Re: (TFT) Space travel - galaxy sized dyson spheres.

[Denis DesHarnais <denisdesharnais@gmail.com>]

Assuming it's actually a perfect sphere, and was perfectly placed, wouldn't
gravitiational effects cancel?  I think solar wind doesn't blow equally
hard in all directions all the time, so the reduced surface-area of a net
would be better.

I'm actually responding as though this were a brainstorming session.  Man,
is my job boring.

On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 4:43 PM, PvK <pvk@oz.net> wrote:

> I'm sure there isn't enough Si to do that, nor even enough matter even if
> you could convert the rest of the matter outside the core into glass.
> "Regular" Dyson Spheres are around a single star (not around an entire
> galactic core), and even those are more the stuff of Space Opera more than
> sober science fiction, it seems to me.
>
> The Wiki article too seems to be slightly off. In the first place, anyone
> who could actually build a Dyson Sphere would be able to figure out how to
> keep it in place, and second, even though their gravity argument passes
> basic physics, it doesn't consider the force of the solar wind, which would
> actually tend to center the sphere, since drift in one direction would (I
> think - I haven't done the math nor do I know how strong the wind would be
> nor of course how heavy the sphere would be) result in more wind force on
> the closer side, which might tend to naturally balance drift. As for the
> "falling in" problem, again I tend to think Dyson Sphere creators would
> have one solution or another (rope? Handi-Bundlers? magnets? wind?
> counter-gravity? force fields? glass floors and mirrors?). They make the
> point that it wouldn't just naturally have gravity going conveniently
> outwards, but it would hardly seem likely to be without some solution, if
> you can manage to build it in the first !
>  place. Particularly, it seems to me, since a Dyson Sphere seems highly
> unlikely to be an efficient idea for something to do if one had the means
> to do such a thing (i.e., there would be much more productive things to do
> with all that energy, technology and material), so the beings that could do
> that, would probably have even MORE technology than that needed to do it,
> unless they were all deranged with one-track minds focused only on doing
> just that.
>
> PvK
>
> --- Jay wrote:
>
> "I'm not sure there's enough Si in a galaxy to shell itself, much less
> leave anything inside, super massive black holes or no."
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