I disagreed with a bunch of the implications of this comment, but I was curious about the specific question “Would a dyson sphere made out of the solar system necessarily cover (most of) the sun?” (and therefore block out a substantial fraction of light coming to Earth).
The subquestions here seem to be (at first glance, not a physicist)
What are efficient Dyson spheres probably made of?
What percent of the solar system can be converted into Dyson-sphere material?
Are gas giants harvestable?
How long would it take to harvest that material?
What would the radius of a Dyson sphere be? (i.e. how far away from the sun is optimal). How thick?
If the sphere is (presumably) lots of small modules, how far apart are they?
I don’t know if there’s already been a canonical answer written up somewhere. The original motivating question was “if an AI is moderately ‘nice’, leaves Earth alone but does end up converting the rest of the solar system into a Dyson sphere, how fucked is Earth? (also, on what timescale?).
I don’t know that this question actually makes sense (as another commenter mentioned, if the AI is that nice, it can probably also redirect sunlight to Earth at low cost. But, I’m still just curious about the details. (I have enough uncertainty about how the future plays out that it seems nice to understand some of the physical limits involved)
[Question] What percent of the sun would a Dyson Sphere cover?
I disagreed with a bunch of the implications of this comment, but I was curious about the specific question “Would a dyson sphere made out of the solar system necessarily cover (most of) the sun?” (and therefore block out a substantial fraction of light coming to Earth).
The subquestions here seem to be (at first glance, not a physicist)
What are efficient Dyson spheres probably made of?
What percent of the solar system can be converted into Dyson-sphere material?
Are gas giants harvestable?
How long would it take to harvest that material?
What would the radius of a Dyson sphere be? (i.e. how far away from the sun is optimal). How thick?
If the sphere is (presumably) lots of small modules, how far apart are they?
I don’t know if there’s already been a canonical answer written up somewhere. The original motivating question was “if an AI is moderately ‘nice’, leaves Earth alone but does end up converting the rest of the solar system into a Dyson sphere, how fucked is Earth? (also, on what timescale?).
I don’t know that this question actually makes sense (as another commenter mentioned, if the AI is that nice, it can probably also redirect sunlight to Earth at low cost. But, I’m still just curious about the details. (I have enough uncertainty about how the future plays out that it seems nice to understand some of the physical limits involved)