physicist, I have to wonder if there is something I am missing. Can’t imagine what.

Also interested in the latest punt from NASA which abandons the Bush vision of going back to the Moon, in favour of exploring satellite or orbital station location at the Lagrange points. Seems to make much more sense to me than risking human life in medium to long term adventures in hostile environments which we don’t fully understand or have the science to cope with adequately yet.

Home On The LeGrange

Well put. Lagrange.

Just pointing out though that we always should be aware that the map is never the territory, that initially colonising frontiers often starts hard, dirty and nasty and that such efforts always always end up way way off the original masterplan.

I’m a learned pessimist too.

If beaming energy to Earth is a step toward it, okay, I suppose. Seems almost petty though, doesn’t it?

Profit is a main cause of adventure and settlement. Columbus was looking for a shortcut to India. Victoria was built by goldrush settlers, as was much of California. Unlike motivations such as war or conquest, mostly good comes of it.

In the mid 70s when O’Neill was pushing his idea, there was an issue of a Stewart Brand mag “CoEvolution Quarterly” which was devoted to space colonies and a subsequent issue devoted to comments on the concept. I recall someone saying it would be like being in a Greyhound bus terminal - slightly greasy.

Still, if it offered grand adventure and the possibility of wealth and honour, there are surely millions of people who would go.

It has to be done. The alternative - staying on this mudball and eating, sleeping and reproducing forever - is scarce to be contemplated. In ten thousand years’ time, when the galaxy is populated and Earth is heritage-listed, historians will consider it the biggest step mankind ever took.

If beaming energy to Earth is a step toward it, okay, I suppose. Seems almost petty though, doesn’t it?

As a sidelight, I counted the acknowledgements in that dry and jargon-riddled report. They list 60 people of whom it appears just two are women.

Call up the volunteers - send ‘em off. When they run out, send out the convicts!

Oh, I don’t disagree with that vision as a long term goal. Hell I was a SF reading kid too.

My point is that is that the path to achieving that vision is gonna be a lot more dirty, industrial, prosaic and dangerous than all the Home On The LeGrange boosters currently care to dwell on.

“Large enough to have its own weather.”

But just small enough to have an closed ecosystem vulnerable to any stray bacterium or virus. In Bruce Sterling’s “Schismatrix” he paints a short and powerful picture of how the biofarming systems of such O’Neill habitants can spin out of control and go “sour”.

Look, I certainly reckon the overall concept is worth a serious shot. (When I get old, brittle-boned and feeble, I could certainly use some zero-g m’self.) After all the human race didn’t get where it is now without taking some mighty big punts from time to time.

Just pointing out though that we always should be aware that the map is never the territory, that initially colonising frontiers often starts hard, dirty and nasty and that such efforts always always end up way way off the original masterplan.

Real Life Is A Harsh Mistress.

He didn’t himself endorse population control policies. He about them in the list of problems which he wanted to solve.

So it wasn’t just fashion, haircuts and the end of the Bretton Woods system that was wrong with the 70s, the imminent fear of population bombs, peak oil and ice ages allowed futurologists to indulge in a little bit of Final Solution thinking? I don’t think I’d want to be a colonist with any nutjob that seriously considered enforced population controls.

much more palatable alternative to enforced population programs.

WTF????

More like living on a oil rig with the constant low-level humming tech paranioa of being on a long plane flight thrown in.

Oh, I don’t know about that. O’Neill calculated that colonies could be built with a diameter of 11kms with a 100% safety margin, if you use materials from the moon (aluminium and titanium, mostly). Large enough to have its own weather.

A fellow called McKendree redid the calculations assuming availability of carbon nanotube construction. The maximum size of a colony goes up to 900kms diameter.

And presumably, they would be more receptive to what I would imagine would be extremely useful in such an environment - multiple exchangeable prothesis!

More like living on a oil rig with the constant low-level humming tech paranioa of being on a long plane flight thrown in.

“Surely the best occupants of such power stations would be, mainly, the physcially handicapped.”

V. interesting point there. This could be developed further. We could start see space workers recruited from the ParaOlympics.