I hesitated to bring in magical future power sources exploiting spacetime and whatnot, but that could very well be the answer besides harvesting suns. It'd be cool to, as in a book I read, reach out to parallel baby universes and skim off energy from their big bangs.

I was going to respond to something, but ♥♥♥♥ it, just scroll down to the laser and particle beam sections on this page: http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket ... aserpistol

As a matter of fact, here's this website in general: http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/

This website pretty much gives a complete breakdown of everything in sci-fi, ever.

There's probably crap in here about dyson spheres if you look hard enough.

My own personal input on the issue: with dyson spheres, stars themselves will become the most precious resource in the galaxy. A group's military and/or political power would probably be directly proportional to how many stars are under their control.

I imagine that at least part of the front would be turned to vapor, while the pilots would be flash boiled, then explode into an extremely rapidly subliminating/evaporating red cloud.

You assume a dyson sphere being one big solid mass, which, yes, is a ridiculous concept. A more sensible construction would basically be a bunch of individual free-floating units that just keep themselves aligned correctly with the sun and each other. This system could easily be constructed piece-by-piece as time and resources allowed.


Going by that website I posted (which keeps talking in Joules. Argh conversions. Though a decent reference point is that an M16 rifle puts out a little over 1700 joules per shot) some kind of laser weapon would operate in two bursts per shot. The first would punch a hole, then it'd wait a microsecond for the "smoke" to clear, then fire another burst to do the rest of the penetrative damage. There's also particle beam weapons, which wouldn't have to do that since they'd just power through any debris, so you could dump everything into one burst. But particle beam weapons have issues like generating annoying amounts of radiation on everyone involved in a firefight, and generally not staying together and going off in random directions (like firing raw lightning bolts). You could use a powerful laser to ionize a channel, but at that point, why not just put all the energy into the powerful laser? I suppose in the case of an electron beam though, you'd get the added effect of electrocuting people. But then you could just as easily use a laser to create an ionized channel and then just release a regular old electrical discharge, which would follow the channel like a lightning bolt follows its channel.

So I don't know about frying brains externally, but then again I don't know anything about masers.


The video I watched about a scatter shot from a railgun pretty much described idea A. Though I don't know if they were flechettes or just balls like shotgun shot.


Blah blah its the future blah blah.


Man. I think my railgun isn't powerful enough.

Also, nice to have you in the conversation Grif. I'm hoping we can keep this alive and have ourselves an epic thread.

To be accurate; your railgun would need to be much more powerful.
To be balanced; It would need to be kept the same.
Decisions, decisions.

Actually, I'm thinking there probably doesn't even need to be railguns in a game that is effectively designed around the idea of minor skirmishes. Though I'll probably make one that is realistic and then add a disclaimer saying "this is here as an interesting experiment. don't use it if you value your terrain"

Cool to have though, as when its there there's a "Oh ♥♥♥♥!" feeling.

To Grif:

I almost made the point about needing a dyson sphere to make a dyson sphere, but that's assuming that the whole thing would be built all at once. The original concept proposed many individual satellites; I don't see why one couldn't just build a few, send them into orbit, then use the power from those few to make a few more etc.

I could think of a few factors which might contradict your statement about running into aliens at our own technological level. For one, civilizations do not advance technologically at a steady rate. It took us over a million years to realize that sharp rocks tools could be improved by attaching them to a stick. In contrast, it took about a hundred years to get from stationary telephone to cellular phones. For all we know, there may be a time in the future when we're near our mental capacity and innovation slows down. Or perhaps if you're right about the Singularity happening (I know what the Singularity is, thanks), all possible technologies will become available at once. The point I'm trying to make here is that there could be long stagnant ruts of technological development which could span thousands of years, so that even if we were technically a thousand years ahead of an alien race, it would be a thousand years within a rut that they were just starting to enter.

"being unable to fathom the energy requirements of a future civilization doesn't mean that they don't exist"
I never said that they couldn't be fathomed, I just fathomed and figured that they couldn't possibly exceed a certain point.

If we're going to talk about highly theoretical extremes about ways in which we might use energy, describing how we're going to get that energy in the blunt form of "make a lot of solar panels" seems pointless. Theoretical ideas about extreme energy consumption should be coupled with theoretical ideas about extreme energy production. Non-Theoretical (the Dyson Sphere is really only a matter of scale - the general technologies and ideas aren't too exotic) ideas about energy production should be coupled with non-theoretical ideas about energy consumption, such as my own conservative predictions.

Right, there's nothing to guarantee that solar panels will ever be developed which are anywhere near 100% efficient.
In any case, the per-second energy production of the sun is irrelevant: aside from technological limitations, you're not going to get anything close to 1% of the energy the sun produces if you're gathering it in the outer solar system. There's a reason NASA doesn't put solar panels on its planetary exploration probes.

Who says there would be graphics? Why not just hook up a bunch of brains to wires which make 'em happy? This is getting into morals, so we should probably stop here.

Singularity itself isn't guaranteed, so don't go so fast. Aside from doubt about the possibility of building a machine which can think (building such a computer would require an objective understanding of our own subjective experience, which, as Nagel says, is impossible, because in order to see anything objectively you have to leave the subjective behind / the thing you want to understand is the very faculty with which you are trying to understand it with), there's nothing to say that such a computer would result in a singularity which would effect us in meaningful ways, or even a singularity at all. At least this is the impression that I got reading the Popsci summary of the Singularity Conference which took place a few weeks back.

Weren't the Dyson Sphere projections based on a radius of 1 au?

Alright Rawtoast I misread you but I am impressed, bro, you bring up good points.

My thinking about AI is basically the same thinking I apply to extraterrestrial civilizations: if you try enough times the same thing that happened to humans is bound to happen in other environments. I am actually a bit in favor of divine providence insofar as the creation of a universe this well adapted to life is marvelous, I can also fully believe in it being random chance. If there's an infinite number of universes, eventually one will be remarkably well-suited to life, and that seems to have happened. AI also has the marvelous advantage over biological tinkering of being able to happen in a scale of months and years, not millennia.

Also, in regards to "encountering" another civilization, we run into the problem of interstellar travel. It's pretty unlikely an intelligent civilization is hiding within our solar system, and we do not have the current nor projected future technology to get between stars at any decent rate. Any civilization capable of interstellar travel (be it colony ships, hibernation, or FTL) is going to be, at least nominally, more "advanced" than the receiving civilization.

The Dyson sphere isn't exotic, exactly, no. It's more the ridiculous grandeur of the idea, and the sheer effrontery inherent in building a construct that massive that appeals to sci-fi, I think. One of my favorite hard sci-fi yet enjoyable reads is Schlock Mercenary, which offers this gem:


Now, at one AU wide, the surface area is so massive that you'd need significantly more than the mass of a decent sized planet to construct the "sail", even if it's a mere atom thick. It's utterly impractical, and yes, it's "boring", but I'm not sure what you mean to say by arguing that a wider sphere would collect less light. Space is a vacuum (albeit not quite a perfect one); you'd by definition be collecting nearly all the radiation if you had a "perfect" Dyson sphere. Sure, sunlight is less intense with greater distance, but that's just diffusion, not a lowering in actual intensity. If there's nowhere to diffuse to that won't collect it, it doesn't matter if your radius is 1 AU or a million.

Well thank you, Grif. I appreciate the note - same to you.

I think I see the problem here, though. You're thinking of a solid Dyson sphere, and I'm thinking of a modular, many-component Dyson sphere. To be honest, I only read the wiki description briefly, but it was my interpretation that the original concept called for many orbiting satellites, or an imperfect Dyson sphere.

What I don't get about the Dyson sphere is why it has to be so big. Thank you for clarifying the radius, Duh - I thought it was supposed to be the entire solar system. Got it now. Still, why can't it be less than 1 au? Building a sphere around the sun will capture its energy as long as it is encompassing the sun, so why go through the extra trouble of making it 1 au large? Why not just large enough to not get melted?


I still maintain that we will never need this much power. Even with the (as you say, Grif) crappy solar technology we have now, it takes 2-3 square meters of solar paneling to provide enough electricity for the average American's lifestyle. If we build a Dyson Sphere with a radius of 1 au, it would have a surface area of 281,229,865,302,746,430 square kilometers, or 281,229,865,302,746,430,000 square meters. World population is almost 7 billion, but let's triple it to 21 billion for fun. That's 13,391,898 square meters of solar paneling per person, or 4,463,966 times as much energy as is consumed by the average American today. I understand that anything could happen in the future with technology. I totally get that. But we're talking about INDIVIDUAL demand for electricity rising 4,463,966,000%. That's ♥♥♥♥ huge!

Edit: Then again, I keep thinking about ripping up space time. You may have a point there. Even so, as you said, this may be a source of power as well.

I think the scale is meant to serve as two purposes: 1, to insulate the outer surface from stresses from solar flares, coronal mass ejections, etc, and 2, 1 AU is defined as the distance from earth to the sun, which puts any planets/structures/habitats in a nicely comfortable band of heat vs cold that could be exploited by a Dyson sphere. Remember, it's not just a giant power plant; you also have to house your civilization inside it, as it's going to get very cold outside the sphere.

I'm pretty sure lack of stimuli would start doing wacky crap with the brains.
Also, if you don't want the consciousness to deteriorate and want to somehow upload said consciousness, that alone is going to take a pretty decent amount of power, graphics or no.

Man that skynet won't run on gasoline.

This topic is seriously holding my attention. Mad respect for everyone contributing properly. If I wasn't as stressed as I was, I'd contribute to the discussion. For now, I'll stay comfortably in my chair/bed (depending on time of day) reading a riveting discussion. Though, this is stimulating ideas for various pieces of art, so my time might rapidly start getting eaten.This only applies if one doesn't have control of multiple stars, but is a very good point for using the 1AU scale for "smaller" dyson utilising civilisations. (ie those with only one dyson sphere, and "slow" space travel).
I think the problem with collecting energy in a sphere that is pretty much vital for your civilisation is getting the power anywhere, cause wiring it up would be one of the stupidest ideas ever. What do you guys think would be the best way to get the power to anywhere else, electron beam, or chemical store, or what? I cant think of a very good way of doing it :/ my mind is taken up by other things.