Welcome to Gaia! ::

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/ETEmain.html


it's an online encyclopedia dedicated to astronomy, astrobiology, and everything else that exists beyond the earth's atmosphere.

did you know that there's a career field called astroengineering, one that doesn't have a single specialist in it since it doesn't even exist.

that's because astroengineering is dedicated to the construction of really big objects, not just death star big but bigger.

Like the dyson sphere, a product of a science fiction writer of the same name which is built to encircle a star and use it as energy. Imagine what it would be like if we actually found one, a supermassive space station the size of the sun.

I just the need to add this since we've had such a big shortage in topics, now we can have plenty of new topics.

That's a really cool site.

yeah, it's kinda weird...

but then again, before the next century we might just find ourselves with a few astroengineers, maybe building a few smaller scale projects such as ringworld.

I'm not sure about the type II Dyson spheres, the ones where it's nothing more than a giant ball, it seems far too flimsy.

A Type I Dyson sphere on the other hand looks much more probable, it seems easier to use a large collection of individual pieces instead of one giant super death star.

Who knows, there might just be a civilization out there that has actually built a Dyson sphere, maybe we'll build a type I variant.

Have you seen the article on the Dyson sphere converted to a giant computer? That's just crazy right there, a computer that big could very well be God for all we know.

Ringworld would actually be more complicated to build than a Dyson sphere (if even possible) since it has to be all in one piece and that would be really huge... and you would need VERY strong materials to build it, but we don't know any currently.
But a Dyson sphere can consist of relatively small solar panels orbiting close to each other, in multiple orbits closing around the star (more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere#Dyson_shell )

And about a Dyson sphere turned into a giant supercomputer, well that would be cool, but we better not let it become sentient... heard about SkyNet in Terminator? He's really scary (wipes out most of the human race), so imagine an AI computer a trillion times as powerful...
We might end up creating a devil instead of a god...