October 23, 2021 • 45 mins
In 1960 physicist Freeman Dyson suggested that in the hunt for alien life, we should search for evidence of massive engineering projects that encapsulate stars with solar arrays to harness their energy. Could we humans ever make one ourselves? Find out in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M Hey everybody, it's your old pal Josh, and for
this week's Select, I invite you to listen to our
ridiculously interesting episode on Dyson's Fears. It's a really cool
look at how we'll start harnessing energy in the solar
system in the future and eventually from the universe as
a whole. And when we do stand back. I hope
(00:20):
you find this one as interesting as Chuck and I did,
so getty up and enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know,
a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant,
(00:44):
Jerry's over there. Their foot on the button, and that
means this is stuff you should know the podcast. The
foot on the button, just waiting to cut us off. Yeah,
that's what no one knows. But Jerry has a kill
switch at her foot for all of our profane tirades. Yeah,
it would kill us if she ever pressed it. That's right,
(01:06):
That's why they call it that. But she's not very
good at it. I've noticed I've noticed some stuff slips by. Yeah.
I told her she's like Keith Richards of podcast producers,
because he can't use guitar pedals, So he's known for that.
Is that a thing? Well, I mean I don't know
how known he is maybe among guitar players, but he uh,
he just plugs right into the amp. That's pretty great. Oh,
(01:30):
I see. And his he was on Mark Maron's podcast.
It was a great interview in maren he you know,
it's pure Keith Richards and he was just basically like,
you know, I have a hard time standing upright, like
I can't mess with trying to press foot pedals. Right,
that's Keith Man. Yep. Very pure. Yeah. And by pure,
(01:50):
I mean pure heroine, pure China. He's clean now, But
is he really? That's astounding? Well, I mean no, I
mean he doesn't do like hard drugs anymore. I got you,
And I think he drinks and smokes weed. I got you.
Come on, yeah, like Christine. Actually, Maron smoked his first
(02:13):
cigarette in a decade in that show with him. Oh
that was smart, a good decision. He was like, I
have to how can I not? Yeah, he easily could
not have done that. I'm disappointed, did he really? Yeah?
Keith Richards offered him a smoke and he's like sure, Yeah,
I mean I see that, but at the same time
I was assos to not smoking. Listen to you. I
(02:36):
know I'm being judge wagging your finger, so Chuck, Yes,
have you ever used energy? Yes? Well, you know, when
you're using energy, most likely you're using something like a
fossil fuel, right, yeah, right, like gasoline or natural gas
or something like that, stuff that comes from decomposing dinosaurs. Yes, Okay.
(03:01):
The problem with using decomposing dinosaurs, as most people know,
is that it's essentially a non renewable resource. There's no
more dinosaurs decomposed any longer, and even if there were,
it would take tens of millions of years for them
to decompose into fossil fuels for us, right, right, even
if we could, even if we had dino d n
A and we could make new dinosaurs just to kill
(03:25):
them and watch them decompose, which is something we would
do if we had the capability, I guarantee you, right, Um,
But we don't have that capability as far as I know, Like,
no one's working on that track right now. I don't
think just uh Steven Spielberg, right, maybe someone at Rutgers. So, um,
(03:48):
we we have to come up with energy sources that
we won't eventually run out of. And obviously there's like
wind and solar and as far as solar power goes,
from what I understand, we're actually doing pretty well right now.
Like right now, we use something like point zero one
percent of the sunlight that reaches Earth to to power
our our world, So there's a lot of room for
(04:10):
growth potential. The thing is is, I also saw that
if we keep growing and our energy consumption keeps growing
uh at something like one percent a year, within a
thousand years will be using more than the entire amount
of sunlight that hits the Earth UM can provide. So
we really need to come up with something else. Yes,
(04:32):
The problem is is even if we harnessed all of
the energy here on Earth, we would very quickly outgrow
whatever energy it provided. So some people have said, well,
why don't we just go straight to the source. If
the Sun is such a great source of energy, but
it's shooting that energy out in directions other than the Earth, UM,
(04:52):
the stuff that is starting towards the Earth doesn't make
it very frequently. Well, let's just go to the sun
and and basically strangle the life out of it to
get energy from it right, great idea and one of
the first proposals of it. I don't want to say
a serious proposal, because although it's been taken seriously over
(05:13):
the years and almost been interpreted like scripture. Um, it
was a thought experiment to begin with. It's something called
the Dyson's fear. Yes, um, well, I guess we should
introduce the man. Not that we have him here, that'd
be awesome. He's he's still around. Yeah, I know, he's
(05:33):
an old dude. But we're talking about Freeman Dyson, not
to the maker of the vacuum cleaner or the bladeless
fan or the bladeless hair dryer. Is that really a thing?
They have a dice in hair dryer? Yeah, you know
what that. I was so disappointed when I found out
(05:54):
what the bladeless fan was. Why have you seen those? Yeah,
you can stick your and through it. It's amazing. Well
I know, and I was like it is it magic? Like,
how in the world isn't doing this? But it's got
a stupid blade. It's just housed in a in a casing. Yeah,
so that's a terrible name for it. And then it
just channels it up and you know, squirts it out
(06:15):
the front that they're The Dyson invention that always got
me was the air blade hand dryer. I think we've
talked about this before, where you stick your hand down
in there. Those Yeah, but they're so filled with germs
that Actually I was in a bathroom the other day
and they have an air blade now that just blows
downward onto your hands, and it's actually I'm like, Okay,
(06:38):
now I'm satisfied with this invention. Well, you know, you're
not supposed to rub your hand on the air blade itself, no,
but it's so close. It's like you're playing operation like
I'm trying to remove a funny bone or something like that.
It's almost impossible not to hit the sides of the thing,
you know, your big meat hooks or just rubbing all
over every gross. Yeah, it is gross, believe me, because
I walk out is crying with my hands held in
(06:59):
the air every time I'm to go to the bathroom. Well,
you and I have a very big thing about airport bathrooms. Um,
and I think I had the worst one of my
life at a Boston Logan on our last tour. Oh yeah,
what happened? It was just not up to snuff, Like
the first of all the door and this might have
been just this one bathroom, but the doors to the
(07:21):
stalls none of them secured, they've been ripped clean off.
Well they were there, but you couldn't you know, the
locks didn't work. It was just yeah, basically had to
push my hand against it, which grossed me out. Yeah,
that's not okay. And then the gap when the door
was shut was like two or three inches big, like
you could fully just look in and say, how you doing,
(07:41):
how's your poop? Yeah, that's the Mr. Peeper's model. It's
just not acceptable, you know, in this day and age,
to not have complete privacy in there. I mean, I
agree with you. I again, I'm going to reiterate. I
think there should be one stall for an entire bathroom
so that no one could possibly sit down next you.
But barring that, them all exactly. But barring that, though,
(08:04):
like the place, like what we have in our office
is acceptable. It's a good second. There's like a complete
wall in between you. There's a complete wall in front
of you and a door. It's a securely shut it's
a water closet. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess I
guess it is. The man I knew we were going
(08:25):
to get distracted by poop. Yeah, this isn't even the
porta potty I know, all right, So sorry. Back to
Freeman Dyson. Uh, not the vacuum maker. He was born
in England. He worked most of his career he's retired now,
but work most of his career as a physics professor
at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, not Rutgers. Uh.
(08:53):
He was a civilian scientist with the r EF and
World War Two. I went to Cambridge, then Cornell for
grad school. This guy's got some bona fides. Uh. And
then he's been in news recently by being a big
I mean, brilliant, brilliant man. But he's been in the
news recently by being one of the more prominent scientists
that on as a climate change skeptic. Oh is that right? Yeah,
(09:18):
and not like a complete skeptic, like he does believe
that it's I believe, Whereas what his stance is that
he does believe that it's man made, but he doesn't
think we have enough detail about all the variables for
these computer generated models to be accurate. So he's he's
basically saying like this is not the end of the world,
(09:40):
and in fact, he thinks that increasing levels of CEO
two can be a good thing for humanity. Ultimately, I
don't know, I didn't get that far. He's like, it
gives it gives you a pretty good buzz. Maybe, I
don't know. It's pretty interesting though. He's like, I think
starting about, you know, six to ten years ago, really
started making the news with his somewhat controversial because he's
(10:03):
a brilliant man, and all these other scientists are like, wow,
he's such a smart guy, but he's so wrong on this.
But then other people are like, no, he's totally right.
That's pretty interesting anyway. Um, so that's who he is.
And he in nineteen thirty seven, well not n seven.
He in the nineteen sixties was reading a book from
nineteen thirty seven called Starmaker from uh, science fiction author
(10:26):
Olaf Stapledon, and uh, he saw this thing called a
light trap from this book. Uh. And this book also
had predicted things like virtual reality, and it's kind of
a pretty much a landmark sci fi science book. And um,
he said, hey, this light trap sounds like a good idea.
I'm going to rip it off. Yeah he did, And
(10:48):
he actually It was I think a paper that was
published in Science and the General Science in nineteen sixty
and it's really short. Did you read it? Yeah, yeah,
it's like I think it took up two pages in Science, um,
out of like a thousand or something like that in
that volume. But um, he basically said, this would be
a great thing, as you say, to rip off, for
(11:10):
a thought experiment I'm working on. Right, because just very
recently something called Project OSMA had been created, and that
was they started to search the sky for extraterrestrial intelligence.
It was the first cit um and they were looking
for radio signals still are. But Dyson was saying, well,
hold on a second, if you're gonna start looking for
extraterrestrial beings like signs of intelligent civilizations, you should maybe
(11:33):
start looking for these and and they came to be
called Dyson's fears because he was the first one to
popularize it, even though he got the idea from old Off. Yeah,
he actually said, um, he thought a staple in sphere
was a better name, but I guess not good enough
to actually use it, right, right, Yeah, he said it
once very quietly. Yeah, But so this dysons he it
(11:57):
was originally created as a again a thought experiment. He
wasn't He didn't talk about how to construct it necessarily
or anything like that, although there were some follow up
correspondence UM after the letter first came out, but almost
immediately people started thinking about how you would create one
(12:18):
of these things, this this Dicen sphere, and the whole point,
we should say, basically, at its at its basis, a
Dicen sphere is UM an engineering project, a megastructure that
initially was thought to be basically a hollow sphere that
you built around a star, for example, we would build
(12:39):
it around our sun. And the whole point of this
thing is on the inside of this sphere are solar arrays,
so that all of that sunlight, like we were talking
about earlier, that gets wasted as far as we're concerned,
is captured and converted into usable energy for us. And
and in Freeman Dyson's point was, if you build one
(13:03):
of these things, you're going to capture light. Light won't
get out, but infrared radiation heat, thermal heat will escape.
And so if you're looking around the skies for aliens,
look for something that has a tremendous amount of like
the infrared radiation of a star, but isn't putting any
light out? And maybe you just found an alien civilization.
(13:23):
That's how it began. But people started trying to figure
out how to make one of these things almost as
soon as he published that letter. So the one thing
I don't get was he saying that look for this
because other civilizations out there are using a dycen spear.
He he said that it would be likely that they
that this would be an invention they came up. Got you, Yeah,
(13:45):
all right, well, um let's go should we go to
uh this U Nikolai kardas Chef question. I think we
can't put it off any longer. It's pretty interesting. In
the nineteen sixties there was an astrophysicist named Nikolai karda
chef and um he was a Bond villain and actually
he wasn't, but he should have been. Um. He had
(14:07):
this idea that there were three classifications of civilization, uh
type one, which is basically, we have learned how to
harness all the energy on the home planet, like everything
you can possibly harness here on Earth. And you would think, well,
that's probably us. We're not quite there yet. Uh. Really
(14:29):
smart dude name Michio Kaku um not a bond villain either.
He said, uh, in the next hundred years or so,
maybe two hundred years, we might actually be a Type
one civilization. Yeah, And like you said, that's where every
bit of Judeo thermal energy, every drop of sunlight, every
um um, every bit of hydroelectric power, all that stuff,
(14:53):
every potential bit of energy is being harnessed by us.
That's right. Yeah, We're nowhere near that right now. I
think Cocu's assessments a little rosie. Oh well, and I
can say that because he was on our TV show
sort of well he was he yes, he appeared on,
but we didn't interact with us in a real way exactly.
(15:14):
He has no idea who we are, no none. Uh
So Type two is the next, of course, and they
that kind of civilization would understand how to harness all
of the energy not only on your own home planet,
but the energy of a star in its own solar system. Right,
that's where the that's where the Dyson's fear comes in,
(15:35):
and that's what we aspire to do one day, right,
maybe a million or so years from now. And then
Type three is just kind of like following this logical progression, right,
and that's harnessing all the energy of all the galaxies,
or of entire galaxies, not necessarily all of them. Yeah.
(15:56):
I think that the second, the second age, the type
to civilization, would be um the either the hardest to
get to or take the longest to get to. And
that's because when you build that first dicense fear, your
technology and your energy efficiency and your productivity is going
(16:17):
to just shoot forward exponentially from that point on. So
so once you build that first one, you can start
building more and more and more much more quickly. So
you jump from a Type two to a Type three
civilization pretty pretty fast compared to how long it took
you to go from a Type one to a Type
to civilization. Yeah. I think it's like any any product,
(16:41):
even that that first one is tough, and then you
can scale it and uh, but well we'll get to
the robots here. So okay, in fact, let's take a break.
I'm getting a little psych chuck, and we'll talk a
little bit more about the sun right after this. All right,
(17:20):
So I went when I said the word sun, Yeah,
I thought that was odd. No, it's not, you know,
I honestly had no idea where you're going with this?
Well you do, you're being coy. Uh. Most people out there,
most long time listeners, know that our son podcast was
one of our our biggest struggles and would have been
(17:42):
our biggest achievements had we uh done it right. It's
it's the biggest pity applause. We get yeah for this son, No, No,
it was it was fine. Get you tried, Yeah, good
for you for trying. But let's talk a little bit
of about the sun. This stuff I can deal with,
at least as far as its immense power and energy. Um,
(18:06):
and I love that our own article has some of
these comparisons. Um, the sun can generate five times one
zero to three horsepower. I think that that is a TYPEO.
I think that it's supposed to be five times ten
to the twenty three power. You think that's the only
explanation I have for that. That doesn't make sense. That's
(18:27):
a really small number. Actually, yeah, I agree, it would
be like about horse power. Yeah, that's five times tinted.
It's got to be someone just got lazy there. Serious.
They're like, I don't know how to do the little
twenty three thing, right, I don't I don't know how
to use superscript. What am I like a great editor?
(18:49):
Superscript that's what it is, right, superscript and subscript. Uh so,
let's put it this way, and this one is the
one that cracks me up. Um, the sun has enough
energy eat to melt an ice bridge two miles wide
and a mile thick from Earth to the Sun in
a single second. In a single second. That's pretty good.
(19:10):
This is the only article I think I've ever seen
an ellipse in like like the author was like, wait
for it in a single second. Yeah, I don't even
think they did the ellipse right. And the ellips supposed
to be right after the letter or is it their space?
I think there's supposed to be a space on either side.
Really technically, yeah, I've been doing these wrong. Then, well,
don't feel bad. This thing says five times one thousand
(19:32):
three horsepowers. It's all good, all right? What else? One
trillion one megatson bombs going off every second if your
war like, and then finally, one single second of sun
action whatever that is is enough to power our earth
for half a million years. That drives it home. It does,
(19:57):
but it also gives you an idea of just how
primitive we are energy consumption wise, Like, it's it's it's
it's crazy because you know, we're really worried about running
out of our non renewable resources, but we use such
a minute amount of energy that that the Sun could
(20:17):
power the energy use we use currently for half a
million years in one second. Yeah, that's nuts, right, So
that also kind of takes your mind though too. Um,
And this is I think one of the things one
of the buttons that Freeman Dyson um pushed. It makes
you realize, like, holy cow, we could do some really
(20:39):
amazing stuff if we could capture a significant amount of
that power that the Sun puts out, even an insignificant amount. Yeah, yeah,
you'd keep Iggy Pop going for like another hundred years.
Uh So, like you said, the idea behind the Dicen
sphere is this structure originally proposed a hollow sphere and
(21:03):
kind of referred to it as a shell. Um, but
I think now or I think he went on to
to make it a solid sphere. He so he actually
said he was really, um, what's the opposite of clear? Yeah,
I guess a little convoluted. He he didn't really go
(21:24):
to the trouble of spelling it out, because again, remember
this is a thought experiment that had to do with
finding aliens, not an engineering schematic. So he used some
very it was vague. That was the word I was
looking for. He was using some vague words, and we're like, wait,
what what what are you talking about? What is this sphere?
Is it? Is it cohesive? Is it like a solid body?
Is it hollow in the middle? What's going on? And
(21:46):
he came back and said in a letter a follow up,
he said, no, no, no, like there's there's no way
you could build something that would go around our sun
that would be a solid body that was hollow in
the middle, Like it couldn't be a cohesive whole because
the rotational forces, the sheer forces, and the gravitational forces
(22:06):
acting on it would just obliterate it immediately. Like it's
it just be mechanically impossible to make it like that.
So he said, so maybe you would make something like
a bubble or a swarm or something like that. Yeah,
And he said in the letter, I've been closed some
blotter acid. Put it on your tongue. You're gonna love this.
It's dynamite, and call me in an hour. Might make
(22:29):
a little more sense. Uh yeah. Our own article points
out that one of the first downsides, obviously, if you
surround the Sun completely, is that sunlight has I mean,
I know we'd be harnessing that energy, but sunlight provides
a lot more than just energy. Oh yeah, like it
makes us happy. Yeah, people write entire songs about how
(22:52):
sunshine makes you happy, like John Denver, did you know?
And that was just on the shoulders. It would be
a global bummer if somebody enclosed the Sun. That's like
super villain kind of stuff, right, Okay, so that's a problem.
Another problem, though, is that if you're going to build
something like this, and and Dyson even suggested the size
(23:12):
of it. He was saying it would need to have
a radius, so a radius not even a diameter half
of the diameter, a radius that was two times the
distance of the Earth to the Sun. So this thing
would be massive, which means that it would also enclose
the Earth too, right, Like he wasn't proposing you just
go up and create this tight ball around the Sun,
(23:36):
Like it would be much further spread out and it
would actually encompass the Earth's orbit within it. Oh, so
it would be like this, this is mine. It belongs.
It belongs to the Earth and no one else and
can get any sun. Yeah, it would. It would block
off the stuff outside of two times the distance of
the Earth's orbit. So there's a couple of planets out
(23:56):
there that would would get the old screw job. But
but but the ones inside twice the distance of Earth's
orbit would really benefit from it. It's very selfish. Yeah.
But the other problem is to chuck is I imagine
it would. Things would get pretty hot pretty quickly inside
this thing, So the Earth would be destroyed. Yes, he
(24:21):
and to get around this, and a lot of people
I don't think got it immediately. He said, well, you
just live inside the Dyson's fear like like in the
outer shell of it. Oh, sure, make it habitable. Yeah right,
well that makes sense. Yeah, but what you were saying
about just the sheer size of it there. There literally
(24:41):
aren't enough raw materials on our entire planet to make
something this big. In fact, in our in our entire
solar system, there probably aren't enough raw materials to make
a structure like this and not and not still try
to inhabit it. There's just no way. Um. Some people
say though, and in Freeman himself. I keep waying to
(25:03):
call him Freeman, like that's his last name, but I
just end up sounding like I know him on a
first name. He he was saying, Um, you might be
able to build something like this by disassembling Jupiter. Well
that was his suggestion. Yeah, he said, disassembled Jupiter and uh,
put it back together, and you could build a Dyson
(25:27):
sphere um that had the radius twice the distance from
the Earth to the Sun and make a solar array
of it. Must have been some good acid. Yeah, good
for him. All right, So I think we're both in agreement,
and most people are in agreement that this severe idea
is not at all tangible, not as like a cohesive whole. No,
(25:52):
like it just remains in the realm of thought experiment.
So why bother. Oh well, that's the interesting thing to me.
It basically is kind of like he meant it as
a thought experiment. It's been brought out of the realm
of thought experiments. And yeah, we're in no way, shape
or form capable of doing this, but a lot of
(26:13):
people have tried to figure out how to do it,
and I think it's it's one of those things that
it's like yeah, it's theoretically possible. Um, but we're just
it's not at our We're nowhere near that that level
of capability right now. Well, I think his other ideas
that he came up with, though, are are decent. Oh,
(26:33):
like the swarm and stuff. Well, yeah, I mean, let's
let's get to that. He uh he himself even said
the sphere is probably not very realistic at all, So
why don't we do this, Why don't we think of
different machines maybe that are independent of one another, that
actually circle the Sun, collect this energy and then beam
it back to Earth. Right, So, so to him, his
(26:54):
initial idea was that sphere, and then what it came
to be was that the sphere was like the umbrella
term for these different slightly more realistic ideas, like the
swarm or the bubble. So like like, what's the swarm? Uh, well,
the swarm maybe they they are in different orbits and
(27:15):
they like the swarming likens it to bees, like instead
of gathering pollen, they're just around the Sun, moving around,
gathering energy and power, and so those might be habitable too, right,
And they're like they're there's solar rays that are satellites
that are moving around on independent orbits of one another.
And if you and the way that they would make
(27:36):
a dicense fear is, yeah, there's a lot of space
in between them, but if you step back a few
orders of magnitude further back into the other parts of
the galaxy or the universe, it would appear is basically
a whole sphere around the Sun. So it still falls
under that category, right. He had to keep that sphere
think because of branding. He didn't want to lose that.
(27:59):
He's like the genies out of the bottle. They're like,
you really don't need it to be a sphere. He's like, oh,
it's got to be a sphere. Uh. So those satellites
are actually they would be called statites. Well, no, if
they were the bubble, they would be statites. This guy's
got it wrong. Oh really, I thought the solar sales
(28:20):
could be the statites. Now, So the what I saw
the difference between the swarm and the bubble was that
the swarm has the satellites in orbit around the star
and they're they're in their own orbits, not interacting with
each other. A bubble is where the satellites are in
a fixed position relative to the star. So those are
(28:42):
the statites, right, so they're just kind of hovering outside
of the star um, not in orbit, just kind of
hovering instead. And then those are the two and then
the third are the solar sales. Correct, Well, you can
make a solar sale, or you can make any of
them with solar sales. And I don't know where that
guy got that. Yeah, do we do a whole episode
(29:03):
on solar sales? Yeah? So, I mean it makes sense
if you get a bunch of these solar sales orbiting
the Sun, uh, you might think that you could harness
the power and send it back to Earth some way,
right exactly, And like that's that's like you could use
that with with with any of these like whether it's
a bubble, whether it's a swarm, whatever you're doing. Um,
(29:26):
And if you, like you said, a second ago made
them habitable, then all of a sudden you have a
recipe for survival for the human race if Earth ever
becomes untenable. Right, we can't tear a four mars. We
can go live on these things. And and when we
think about living out in space, my brain immediately goes
to like the cramped tiny tin can conditions of the
(29:48):
I s s these things don't need to be like that.
I mean, if we're creating dicens fears, we're going to
be advanced enough that we could build some really looks
um satellites and stat heights as solar race to go
hover or orbit around the Sun. Right, so they could
be huge, so so big in fact, that that Dyson
was saying this, this doesn't have to be an engineering
(30:12):
project that's carried out by a central global government that's
directing the whole thing. That as our energy consumption and
energy needs continue, nations could take it upon themselves individually
to create these solar sales that are habitable, put them
into orbit independently, and just through the desire to preserve
(30:34):
one's own life, would make sure that their orbit wasn't
going to intersect with somebody else's orbit. He was already
up there, and just organically a dycen spear in the
form of a swarm or a bubble could form on
its own, just by self interested nations developing this technology
basically independent of one another. I don't know, I was
(30:57):
he had some far far thinking the far thinking, alright, uh,
should we take another break? I think so, all right,
we'll do that, and we'll wrap it up a little
bit with how to get this energy back to the
home planet star. Alright, so earlier you talked about dismantling
(31:40):
Jupiter with a socket set a couple of screwdrivers. Mercury
is another planet that people have talked about as potentially harvesting. Um.
The good thing about Mercury couple of things. One is
that it is near the Sun. Yeah, so who needs
it already? Yeah, so it would make it um proximity wise,
(32:03):
it makes a little bit of sense. And uh, I
think this. Oxford University physicists Stewart Armstrong is who proposed this.
And um. One of the other great things about Mercury
is it has a lot of great raw materials, namely iron,
that we could use. And he he actually suggested that
we could disassemble Mercury fully in basically what amounted to
(32:27):
a forty year stretch thirty days. I could do it right, exactly,
if a contractor tells you you can take Mercury apart
in thirty days, don't trust him, agreed. Um, No, this
was this was in basically four ten year stretches combined
equals forty years. Obviously, but um, I think his point.
(32:48):
Armstrong's point was that you don't have to disassemble mercury
as a whole and and wait until it's fully disassembled
to put it together into dice and to start creating
a dicensphere. You can disassemble and then start reassembling as
you go. And once you start getting one bit of
it online, it's going to help power and create better
efficiency to harvest and reassemble mercury the rest of mercury,
(33:13):
you know, like we were talking about earlier, And not
only that, but you could use that energy all of
a sudden, you could. That would be super computing like
you've never seen. Uh, space travel would get faster, um
like all these technologies that we can't even like think
about yet would be growing at exponential rates, right, And
I mean that's the point, like when you're like, well,
(33:34):
what would we do with with you know, all of
this energy every second coming off of the sun. Who knows?
We we we just cannot conceive of the stuff we
could do with that amount of energy yet. But I
guarantee it's not going to be you know, using a
few like charging our smartphones. It should be for some
pretty neat stuff. I guess. Uh. So the other cool
(33:59):
idea is that, um, holy cow, how many people would
have to to take part in this kind of a project,
just literally the labor force you would need. And um,
I think Armstrong is the one who said, well you
could use robots actually, uh, and with the same idea
that once you get some of these robots going, uh,
(34:21):
if they could self replicate and build themselves, then you
can just kind of sit back and watch the paint
dry on earth and all these robots are up there
just building themselves and working and working, uh and doing
everything for you exactly. And that's why that was his
I don't know if it was his point. Someone's point
(34:42):
along the way is that when you start that, when
you build that first license fear, all of a sudden,
it's just going to keep going and going and going faster.
It's going to spread at an exponential rate. So you
would go from a type two civilization to a Type
three civilization pretty quickly. And as a matter of fact,
you would also if if this project was carried up
by a centralized government, it would spread so quickly and
(35:04):
so far h in such a relatively short amount of time.
Something like going from that first dicense fhere to um
colonizing an entire galaxy in something like a million years,
that even if it was a centralized government involved at
the beginning, they would very quickly lose control of the
colonies because they'd be so spread out and there'll be
(35:25):
so many of them that they would just basically become
self sufficient and spread over the galaxy. So the reason
this is noteworthy is that if you found one dicens fear,
you would probably find millions or billions or trillions of
them in in just an one section of the universe.
(35:46):
Right You're not you You probably are not going to
find just one dicense fear. You're going to find a
dison galaxy, a type three civilization. And that's what they're
looking for by sifting through UM some of these old
sky surveys, and they found a couple of of candidates.
Actually in the last year or so, I think, yeah,
(36:07):
there's a there's a couple of surveys that have found
stars and they have like typical star names. One is
A K I C eight four six to eight five two,
which is a sexy name, and then the other is
E P I C, which I'm pretty sure they call
Epic two oh four to nine one six right, and
(36:32):
Epic was discovered by the Kepler spacecraft in two fourteen.
And the reason these things are noteworthy is because, um,
there is some sort of weird transit uh pattern where
the light dims um I guess randomly or not necessarily
on some sort of set schedule UM around these stars.
(36:56):
And you would say, well, that's probably just a planet
or something coming in between. Well, yes, they thought about
that already um. And normally a star will dim by
about one percent when a planet sized object comes in
between you, the observer and that planet. These things are
dipping on the in the case of k I C
(37:17):
Star and in the case of the epics star sixty five. Right. Okay,
they have no idea what could be massive enough to
dim those two stars that much. They haven't encountered it before.
There's a couple of theories. One of them said a
swarm of comets. Somebody else said, well, you could very
(37:40):
easily go from a swarm of comets to a swarm
of solar arrays. So maybe these are evidence of Dyson's fears. Yeah,
I mean it's possible. Well, you know, it's kind of
fun to talk about robot robots building themselves and them
doing all this work up there. Uh. One of the
(38:01):
big problems is we're not nearly I mean, we have
robot technology now, but nothing close to that at the present. Um.
And as this article points out, that you would need
like it would have to be so advanced these these
robots would have to be operating without fail up there,
because they would be by themselves or be able to
(38:22):
fix themselves and fix problems like the intelligence would need
to be so far advanced, Like we can't even imagine
what that would be like. No, but I mean, even
if Michio Kaku is off by a hundred or two
hundred or five hundred years, that's not that far off. Like,
if we can harness all the energy on Earth, we
(38:43):
should very quickly and improve as far as our technology
is concerned. So who knows, Maybe maybe those robots aren't
that far off, you know. Um. One other thing that
that I saw from this though, was when H. Freeman
Dyson was talking about disassembling Jupiter Chuck. He said that
it should take I don't know, roughly eight hundred years
(39:06):
worth of the Sun's energy output to disassemble and reassemble
Jupiter well, that's not bad, but do you remember how
much comes out of the sun in a second. We're like, whoa,
you know, that's so much. We would need eight hundred
years worth of that to disassemble and reassemble Jupiter. So
we we like, not only do we not have the
(39:28):
capability of building as Dicens fear, we don't even have
the capability of disassembling Jupiter. We just don't have any
way to harness that energy, which creates this kind of
um chicken or egg dilemma, like the way almost need
a Dicens fear to create a Dicens fear. At this point,
somewhere Freeman Dison is laughing on acid somewhere in New Jersey. Um.
(39:51):
One of the other big issues is, okay, let's say
that you could even do something like this and harness
this energy. UM to get it to Earth is another
big problem, um um. If we want to make it
actually actually usable. Um. Some people said we could laser
it over, but the problems with laser beams is after
about a mile you're gonna lose a lot of uh
(40:12):
if efficiency with it. So good luck with that. Microwaves
have been floated out there, but microwaves. Even though they're
more effective, longer farther out than lasers. Um, you're still
limited to about a hundred miles, which will do us
no good. Right, So what's the answer. I don't know. Yeah,
I don't have one either. I mean, I guess one
(40:34):
of the easy ones is, well, just inhabit the solar rays.
Go inhabit the Dyson sphere. Stop being so precious about
living on Earth. Yea um, which makes sense. But I
like living on Earth. Yeah, but would an Earth eight
hundred years from now be worth living on? Uh? It depends, Chuck,
(40:55):
will it be skipping skipping to school and skinning knees
and spelling bees and all that still? Because if so, yes, Yeah,
I don't know what you're talking about. It's another Simpsons reference.
He's it's a one where Principal Skinner came back, the
real Principal Skinner, and he's like, he goes, if if
(41:17):
you think skinning knees and spelling bees or corny, well,
then mr corn me up. That's right. That's when they
introduced Uh, I would like to introduce the Principal Skinner,
Principal ski Moore Skinner. Armontain's Ariane that's a great one. Um,
there's one other thing. You've got anything else? I got
nothing else. I got one more thing. So there's that
(41:40):
whole idea that Dyson came up with to search the
skies for this this imprint where there's a lot of
infrared radiation but no visible light. There's a problem with
that because this guy came along. His name was Robert
Bradberry's a futurist, I think maybe a science fiction writer. No, Robert,
his little little brother. Um Robert Bradberry said, well, you
(42:04):
know what, if you really wanted to um make these
dicense fears efficient, you'd make them in like the same
manner that those Russian nesting dolls are made Troishka, right,
So you'd have the the internal sphere and then outer
spheres going around and catching all that lost heat energy
and turning it into usable power, which is awesome because
(42:27):
you'd have basically a hundred percent efficiency as far as
the dicense fear was concerned. But if you're looking at
the stars, you would see nothing because not only would
there not be visible light, there also wouldn't be any
infrared radiation. And Freeman Dyson just hung his head, went
into his room and shut the door and laid down
on his bed for a while. The end. Yeah. Uh, Well,
(42:51):
if you want to know more about dicens fears, you
can start with this article on how stuff works dot
com by typing dicens fear into the search bar how
stuff works. As I said, and since I said how
stuff works twice, that means it's time for a listener mail.
I'm gonna call this. Uh we helped a lady out. Um. Hey, guys,
(43:13):
hope this email finds you. Well. Been listening for only
a short time, but it becomes so addicted. I've already
being about half of your episodes offered on Spotify. I
think she meant changed. We were on Spotify, by the way,
and you can being us all you want from that platform. Um,
like many others, I absolutely adore your show. I came
(43:36):
across the podcast after a very upsetting event in my
life save you the SOB story, and just say I
was going through intense grief. There was something about your
kind voice, is strong intellect, and raunchy humor that gave
me a thirst for learning and a new purpose in life.
Wait a minute, Wait a minute, wait a minute, do
we have raunchy humor. I didn't realize that. I think
(43:58):
she picks up on the that's like Cheach and Chong,
the sideways comments. We're like the new Cheech and Chong.
Thank you a billion times over for just being who
you are. The podcast was a large factor in saving
my life. Don't ever underestimate or doubt what you do
and know that there are people like me out there
soaking up every word. Sincerely, Cheery B. Thanks a lot, Cherry.
(44:22):
That's nice and I like hearing that we help people. Yeah,
it makes me feel good in my belly. Yeah, we
appreciate the compliment. That's very nice of you to take
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And if you want to get in touch with us
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Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should
(44:46):
Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts
for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
M Hey everybody, it's your old pal Josh, and for
this week's Select, I invite you to listen to our
ridiculously interesting episode on Dyson's Fears. It's a really cool
look at how we'll start harnessing energy in the solar
system in the future and eventually from the universe as
a whole. And when we do stand back. I hope
(00:20):
you find this one as interesting as Chuck and I did,
so getty up and enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know,
a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant,
(00:44):
Jerry's over there. Their foot on the button, and that
means this is stuff you should know the podcast. The
foot on the button, just waiting to cut us off. Yeah,
that's what no one knows. But Jerry has a kill
switch at her foot for all of our profane tirades. Yeah,
it would kill us if she ever pressed it. That's right,
(01:06):
That's why they call it that. But she's not very
good at it. I've noticed I've noticed some stuff slips by. Yeah.
I told her she's like Keith Richards of podcast producers,
because he can't use guitar pedals, So he's known for that.
Is that a thing? Well, I mean I don't know
how known he is maybe among guitar players, but he uh,
he just plugs right into the amp. That's pretty great. Oh,
(01:30):
I see. And his he was on Mark Maron's podcast.
It was a great interview in maren he you know,
it's pure Keith Richards and he was just basically like,
you know, I have a hard time standing upright, like
I can't mess with trying to press foot pedals. Right,
that's Keith Man. Yep. Very pure. Yeah. And by pure,
(01:50):
I mean pure heroine, pure China. He's clean now, But
is he really? That's astounding? Well, I mean no, I
mean he doesn't do like hard drugs anymore. I got you,
And I think he drinks and smokes weed. I got you.
Come on, yeah, like Christine. Actually, Maron smoked his first
(02:13):
cigarette in a decade in that show with him. Oh
that was smart, a good decision. He was like, I
have to how can I not? Yeah, he easily could
not have done that. I'm disappointed, did he really? Yeah?
Keith Richards offered him a smoke and he's like sure, Yeah,
I mean I see that, but at the same time
I was assos to not smoking. Listen to you. I
(02:36):
know I'm being judge wagging your finger, so Chuck, Yes,
have you ever used energy? Yes? Well, you know, when
you're using energy, most likely you're using something like a
fossil fuel, right, yeah, right, like gasoline or natural gas
or something like that, stuff that comes from decomposing dinosaurs. Yes, Okay.
(03:01):
The problem with using decomposing dinosaurs, as most people know,
is that it's essentially a non renewable resource. There's no
more dinosaurs decomposed any longer, and even if there were,
it would take tens of millions of years for them
to decompose into fossil fuels for us, right, right, even
if we could, even if we had dino d n
A and we could make new dinosaurs just to kill
(03:25):
them and watch them decompose, which is something we would
do if we had the capability, I guarantee you, right, Um,
But we don't have that capability as far as I know, Like,
no one's working on that track right now. I don't
think just uh Steven Spielberg, right, maybe someone at Rutgers. So, um,
(03:48):
we we have to come up with energy sources that
we won't eventually run out of. And obviously there's like
wind and solar and as far as solar power goes,
from what I understand, we're actually doing pretty well right now.
Like right now, we use something like point zero one
percent of the sunlight that reaches Earth to to power
our our world, So there's a lot of room for
(04:10):
growth potential. The thing is is, I also saw that
if we keep growing and our energy consumption keeps growing
uh at something like one percent a year, within a
thousand years will be using more than the entire amount
of sunlight that hits the Earth UM can provide. So
we really need to come up with something else. Yes,
(04:32):
The problem is is even if we harnessed all of
the energy here on Earth, we would very quickly outgrow
whatever energy it provided. So some people have said, well,
why don't we just go straight to the source. If
the Sun is such a great source of energy, but
it's shooting that energy out in directions other than the Earth, UM,
(04:52):
the stuff that is starting towards the Earth doesn't make
it very frequently. Well, let's just go to the sun
and and basically strangle the life out of it to
get energy from it right, great idea and one of
the first proposals of it. I don't want to say
a serious proposal, because although it's been taken seriously over
(05:13):
the years and almost been interpreted like scripture. Um, it
was a thought experiment to begin with. It's something called
the Dyson's fear. Yes, um, well, I guess we should
introduce the man. Not that we have him here, that'd
be awesome. He's he's still around. Yeah, I know, he's
(05:33):
an old dude. But we're talking about Freeman Dyson, not
to the maker of the vacuum cleaner or the bladeless
fan or the bladeless hair dryer. Is that really a thing?
They have a dice in hair dryer? Yeah, you know
what that. I was so disappointed when I found out
(05:54):
what the bladeless fan was. Why have you seen those? Yeah,
you can stick your and through it. It's amazing. Well
I know, and I was like it is it magic? Like,
how in the world isn't doing this? But it's got
a stupid blade. It's just housed in a in a casing. Yeah,
so that's a terrible name for it. And then it
just channels it up and you know, squirts it out
(06:15):
the front that they're The Dyson invention that always got
me was the air blade hand dryer. I think we've
talked about this before, where you stick your hand down
in there. Those Yeah, but they're so filled with germs
that Actually I was in a bathroom the other day
and they have an air blade now that just blows
downward onto your hands, and it's actually I'm like, Okay,
(06:38):
now I'm satisfied with this invention. Well, you know, you're
not supposed to rub your hand on the air blade itself, no,
but it's so close. It's like you're playing operation like
I'm trying to remove a funny bone or something like that.
It's almost impossible not to hit the sides of the thing,
you know, your big meat hooks or just rubbing all
over every gross. Yeah, it is gross, believe me, because
I walk out is crying with my hands held in
(06:59):
the air every time I'm to go to the bathroom. Well,
you and I have a very big thing about airport bathrooms. Um,
and I think I had the worst one of my
life at a Boston Logan on our last tour. Oh yeah,
what happened? It was just not up to snuff, Like
the first of all the door and this might have
been just this one bathroom, but the doors to the
(07:21):
stalls none of them secured, they've been ripped clean off.
Well they were there, but you couldn't you know, the
locks didn't work. It was just yeah, basically had to
push my hand against it, which grossed me out. Yeah,
that's not okay. And then the gap when the door
was shut was like two or three inches big, like
you could fully just look in and say, how you doing,
(07:41):
how's your poop? Yeah, that's the Mr. Peeper's model. It's
just not acceptable, you know, in this day and age,
to not have complete privacy in there. I mean, I
agree with you. I again, I'm going to reiterate. I
think there should be one stall for an entire bathroom
so that no one could possibly sit down next you.
But barring that, them all exactly. But barring that, though,
(08:04):
like the place, like what we have in our office
is acceptable. It's a good second. There's like a complete
wall in between you. There's a complete wall in front
of you and a door. It's a securely shut it's
a water closet. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess I
guess it is. The man I knew we were going
(08:25):
to get distracted by poop. Yeah, this isn't even the
porta potty I know, all right, So sorry. Back to
Freeman Dyson. Uh, not the vacuum maker. He was born
in England. He worked most of his career he's retired now,
but work most of his career as a physics professor
at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, not Rutgers. Uh.
(08:53):
He was a civilian scientist with the r EF and
World War Two. I went to Cambridge, then Cornell for
grad school. This guy's got some bona fides. Uh. And
then he's been in news recently by being a big
I mean, brilliant, brilliant man. But he's been in the
news recently by being one of the more prominent scientists
that on as a climate change skeptic. Oh is that right? Yeah,
(09:18):
and not like a complete skeptic, like he does believe
that it's I believe, Whereas what his stance is that
he does believe that it's man made, but he doesn't
think we have enough detail about all the variables for
these computer generated models to be accurate. So he's he's
basically saying like this is not the end of the world,
(09:40):
and in fact, he thinks that increasing levels of CEO
two can be a good thing for humanity. Ultimately, I
don't know, I didn't get that far. He's like, it
gives it gives you a pretty good buzz. Maybe, I
don't know. It's pretty interesting though. He's like, I think
starting about, you know, six to ten years ago, really
started making the news with his somewhat controversial because he's
(10:03):
a brilliant man, and all these other scientists are like, wow,
he's such a smart guy, but he's so wrong on this.
But then other people are like, no, he's totally right.
That's pretty interesting anyway. Um, so that's who he is.
And he in nineteen thirty seven, well not n seven.
He in the nineteen sixties was reading a book from
nineteen thirty seven called Starmaker from uh, science fiction author
(10:26):
Olaf Stapledon, and uh, he saw this thing called a
light trap from this book. Uh. And this book also
had predicted things like virtual reality, and it's kind of
a pretty much a landmark sci fi science book. And um,
he said, hey, this light trap sounds like a good idea.
I'm going to rip it off. Yeah he did, And
(10:48):
he actually It was I think a paper that was
published in Science and the General Science in nineteen sixty
and it's really short. Did you read it? Yeah, yeah,
it's like I think it took up two pages in Science, um,
out of like a thousand or something like that in
that volume. But um, he basically said, this would be
a great thing, as you say, to rip off, for
(11:10):
a thought experiment I'm working on. Right, because just very
recently something called Project OSMA had been created, and that
was they started to search the sky for extraterrestrial intelligence.
It was the first cit um and they were looking
for radio signals still are. But Dyson was saying, well,
hold on a second, if you're gonna start looking for
extraterrestrial beings like signs of intelligent civilizations, you should maybe
(11:33):
start looking for these and and they came to be
called Dyson's fears because he was the first one to
popularize it, even though he got the idea from old Off. Yeah,
he actually said, um, he thought a staple in sphere
was a better name, but I guess not good enough
to actually use it, right, right, Yeah, he said it
once very quietly. Yeah, But so this dysons he it
(11:57):
was originally created as a again a thought experiment. He
wasn't He didn't talk about how to construct it necessarily
or anything like that, although there were some follow up
correspondence UM after the letter first came out, but almost
immediately people started thinking about how you would create one
(12:18):
of these things, this this Dicen sphere, and the whole point,
we should say, basically, at its at its basis, a
Dicen sphere is UM an engineering project, a megastructure that
initially was thought to be basically a hollow sphere that
you built around a star, for example, we would build
(12:39):
it around our sun. And the whole point of this
thing is on the inside of this sphere are solar arrays,
so that all of that sunlight, like we were talking
about earlier, that gets wasted as far as we're concerned,
is captured and converted into usable energy for us. And
and in Freeman Dyson's point was, if you build one
(13:03):
of these things, you're going to capture light. Light won't
get out, but infrared radiation heat, thermal heat will escape.
And so if you're looking around the skies for aliens,
look for something that has a tremendous amount of like
the infrared radiation of a star, but isn't putting any
light out? And maybe you just found an alien civilization.
(13:23):
That's how it began. But people started trying to figure
out how to make one of these things almost as
soon as he published that letter. So the one thing
I don't get was he saying that look for this
because other civilizations out there are using a dycen spear.
He he said that it would be likely that they
that this would be an invention they came up. Got you, Yeah,
(13:45):
all right, well, um let's go should we go to
uh this U Nikolai kardas Chef question. I think we
can't put it off any longer. It's pretty interesting. In
the nineteen sixties there was an astrophysicist named Nikolai karda
chef and um he was a Bond villain and actually
he wasn't, but he should have been. Um. He had
(14:07):
this idea that there were three classifications of civilization, uh
type one, which is basically, we have learned how to
harness all the energy on the home planet, like everything
you can possibly harness here on Earth. And you would think, well,
that's probably us. We're not quite there yet. Uh. Really
(14:29):
smart dude name Michio Kaku um not a bond villain either.
He said, uh, in the next hundred years or so,
maybe two hundred years, we might actually be a Type
one civilization. Yeah, And like you said, that's where every
bit of Judeo thermal energy, every drop of sunlight, every
um um, every bit of hydroelectric power, all that stuff,
(14:53):
every potential bit of energy is being harnessed by us.
That's right. Yeah, We're nowhere near that right now. I
think Cocu's assessments a little rosie. Oh well, and I
can say that because he was on our TV show
sort of well he was he yes, he appeared on,
but we didn't interact with us in a real way exactly.
(15:14):
He has no idea who we are, no none. Uh
So Type two is the next, of course, and they
that kind of civilization would understand how to harness all
of the energy not only on your own home planet,
but the energy of a star in its own solar system. Right,
that's where the that's where the Dyson's fear comes in,
(15:35):
and that's what we aspire to do one day, right,
maybe a million or so years from now. And then
Type three is just kind of like following this logical progression, right,
and that's harnessing all the energy of all the galaxies,
or of entire galaxies, not necessarily all of them. Yeah.
(15:56):
I think that the second, the second age, the type
to civilization, would be um the either the hardest to
get to or take the longest to get to. And
that's because when you build that first dicense fear, your
technology and your energy efficiency and your productivity is going
(16:17):
to just shoot forward exponentially from that point on. So
so once you build that first one, you can start
building more and more and more much more quickly. So
you jump from a Type two to a Type three
civilization pretty pretty fast compared to how long it took
you to go from a Type one to a Type
to civilization. Yeah. I think it's like any any product,
(16:41):
even that that first one is tough, and then you
can scale it and uh, but well we'll get to
the robots here. So okay, in fact, let's take a break.
I'm getting a little psych chuck, and we'll talk a
little bit more about the sun right after this. All right,
(17:20):
So I went when I said the word sun, Yeah,
I thought that was odd. No, it's not, you know,
I honestly had no idea where you're going with this?
Well you do, you're being coy. Uh. Most people out there,
most long time listeners, know that our son podcast was
one of our our biggest struggles and would have been
(17:42):
our biggest achievements had we uh done it right. It's
it's the biggest pity applause. We get yeah for this son, No, No,
it was it was fine. Get you tried, Yeah, good
for you for trying. But let's talk a little bit
of about the sun. This stuff I can deal with,
at least as far as its immense power and energy. Um,
(18:06):
and I love that our own article has some of
these comparisons. Um, the sun can generate five times one
zero to three horsepower. I think that that is a TYPEO.
I think that it's supposed to be five times ten
to the twenty three power. You think that's the only
explanation I have for that. That doesn't make sense. That's
(18:27):
a really small number. Actually, yeah, I agree, it would
be like about horse power. Yeah, that's five times tinted.
It's got to be someone just got lazy there. Serious.
They're like, I don't know how to do the little
twenty three thing, right, I don't I don't know how
to use superscript. What am I like a great editor?
(18:49):
Superscript that's what it is, right, superscript and subscript. Uh so,
let's put it this way, and this one is the
one that cracks me up. Um, the sun has enough
energy eat to melt an ice bridge two miles wide
and a mile thick from Earth to the Sun in
a single second. In a single second. That's pretty good.
(19:10):
This is the only article I think I've ever seen
an ellipse in like like the author was like, wait
for it in a single second. Yeah, I don't even
think they did the ellipse right. And the ellips supposed
to be right after the letter or is it their space?
I think there's supposed to be a space on either side.
Really technically, yeah, I've been doing these wrong. Then, well,
don't feel bad. This thing says five times one thousand
(19:32):
three horsepowers. It's all good, all right? What else? One
trillion one megatson bombs going off every second if your
war like, and then finally, one single second of sun
action whatever that is is enough to power our earth
for half a million years. That drives it home. It does,
(19:57):
but it also gives you an idea of just how
primitive we are energy consumption wise, Like, it's it's it's
it's crazy because you know, we're really worried about running
out of our non renewable resources, but we use such
a minute amount of energy that that the Sun could
(20:17):
power the energy use we use currently for half a
million years in one second. Yeah, that's nuts, right, So
that also kind of takes your mind though too. Um,
And this is I think one of the things one
of the buttons that Freeman Dyson um pushed. It makes
you realize, like, holy cow, we could do some really
(20:39):
amazing stuff if we could capture a significant amount of
that power that the Sun puts out, even an insignificant amount. Yeah, yeah,
you'd keep Iggy Pop going for like another hundred years.
Uh So, like you said, the idea behind the Dicen
sphere is this structure originally proposed a hollow sphere and
(21:03):
kind of referred to it as a shell. Um, but
I think now or I think he went on to
to make it a solid sphere. He so he actually
said he was really, um, what's the opposite of clear? Yeah,
I guess a little convoluted. He he didn't really go
(21:24):
to the trouble of spelling it out, because again, remember
this is a thought experiment that had to do with
finding aliens, not an engineering schematic. So he used some
very it was vague. That was the word I was
looking for. He was using some vague words, and we're like, wait,
what what what are you talking about? What is this sphere?
Is it? Is it cohesive? Is it like a solid body?
Is it hollow in the middle? What's going on? And
(21:46):
he came back and said in a letter a follow up,
he said, no, no, no, like there's there's no way
you could build something that would go around our sun
that would be a solid body that was hollow in
the middle, Like it couldn't be a cohesive whole because
the rotational forces, the sheer forces, and the gravitational forces
(22:06):
acting on it would just obliterate it immediately. Like it's
it just be mechanically impossible to make it like that.
So he said, so maybe you would make something like
a bubble or a swarm or something like that. Yeah,
And he said in the letter, I've been closed some
blotter acid. Put it on your tongue. You're gonna love this.
It's dynamite, and call me in an hour. Might make
(22:29):
a little more sense. Uh yeah. Our own article points
out that one of the first downsides, obviously, if you
surround the Sun completely, is that sunlight has I mean,
I know we'd be harnessing that energy, but sunlight provides
a lot more than just energy. Oh yeah, like it
makes us happy. Yeah, people write entire songs about how
(22:52):
sunshine makes you happy, like John Denver, did you know?
And that was just on the shoulders. It would be
a global bummer if somebody enclosed the Sun. That's like
super villain kind of stuff, right, Okay, so that's a problem.
Another problem, though, is that if you're going to build
something like this, and and Dyson even suggested the size
(23:12):
of it. He was saying it would need to have
a radius, so a radius not even a diameter half
of the diameter, a radius that was two times the
distance of the Earth to the Sun. So this thing
would be massive, which means that it would also enclose
the Earth too, right, Like he wasn't proposing you just
go up and create this tight ball around the Sun,
(23:36):
Like it would be much further spread out and it
would actually encompass the Earth's orbit within it. Oh, so
it would be like this, this is mine. It belongs.
It belongs to the Earth and no one else and
can get any sun. Yeah, it would. It would block
off the stuff outside of two times the distance of
the Earth's orbit. So there's a couple of planets out
(23:56):
there that would would get the old screw job. But
but but the ones inside twice the distance of Earth's
orbit would really benefit from it. It's very selfish. Yeah.
But the other problem is to chuck is I imagine
it would. Things would get pretty hot pretty quickly inside
this thing, So the Earth would be destroyed. Yes, he
(24:21):
and to get around this, and a lot of people
I don't think got it immediately. He said, well, you
just live inside the Dyson's fear like like in the
outer shell of it. Oh, sure, make it habitable. Yeah right,
well that makes sense. Yeah, but what you were saying
about just the sheer size of it there. There literally
(24:41):
aren't enough raw materials on our entire planet to make
something this big. In fact, in our in our entire
solar system, there probably aren't enough raw materials to make
a structure like this and not and not still try
to inhabit it. There's just no way. Um. Some people
say though, and in Freeman himself. I keep waying to
(25:03):
call him Freeman, like that's his last name, but I
just end up sounding like I know him on a
first name. He he was saying, Um, you might be
able to build something like this by disassembling Jupiter. Well
that was his suggestion. Yeah, he said, disassembled Jupiter and uh,
put it back together, and you could build a Dyson
(25:27):
sphere um that had the radius twice the distance from
the Earth to the Sun and make a solar array
of it. Must have been some good acid. Yeah, good
for him. All right, So I think we're both in agreement,
and most people are in agreement that this severe idea
is not at all tangible, not as like a cohesive whole. No,
(25:52):
like it just remains in the realm of thought experiment.
So why bother. Oh well, that's the interesting thing to me.
It basically is kind of like he meant it as
a thought experiment. It's been brought out of the realm
of thought experiments. And yeah, we're in no way, shape
or form capable of doing this, but a lot of
(26:13):
people have tried to figure out how to do it,
and I think it's it's one of those things that
it's like yeah, it's theoretically possible. Um, but we're just
it's not at our We're nowhere near that that level
of capability right now. Well, I think his other ideas
that he came up with, though, are are decent. Oh,
(26:33):
like the swarm and stuff. Well, yeah, I mean, let's
let's get to that. He uh he himself even said
the sphere is probably not very realistic at all, So
why don't we do this, Why don't we think of
different machines maybe that are independent of one another, that
actually circle the Sun, collect this energy and then beam
it back to Earth. Right, So, so to him, his
(26:54):
initial idea was that sphere, and then what it came
to be was that the sphere was like the umbrella
term for these different slightly more realistic ideas, like the
swarm or the bubble. So like like, what's the swarm? Uh, well,
the swarm maybe they they are in different orbits and
(27:15):
they like the swarming likens it to bees, like instead
of gathering pollen, they're just around the Sun, moving around,
gathering energy and power, and so those might be habitable too, right,
And they're like they're there's solar rays that are satellites
that are moving around on independent orbits of one another.
And if you and the way that they would make
(27:36):
a dicense fear is, yeah, there's a lot of space
in between them, but if you step back a few
orders of magnitude further back into the other parts of
the galaxy or the universe, it would appear is basically
a whole sphere around the Sun. So it still falls
under that category, right. He had to keep that sphere
think because of branding. He didn't want to lose that.
(27:59):
He's like the genies out of the bottle. They're like,
you really don't need it to be a sphere. He's like, oh,
it's got to be a sphere. Uh. So those satellites
are actually they would be called statites. Well, no, if
they were the bubble, they would be statites. This guy's
got it wrong. Oh really, I thought the solar sales
(28:20):
could be the statites. Now, So the what I saw
the difference between the swarm and the bubble was that
the swarm has the satellites in orbit around the star
and they're they're in their own orbits, not interacting with
each other. A bubble is where the satellites are in
a fixed position relative to the star. So those are
(28:42):
the statites, right, so they're just kind of hovering outside
of the star um, not in orbit, just kind of
hovering instead. And then those are the two and then
the third are the solar sales. Correct, Well, you can
make a solar sale, or you can make any of
them with solar sales. And I don't know where that
guy got that. Yeah, do we do a whole episode
(29:03):
on solar sales? Yeah? So, I mean it makes sense
if you get a bunch of these solar sales orbiting
the Sun, uh, you might think that you could harness
the power and send it back to Earth some way,
right exactly, And like that's that's like you could use
that with with with any of these like whether it's
a bubble, whether it's a swarm, whatever you're doing. Um,
(29:26):
And if you, like you said, a second ago made
them habitable, then all of a sudden you have a
recipe for survival for the human race if Earth ever
becomes untenable. Right, we can't tear a four mars. We
can go live on these things. And and when we
think about living out in space, my brain immediately goes
to like the cramped tiny tin can conditions of the
(29:48):
I s s these things don't need to be like that.
I mean, if we're creating dicens fears, we're going to
be advanced enough that we could build some really looks
um satellites and stat heights as solar race to go
hover or orbit around the Sun. Right, so they could
be huge, so so big in fact, that that Dyson
was saying this, this doesn't have to be an engineering
(30:12):
project that's carried out by a central global government that's
directing the whole thing. That as our energy consumption and
energy needs continue, nations could take it upon themselves individually
to create these solar sales that are habitable, put them
into orbit independently, and just through the desire to preserve
(30:34):
one's own life, would make sure that their orbit wasn't
going to intersect with somebody else's orbit. He was already
up there, and just organically a dycen spear in the
form of a swarm or a bubble could form on
its own, just by self interested nations developing this technology
basically independent of one another. I don't know, I was
(30:57):
he had some far far thinking the far thinking, alright, uh,
should we take another break? I think so, all right,
we'll do that, and we'll wrap it up a little
bit with how to get this energy back to the
home planet star. Alright, so earlier you talked about dismantling
(31:40):
Jupiter with a socket set a couple of screwdrivers. Mercury
is another planet that people have talked about as potentially harvesting. Um.
The good thing about Mercury couple of things. One is
that it is near the Sun. Yeah, so who needs
it already? Yeah, so it would make it um proximity wise,
(32:03):
it makes a little bit of sense. And uh, I
think this. Oxford University physicists Stewart Armstrong is who proposed this.
And um. One of the other great things about Mercury
is it has a lot of great raw materials, namely iron,
that we could use. And he he actually suggested that
we could disassemble Mercury fully in basically what amounted to
(32:27):
a forty year stretch thirty days. I could do it right, exactly,
if a contractor tells you you can take Mercury apart
in thirty days, don't trust him, agreed. Um, No, this
was this was in basically four ten year stretches combined
equals forty years. Obviously, but um, I think his point.
(32:48):
Armstrong's point was that you don't have to disassemble mercury
as a whole and and wait until it's fully disassembled
to put it together into dice and to start creating
a dicensphere. You can disassemble and then start reassembling as
you go. And once you start getting one bit of
it online, it's going to help power and create better
efficiency to harvest and reassemble mercury the rest of mercury,
(33:13):
you know, like we were talking about earlier, And not
only that, but you could use that energy all of
a sudden, you could. That would be super computing like
you've never seen. Uh, space travel would get faster, um
like all these technologies that we can't even like think
about yet would be growing at exponential rates, right, And
I mean that's the point, like when you're like, well,
(33:34):
what would we do with with you know, all of
this energy every second coming off of the sun. Who knows?
We we we just cannot conceive of the stuff we
could do with that amount of energy yet. But I
guarantee it's not going to be you know, using a
few like charging our smartphones. It should be for some
pretty neat stuff. I guess. Uh. So the other cool
(33:59):
idea is that, um, holy cow, how many people would
have to to take part in this kind of a project,
just literally the labor force you would need. And um,
I think Armstrong is the one who said, well you
could use robots actually, uh, and with the same idea
that once you get some of these robots going, uh,
(34:21):
if they could self replicate and build themselves, then you
can just kind of sit back and watch the paint
dry on earth and all these robots are up there
just building themselves and working and working, uh and doing
everything for you exactly. And that's why that was his
I don't know if it was his point. Someone's point
(34:42):
along the way is that when you start that, when
you build that first license fear, all of a sudden,
it's just going to keep going and going and going faster.
It's going to spread at an exponential rate. So you
would go from a type two civilization to a Type
three civilization pretty quickly. And as a matter of fact,
you would also if if this project was carried up
by a centralized government, it would spread so quickly and
(35:04):
so far h in such a relatively short amount of time.
Something like going from that first dicense fhere to um
colonizing an entire galaxy in something like a million years,
that even if it was a centralized government involved at
the beginning, they would very quickly lose control of the
colonies because they'd be so spread out and there'll be
(35:25):
so many of them that they would just basically become
self sufficient and spread over the galaxy. So the reason
this is noteworthy is that if you found one dicens fear,
you would probably find millions or billions or trillions of
them in in just an one section of the universe.
(35:46):
Right You're not you You probably are not going to
find just one dicense fear. You're going to find a
dison galaxy, a type three civilization. And that's what they're
looking for by sifting through UM some of these old
sky surveys, and they found a couple of of candidates.
Actually in the last year or so, I think, yeah,
(36:07):
there's a there's a couple of surveys that have found
stars and they have like typical star names. One is
A K I C eight four six to eight five two,
which is a sexy name, and then the other is
E P I C, which I'm pretty sure they call
Epic two oh four to nine one six right, and
(36:32):
Epic was discovered by the Kepler spacecraft in two fourteen.
And the reason these things are noteworthy is because, um,
there is some sort of weird transit uh pattern where
the light dims um I guess randomly or not necessarily
on some sort of set schedule UM around these stars.
(36:56):
And you would say, well, that's probably just a planet
or something coming in between. Well, yes, they thought about
that already um. And normally a star will dim by
about one percent when a planet sized object comes in
between you, the observer and that planet. These things are
dipping on the in the case of k I C
(37:17):
Star and in the case of the epics star sixty five. Right. Okay,
they have no idea what could be massive enough to
dim those two stars that much. They haven't encountered it before.
There's a couple of theories. One of them said a
swarm of comets. Somebody else said, well, you could very
(37:40):
easily go from a swarm of comets to a swarm
of solar arrays. So maybe these are evidence of Dyson's fears. Yeah,
I mean it's possible. Well, you know, it's kind of
fun to talk about robot robots building themselves and them
doing all this work up there. Uh. One of the
(38:01):
big problems is we're not nearly I mean, we have
robot technology now, but nothing close to that at the present. Um.
And as this article points out, that you would need
like it would have to be so advanced these these
robots would have to be operating without fail up there,
because they would be by themselves or be able to
(38:22):
fix themselves and fix problems like the intelligence would need
to be so far advanced, Like we can't even imagine
what that would be like. No, but I mean, even
if Michio Kaku is off by a hundred or two
hundred or five hundred years, that's not that far off. Like,
if we can harness all the energy on Earth, we
(38:43):
should very quickly and improve as far as our technology
is concerned. So who knows, Maybe maybe those robots aren't
that far off, you know. Um. One other thing that
that I saw from this though, was when H. Freeman
Dyson was talking about disassembling Jupiter Chuck. He said that
it should take I don't know, roughly eight hundred years
(39:06):
worth of the Sun's energy output to disassemble and reassemble
Jupiter well, that's not bad, but do you remember how
much comes out of the sun in a second. We're like, whoa,
you know, that's so much. We would need eight hundred
years worth of that to disassemble and reassemble Jupiter. So
we we like, not only do we not have the
(39:28):
capability of building as Dicens fear, we don't even have
the capability of disassembling Jupiter. We just don't have any
way to harness that energy, which creates this kind of
um chicken or egg dilemma, like the way almost need
a Dicens fear to create a Dicens fear. At this point,
somewhere Freeman Dison is laughing on acid somewhere in New Jersey. Um.
(39:51):
One of the other big issues is, okay, let's say
that you could even do something like this and harness
this energy. UM to get it to Earth is another
big problem, um um. If we want to make it
actually actually usable. Um. Some people said we could laser
it over, but the problems with laser beams is after
about a mile you're gonna lose a lot of uh
(40:12):
if efficiency with it. So good luck with that. Microwaves
have been floated out there, but microwaves. Even though they're
more effective, longer farther out than lasers. Um, you're still
limited to about a hundred miles, which will do us
no good. Right, So what's the answer. I don't know. Yeah,
I don't have one either. I mean, I guess one
(40:34):
of the easy ones is, well, just inhabit the solar rays.
Go inhabit the Dyson sphere. Stop being so precious about
living on Earth. Yea um, which makes sense. But I
like living on Earth. Yeah, but would an Earth eight
hundred years from now be worth living on? Uh? It depends, Chuck,
(40:55):
will it be skipping skipping to school and skinning knees
and spelling bees and all that still? Because if so, yes, Yeah,
I don't know what you're talking about. It's another Simpsons reference.
He's it's a one where Principal Skinner came back, the
real Principal Skinner, and he's like, he goes, if if
(41:17):
you think skinning knees and spelling bees or corny, well,
then mr corn me up. That's right. That's when they
introduced Uh, I would like to introduce the Principal Skinner,
Principal ski Moore Skinner. Armontain's Ariane that's a great one. Um,
there's one other thing. You've got anything else? I got
nothing else. I got one more thing. So there's that
(41:40):
whole idea that Dyson came up with to search the
skies for this this imprint where there's a lot of
infrared radiation but no visible light. There's a problem with
that because this guy came along. His name was Robert
Bradberry's a futurist, I think maybe a science fiction writer. No, Robert,
his little little brother. Um Robert Bradberry said, well, you
(42:04):
know what, if you really wanted to um make these
dicense fears efficient, you'd make them in like the same
manner that those Russian nesting dolls are made Troishka, right,
So you'd have the the internal sphere and then outer
spheres going around and catching all that lost heat energy
and turning it into usable power, which is awesome because
(42:27):
you'd have basically a hundred percent efficiency as far as
the dicense fear was concerned. But if you're looking at
the stars, you would see nothing because not only would
there not be visible light, there also wouldn't be any
infrared radiation. And Freeman Dyson just hung his head, went
into his room and shut the door and laid down
on his bed for a while. The end. Yeah. Uh, Well,
(42:51):
if you want to know more about dicens fears, you
can start with this article on how stuff works dot
com by typing dicens fear into the search bar how
stuff works. As I said, and since I said how
stuff works twice, that means it's time for a listener mail.
I'm gonna call this. Uh we helped a lady out. Um. Hey, guys,
(43:13):
hope this email finds you. Well. Been listening for only
a short time, but it becomes so addicted. I've already
being about half of your episodes offered on Spotify. I
think she meant changed. We were on Spotify, by the way,
and you can being us all you want from that platform. Um,
like many others, I absolutely adore your show. I came
(43:36):
across the podcast after a very upsetting event in my
life save you the SOB story, and just say I
was going through intense grief. There was something about your
kind voice, is strong intellect, and raunchy humor that gave
me a thirst for learning and a new purpose in life.
Wait a minute, Wait a minute, wait a minute, do
we have raunchy humor. I didn't realize that. I think
(43:58):
she picks up on the that's like Cheach and Chong,
the sideways comments. We're like the new Cheech and Chong.
Thank you a billion times over for just being who
you are. The podcast was a large factor in saving
my life. Don't ever underestimate or doubt what you do
and know that there are people like me out there
soaking up every word. Sincerely, Cheery B. Thanks a lot, Cherry.
(44:22):
That's nice and I like hearing that we help people. Yeah,
it makes me feel good in my belly. Yeah, we
appreciate the compliment. That's very nice of you to take
the time to write in to let us know. Uh.
And if you want to get in touch with us
to correct us or call us out for something or whatever,
um lay it on us. Send us an email to
Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should
(44:46):
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