I think a logical layout for a Dyson Sphere would be habitation around the equator, industry & docking at the poles, and energy generation elsewhere. Also, if they're advanced enough to make this structure, you'd think they'd be advanced enough to be able to maintain the star beyond a normal stellar lifespan
An idea I brainstormed years ago was that you had a "dyson slice" orbiting around the star to give it a proper day and night cycle. The inner surface of this 'slice' would be coated in solar panels to harvest energy while the reverse side would house most of your heavy polluting industry leaving the surface of your sphere solely for habitation, agriculture, and lighter non-polluting industry.
A multi-species civilization, each with its own planetary origins, might find it useful to have latitudes of varying gravity within its spinning sphere.
Agreed the pole areas with lower gravity would probably be industrial areas. As for the species who built it, it is possible that they evolved into non corporeal organisms, were laid waste by a pandemic or lost the skills needed to maintain the structure
THATS what i was saying! Everything you said...i mean hell the enterprise saved that one star from going nova in the episode Troys mom had the hots for that big dude that was set to die. Or did they? Now i forgot if that was a failure or not but still if they could fully erect the sphere they could put some gas into the star or somehow repair fix or what ever. But if they were dead set on that id have rote into cannon a race pissed off poisoned the star to make the entire thing unusable which would go. ;)
Big fan of Ringworld and Niven. Great at world building but the best of Niven’s “Know Spaces” and other novels are collaborations with the late Jerry Pournelle and other authors playing with in the universe (Man-Kzin Wars series.) Niven does alright when focused on a single, western male protagonist. Niven/Pournelle complemented each other well.
Fun fact: The original Dyson Sphere design was never a singular structure. Instead it was really a cloud of habitats and various structures such as energy collection.
Star Trek never does it, but you can keep a star stable for, basically, forever via starlifting - pulling out the heavier elements - and feeding in fresh hydrogen or helium in controlled amounts.
Given the sheer size of even a small G-type star vs the size of starships, that would require a hell of a constant convoy operation or the ability for matter transmutation.
Can't remember hearing about that, but with their ability to trave via the Iconian gateway network, they could easily swap an old, dying star for a younger one. @@barrybend7189
Using a sphere for concealment is an excellent idea, except it will re-radiate the interior star's energy as infrared. (Not to mention the waste heat from the occupants inside.) A spot in space glowing in IR with no energy source visible in other wavelengths will no doubt draw the attention of some cadet looking for adventure. And thus another series is born.
@@DarthRagnarok343 That seems very Wasteful. We already have Thermo-Electric generators IRL. Imagine the quality & efficiency of TEG's they would have by the 24th century. All that free excess heat energy converted to electricity to be stored.
IIRC, “spheres as hidden arks” was exactly how the Forerunners intended their spheres to be used at the end of the war with the Flood. Nice to see that others have considered such a useful function. :D
In regards to the ring world: The idea was first described by Olaf Stapledon in his 1937 novel Star Maker before being popularised in the 1960s by the theoretical and mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson and later in the 70s by author Larry Niven. So Dyson did not "invent" the ring world.
actually dyson is more well known for the sphere and it's idiotic little cousin the dyson swarm, larry niven popularised the humble ring world and another guy entirely popularised a circle within circle within yet another circle design.
@@xyreniaofcthrayn1195you forget that niven make first specific how it is build and the Mit check it and correct it how that Ring can be build working
@@-Gothicgirl- not really and mit is I assume an offshoot of M.I.T which is great and all but they haven't achieved much besides working within others works.
The term "Dyson Sphere" originally didn't describe a uniform shell around a star, rather it meant a swarm of space structures clustered so densely that between them all basically no direct sunlight reaches the edge of the cloud. But people heard "sphere" and imagined a simple ball - and once popularized it is practically impossible to correct such a misunderstanding. The funny part is, such a Dyson Swarm is far easier to build than any example we see in Trek. Even our current industrial capabilities would allow us to build spinning cylindrical habitats with the inner surface area on the lower continental scale - each only taking resources from a handful of asteroids at most. We could have dozens of times the habitable area of earth in our planet's orbit, with the only thing you'd notice of it from the surface being the occasional glint of a surface catching the sunlight in the night sky. Now think how many of those it would take to literally blot out the sun. The surface area of the Sphere in Trek would vanish if compared to the total surface such a Swarm could offer - at a fraction of the material required.
It's worthy of note that none of these are inherently stable and will eventually lose their "orbit" without ongoing work to stabilize them they will eventually crash into their parent star. Of course any civilization that could build them would likely be able to create the necessary systems to correct for these iherent instabilities. This is touched on in Lary Niven's "Ringworld Engineers", a sequal to his book "Ringworld" and middle of the trilogy.
Not really that big a deal. An actual shell as we see it in the show is impossible anyway. In all scenarios. Instead, a series of (very, very many) orbital rings could be interwoven together, supporting an external shell to live on, and an internal shell to collect power and material from the sun. Those rings would have very dense fluids forced through them at velocities balanced to equate to the necessary stable orbital velocity of the star at that altitude. The star itself would power those systems. So, as long as they're maintained and robustly constructed to begin with, there should never be any need for other convoluted systems to maintain the structure's stability.
@@DoremiFasolatido1979 The instability is gravitational. Some sort of station keeping will be necessary. It's not about structural stability (that's also a huge engineering challenge requiring Clark-tech).
As a Stellaris player, we have both spheres and rings, but only the rings are used as habitats, while the spheres are massive solar collectors, and they are not stealthy. Quite a few other empires often complain that I've built my sphere around a key star in their favorite constelation.
Which kind of doesn't make sense. It takes about 20 years in game to build a sphere but the light from that star should take thousands of years to arrive at neighboring systems. So it should take them at least a thousand years to complain, one would think.
Regarding your theory of the Dyson Sphere being an ark, the major question would be why it was built in such a manner to be as "stealthy" as it was would depend on when it was built and if it was old enough it could have been made by a race attempting to hide from the Slavers empire...
I had always thought the Dyson Sphere had Artificial Gravity generators, which is a simple enough technology that Starfleet has it (as well as most races), and, as you pointed out, spinning doesn't make much sense (but love the 'Ease of Filming' joke, the primary reason AG seems so easy for most Sci-Fi races to come up with in movies and on TV 😂)
I question of the Dyson Sphere is more along the lines of solar winds....I mean would that be a ticking time bomb? The reason we can't put a lot of things into orbits is because our sun pushes them out of place, what's to stop it creating so much pressure it explodes or destroys things from the inside out?
If you had a single gravity generator go bad, all the structure's atmosphere would go exploding up into space. It would likely be the biggest thunderstorm in the galaxy's history.
@@s.patrickmarino7289 Still, we are talking about a species that had the technology to build this in the first place, and have it last who knows how many hundreds of thousands/millions of years. They would probably have fail safes for something like that.
@@MrChupacabra555 They might not fail over a year. They might not fail over 100 or even 1,000 years. When you are building on that scale, you are thinking on time scales of millions of years. Something on that scale needs to reliably be able to function long after your civilization ends. It needs to work, even if your great great great... grandchildren no longer know how to maintain it. They need to be as reliable as planets.
Based on the in show visuals, it looks like the ring was only a few km wide. You can even make out individual buildings and roads in some of the establishing shots. I guess the star at its center was a jumbo sized lightbulb or something
Halo is a ripoff of Ringworld, and a poor one at that. The Star at the center of the Ringworld can be commanded to eject million mile long solar flares which then lase to destroy incoming meteors. That’s a fricking weapon.
The idea that a Dyson Sphere would be used to hide a civilization within obviously begs the question. From what or Whom were they hiding that necessitated building such a vast structure? Reminds me of when I heard that the white spots on the back of a tigers ears were there to deter predators. What the hell does a tiger consider as a predator?
The Dyson Swarm is the most efficient & flexible structure configuration at these scale. It allow for change based on the activity of the star & provide all the surface area you need for your civilization. On top of that, once the "host star" has exhausted, each individual units in the "swam" already behave as their own spaceship... So it's easier to migrate to another star. Rings are funs but not at this scale, they would be more useful around planets than around stars. (because the habitable zone of each star is different so the sizing of the ring will have to change every time you change host star...)
I learned from Isaac Arthur that the original concept for a Dyson Sphere was a massive collection of orbital satellites, space stations and other such things that orbited the star, described as a Dyson Swarm while the pop-culture concept would be a Dyson Shell. Though I can understand why they went with the Shell concept because animating like 15 trillion satellites would have been an utter pain with the budgets and special effects capabilities of 1990s tv shows.
IRL Dr Dyson probably never thought anybody would build a solid sphere It was more about the principle that eventually any civilization would expand to the point that it used up all it's sun, and that might be a good idea for us to keep in mind when we modern humans see stars that look strange
technically speaking, the spheres should still be emitting a lot of IR radiation, just from waste heat, and still be visible to most sensors. unless, the nutronium is somehow able to negate entorpy somehow...
Dyson swarms with a ring are my favorite go to in Star Trek. Especially since with transporters you can turn solar energy into a new solar collector with some nice automated programming.
When it's a niven ringworld and niven is a known writer in Star trek that gives the kzinti to Star trek that is on lower decks too. And the Ring was in the trailer for season 4
The Halo array and the Dyson Rings from ST get their reference from Larry Niven's "Ringworld" books. Niven went on to write for Star Trek, and is the one responsible for introducing his race of cat people, the Kzinti, into Star Trek continuity. In his books, they were genetically engineered supersoldiers, in trek, a separate race.
@@TacComControl The Halo array is much more likely inspired by the Orbitals from Iain M Banks's Culture novels. It's hugely too small to be a Dyson structure.
The Dyson Sphere in TNG: "Relics" is stated to have a diameter of 200 million km, not 2 million km. Corazonia in LDS: "In the Cradle of Vexilon" is a megastructure but it's nowhere near the scale of a Dyson ring (also known as a Niven ring). Based on the speed of rotation vs its apparently Earth-like surface gravity, and based on individual buildings being visible from orbit, it must be around 200km-250km in diameter only, with a surface area of around 3000km². It's more of a large city-state or colony than a whole artificial world. Something this small must surround an artificial luminaire rather than a star (backed up by Vexilon apparently being able to turn it on and off at will). The closest type of superstructure postulated today would be a Bishop Ring.
It’s called a “Bishop Ring”, for Forest Bishop the engineer who first proposed the structure. I recommend looking up Orion’s Arm for a sci-fi property that deals with megastructures extensively.
From what I understand Dyson never postulated a ring because he said it would be mechanically impossible. I think that Larry Niven was the first person to put it out there, albeit as science-fiction, but Larry Niven isn’t as well known so I guess people call it a Dyson Ring even though Dyson would never have. *edit - according to the director of the episode the sun is artificial. The entire solar system is “bespoke“
Likewise. This is the first time I've ever heard someone call such a structure a "Dyson Ring", but I've heard "Niven Ring" many a time. (And I'm British as was Dyson, while Niven is American, so I'm not being nationalistically biased.)
@CtrlOptDel in college here in the US my physics books referred to them as both depending on the book. I think Nevin gets more credit in newer books since 2000, before that Dyson gets most of the credit.
Side-Fact, the Original Idea for the Dyson Sphere was that the Civilisation lives on the Outside, not the Inside, but on the Other End, Living only under a starlit sky might also bit dull so no wonder writers flipped that to bad we never got an answer why the Sphere Builders (no, not THAT Sphere Builders) didn't have the Technologie to stabilize a star so it would be more an large "open" Fusion reactor ooor that we never got more Episodes with the Dyson Sphere in TNG. While it was nice to see Scotty again, the Sphere was a bit of a waste, but it was nice to Visit one in STO
There were three Dyson Spheres visited in STO: The Solenae Sphere, which was contested with the Voth, the Jenolan Sphere, which jumped to the Delta Quadrant and served as the main waypoint between the Beta and Delta Quadrants for the Alliance and Undine, and the Herald Sphere, which was the main base of operations for the Iconians.
No Dyson construct is gravitationally stable. Neither rings nor spheres orbit the stars at their centers. Without constant active control they will eventually drift into contact with the star. That would be… bad. This was pointed out by some MIT students who analyzed the Dyson ring in Larry Niven’s book Ringworld. And your research is correct, the gravitational field inside either cancels out, and spin “gravity” within a Dyson sphere decreases away from the equator. That leads to some fun consequences if you jump off of the interior surface if there’s no Trek style artificial gravity.
A swarm of elements in coordinated orbits is stable. Arrayed in numerous inclined and interlaced elliptical orbits to approximate a sphere. And can be built incrementally.
I don't like they Solanae tie-in since they're a subspace species and the sphere looked like it was made for normal space species living. Plus, iirc, they could teleport the sphere to move it and if they can move the whole thing why can't they just teleport out the bad star instead of abandoning the whole, presumably expensive and hard to make structure?
Good lord. I love how even without naming it, we associate one thing with another. Two Syfy franchises, without or possibly with, trying compliment one another.
Are you sure you're not part Vulcan? You make WAY too much sense with your theories.. lolol ;) On the more serious side though I DO SO MUCH enjoy watching your videos... always entertaining and thought provoking! Keep up the good work!!
@@grahamturner1290 the mysteriös materials to build a ring. And I would say the puppetplayers are not the best neightbours. Ok the ratcats are Bad as neightbour
@@grahamturner1290 Yeah but to the puppetplayers it's no problem through the blast. Heck even the fleet esvape is not needed. Nike and other of the high of the puppetplayers said the escape is not needed and the radiation doesnt get through to the living. That great escape of the puppetplayers is full fake
If nothing else, the idea of the Dyson ring could help to better explain the design philosophy of the Yorktown Starbase in the Kelvin timeline (assuming they're aware of the Dyson spheres).
A rotaing Dyson's Sphere to make artificial gravity on the inside would only work at it's equator and gravity would decrease to zero at the poles of the rotation. The sphere would have to have bands that rotate at different speeds to keep the gravity the same throughout the internal surface but it would only work upto a certain lattatude and would be still be zero gravity at the poles.
@@kamenriderblade2099 Gravity plating could work if you had enough power collectors/sq footage. other wise central band for population and rest for power
The question I had with the Dyson Sphere was, how could a civilization be advanced enough to build the sphere, have infinite resources and energy, but not the ability to stabilize the star when the federation of the Next Gen era had the ability to stabilize stars to a limited degree at least.
The Ring in lower decks is a "Bishop Ring", you can see from the curvature and its surface features that its fairly small in terms of megastructures and the lightsource in the middle is way to small to be a natural Star. A "Bishop Ring" is esentially a smaller version of the "Banks Orbital" (which servede as the inspiration for the "Halo Array") which is MASSIVE but still orbits around a star not built around it (think of it as a giant ring when a planet would be) While what you refer to as a "Dyson Ring" is actually a "Niven ring" or more popular a "Ring world". Freeman Dyson never proposed any design besides the Sphere, which he took inspiration from the 1937 novel Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
I see on the Star trek ringworld characteristiccs of a niven Ring like the wall on the side tht in nivens World house the Correct Ur Systems, Meteor defense or docking Systems. And the sun in the middle with day night zyklus
@@-Gothicgirl- So all Ring structures have a wall. and the Day night cycle of a Niven Ring is provided by massive panels that block out the sun this ring is far too small. the "Sun" in the middle is far to small to be natural and makes me question why they did it as a simple tilt on a rotating ring would be enough to make a day night cycle
I'm surely not the first to point this out, but just in case, the original proposition for a Dyson sphere used "sphere" in much the same way "atmosphere" or "biosphere" do, i.e. some kind of layer around something, in this case a cloud of objects such as solar panels or stations that collectively surround the star, which is a much more practical way to tackle problems such as gravity and material strength limitations. Alternately, a solid sphere could be constructed like a hollow yarn ball out of many rings at different angles, optionally connected by bridges or even a full shell, provided the rings generate adequate centrifugal force to support everything. The inner surface of the sphere would have negligible gravity, but a large combined surface area would exist on the rings and any rotating internal structures. Of course, in a setting with technobabble gravity generators, one could simply support the sphere and provide gravity to residents using that technology.
If I remember correctly, one of the dyson spheres in STO performeda subspace jump (or something along those lines) to a different star in a completely different region of space.
If that's right, both spheres must have jumped, as I remember a Starfleet ship being trapped in the sphere while it jumped to the delta quadrant. @@Janoha17
I seem to recall that in the Star Trek: Destiny novels, the Caeliar (can’t remember the proper spelling off the top of my head) used a Dyson sphere to hide their civilization.
You can also rotate a sphere on multiple axes. That solves your problem of no gravity at the poles. Ideally with a 3-dimenional structure you would want to rotate it along all three axes for greatest coverage.
That's not how that works. Rotating a sphere is essentially just choosing a plane to rotate on which defines the poles. You can't change that plane since it would result in an inconsistent "gravitational" force in both strength and relative direction
As I understand the concept described by Dr. Dyson, it would be better named a Dyson Swarm. A swarm of elements arrayed in numerous inclined and interlaced elliptical orbits to approximate a sphere. And can be built incrementally. As for a sphere being hard to detect, not likely. Absent some very exotic means of disposing of waste heat the structure has to radiate as much energy as infrared as is absorbed from the star.
The mass of the neutronium sphere would be enough to create the gravity to hold its occupants and an atmosphere. I believe this was the cause of the crash of the starship that originally discovered it.
The Ring was far more habitable and feasible engineering wise. But a civilization with that kind of technological knowledge could over come issue with northern and southern hemisphere habitability. That episode gave me flashbacks of Larry Nivens - Ring World.
I would go with a sphere, for many reason. 1. When you want this, you want power, and a full sphere is the most power. 2. When you want this you want centrelised K-type civilisation, and you need all the room you can get. 3. A ring/swarm/etc, would need ACTIVE systems to maintain atmosphere and preasure. In a shpere you free up systems and maintenance and energy need as the sun blows the air against the inner hull, preserving warming and pressurise it all in one go. So even if the civilization regress to stone age it would still function without maintenance. 4. As you said, visibility. You don't want a hard to protect structure to be exposed and completelly nullify exposure is needed. 5. There is no reason to make it a perfect sphere, it looks more presentable, but it can still have overlaping swarm of layers, gaining the benifit of those.
No the head would make the Sound of a herd of puppetplayers! This is not that cheap halo knock off rings! These are larry niven ringworlds! Ringworld around a sun! Nivens ringworld has the size of earth Orbit around sun
Spinning the sphere would greatly help it maintain structural integrity through centrifugal force. It might have started out as a rotating ringworld, and was built up from there.
Then you would not have same gravity on All place. And a ringworld convert to sphere? That's impossible. Because the ringworld that has earth Orbit size take All Ressource of the system where it is build
So a fun fact about the gravity of a dyson sphere like structure. While it would certainly produce a huge amount of gravity on the outside, the inside of a hollow sphere actually has virtually no gravitational effect at any point within itself. The closer you are to one side of the sphere the more gravity you feel from it of course, but you also have more and more of the rest of the sphere pulling you in the opposite direction. No matter where you are within the sphere, all of the forces always cancel out. So yeah it actually makes sense that the dyson sphere would need to provide some means of artificial gravity because otherwise everyone would just float about the inside of the structure. My own theory about the Dyson Sphere's practicality is that maybe it does spin to provide artificial gravity along the equator and neighboring areas, but then past the point where it'd be impractical to live there, the rest of the sphere may just be solar collectors, as that is the main point of a dyson sphere structure, to harvest as much energy from the star as possible. So they may just be sacrificing a small portion of that energy to create a suitable living area equivalent to a dyson ring, and then the rest of the structure just collects energy to power some absurdly powerful technology of some sort. The bigger problem with the portrayal in Star trek imo is that there seems to be no mechanism in place for creating an artificial night. Famously in the original Ringworld novel, there were massive solar panels placed between the host star and the ring, which both served as a means to collect energy, while also blocking the sun at regular intervals to provide a simulation of night time. This also would prevent the world from getting too hot from continuous exposure to the sun. Without this mechanism in the Dyson Sphere, at least for the habitable portions of it, there would be no means of possibly supporting life as the internal temperature would rapidly grow to well beyond water's boiling point and then some. Though I guess if we're being generous, maybe they just didn't show said mechanism in the show.
There was a novel (called "Dyson Sphere") where the Enterprise-D returned to the Dyson Sphere, only to discover that some unknown species had fired a neutron star at it. That goes well with the "hiding" idea.
i think both types of dyson structures serve a purpose depending on what they're needed for also the dyson sphere being an ark could make an interesting supposition what if its an ancient ark from one galaxy to another containing species who came over and seeded life in this galaxy possibly the precursor civilization that left that one message encoded in the dna of various species from that one tng episode.
Both spheres and rings have one simple problem: their orbit is hugely unstable. If one side gets a little bit closer to the star, it will get more of a gravitational pull than the other side, which means it will get even closer, so eventually the whole thing just falls in. For this reason, a Dyson Swarm, basically a number of individual orbiting stations/platforms is a much more sensible construction. It's also nice you could build something like that up gradually, instead of having to put it together all at once for it to be properly stable. And unlike a ring, if you build enough of them you can still catch the entire energy of the star!
No the Mit correct larry nivens ringworld that it work. The ringworld has size of the Orbit of earth around sun and it rotate and has correct or Systems to make the Orbit stabile. I would say you should read the ringworld novels where these things are explain. MIT sung "the ringworld is unstable"! Then niven sat with the mit together and the Correct the World to make it working
Olaf Stapledon deserves credit for being among the first if not the first to think of megastructures of this sort. Then Dyson. It's hard for me to think that this particular megastructure was not inspired by Larry Niven's Ringworld but a lot of people might be more familiar with Halo rings or Iain M Banks Orbitals. The fact that there is a supercomputer running the ring in Lower Decks makes me think of one of the Minds in Banks Culture novels. In case you haven't read Iain M Banks novels I highly recommend them. Excellent sci-fi!
Before Halo made the concept of a ring world more known and popular, I preferred the book series "Ring World" and thought it a very cool idea. They had a lot of more real world solutions to the types of issues this type of thing would face. Halo hand waved a lot of the real science issues due to Halo tech and the fact the rings had a different purpose than actually being a habitation of sorts. The Dyson sphere is an interesting thing for me also because I don't see it being used on a yellow star like our, but more practical for a red star which is smaller, more abundant, and longer lived.
Just wondering is the gravity of a star can keep Neptune in a loose orbit, wouldn’t anything built around a similar star collapse into itself / the star?
Dyson swarms make way more sense for habitation on that scale. Mega rings and the like are fun and all, but they're unstable. Better to have a habitat swarm that can move around if need-be.
A civilization that could construct a sphere might also have the ability to stabilize it long term. The reason for evacuating it could be unrelated to the degradation of the star. If not though, the issue of the reusability of a sphere if you can't remove/replace the star inside has been something I've wondered for decades. As for the ark theory. We have theories already that the universe will eventually tear itself apart when the forces of entropy that spread it apart will overcome the gravity holding anything together. Anyone still alive during this time will likely be researching ways to maybe hop dimensions or universes to save the cumulative history of their universe. So a dyson sphere meant to preserve an entire advanced civilization from some kind of massive local catastrophe would make sense.
it is worth noting that the ring in the episode was *not* a dyson ring. scale wise compared to the ship and buildings it is a Bishop ring ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_Ring_(habitat) ). a much much smaller structure. (and one of the inspirations for the Halo rings of the eponymous game) while it has a star in the center, the description fo the system as being 'bespoke' suggests that the star was artificial. which would help explain why the Vexilon could dim it to make a night cycle.
When I first saw this I assumed that another structure surrounded the sun within the Dyson sphere and was used to absorb all the power from the sun and transferred that power to the rest of the Dyson sphere. Just over time, it was destroyed, and what you see is the end time of the Dyson sphere.
The poles of the sphere could be used for energy recovery and maybe for magnetic shielding for the planet. Maybe even a way to vent heat and material into space. Less than one g would also be nice for some people with infirmities. It could also be used for some manufacturing processes. Also, let's be honest. There is no shortage of living space on that thing.
I think those aren't cities in the sphere, it just might not have enough 'natural' to cover the inside, might have originally had deeper oceans or was meant to or it was stopped or still mid-terraform?
The "ARK" idea would work better for a Ring shaped structure than a sphere. As others have mentioned, the Dyson sphere would radiate waste heat, so would show up on a infrared scanner as a big ball of glowing metal. There would no way to 100% absorb the stars energy output - some of it, along with the civilization living on the sphere, would end up radiated into space. A Ring, on the other hand, could use a network of millions of miles of superconducting coils built into the Ring structure itself - then used the energy absorbed by their solar collectors to power the coils, to create a magnetic lock on the central star. This would allow the Ring to keep the star centered, or even move the star or the Ring up and down to simulate seasons. It could also be used to turn the star into a giant fusion engine and have it emit a beam of plasma energy from one of it's polar regions, pushing the star and the Ring itself eventually up to a good fraction of lightspeed. When you ran out of star to burn, the Ring would be moving fast enough to use it's magnetic shield to pull in hydrogen from space and heat it up, sort of like a giant Bussard Ramjet engine. Which would also keep the Ring warm and habitable. It would make an excellent way to move billions of people around the galaxy, or even travel to another galaxy, assuming you were in no rush. OR if possible, put warp coils in the Ring, powered by the star, and got FTL to Andromeda in a few centuries. The Sphere would require some kind of external drive system to move - which would give away it's location. A moving Ring would be noticed as well, more so for the Star that is moving at high sub-light speeds. But the energy shielding needed to protect the Ring while traveling in real space at high sub-light speed would also protect the Ring, or the Sphere, from just about anything that could threaten it.
Hmm, the dyson sphere being an arc, that may actually make sense, I forget what they're called but the aliens the TNG crew meet that claim to have seeded the whole galaxy, what if it was them who built it to survive some galaxy wide extinction event similar to say mass effect's? When they emerged the found the galaxy a lonely place, so they seeded new life. I do seem to remember them saying something similar to this at some point. As for the ring, it's comically small probably due to being part of lower decks, while a dyson sphere would be great for energy generation, a ring makes more sense for habitation. Yea, I forget the majority of the series TV content only bits and pieces get remembered, lol.
Astronomer here. The gravity inside a spherical shell is zero, regardless of its mass. This is Newton's Shell Theorem. Basically, the gravitational pull from all directions cancel out. So no, the solid-structure Dyson sphere has on gravity on the interior. Of course, it does have gravity on the exterior, but presumably the goal is to live in the interior where you get the Sunlight.
Feel like the only way a sphere is possible is at a range in the thousands of kilometers (as opposed to millions, think the moon's orbit around earth rather than earth's orbit around the sun) around the teeniest tiniest of red dwarves. Even then the material needed for it might just exceed all available material in that solar system, especially if being converted into denser materials for construction. I can't even begin to imagine the gravitational effects of such a structure either. Like, on itself, on its star, on its inhabitants, or even on nearby systems. I can't even imagine.
The gravity field inside a hollow sphere of any diameter, thickness, or mass is nil. The gravitational pull from any part is cancelled out by all the other parts. the same thing happens in a hollow conductor and its electric field. You would just float around no matter where you were inside. close to the inner surface or center doesn't matter.
honesty the Sphere seems to be more of a Shell world. Also if I remember correctly Dyson concieved the idea less as an actual solid Sphere then like a bunch of smaller structures surrounding a star
You can spin a 3D object in more than one axis at the same time. Everyone always forgets that. But the Dyson sphere would almost certainly be using artificial gravity and, given that the Neutronium superstructure would be about as dense as a planet it would likely generate enough of its own gravity that it wouldn't really need much augmentation. The idea of a Dyson is better than a Ring World but, since its about 99 times more expensive to build it hardly seems a viable choice. Plus, while capturing all the energy of a star is a huge amount of energy to have, the lack of night and day, seasons and any variability in that relationship means every CME or solar flare is a potentially extinction level event. When they encounter the sphere in TNG they mention the star has become unstable and we assume that is the reason the thing is abandoned. But its likely the whole thing was abandoned long before after the first instability in the star wiped out the population. Even in Star Trek Online, the Jenolan sphere is not at all commented upon beyond the fact that its jumped from the Alpha Quadrant to the Delta Quadrant. Another sphere jumps from Andromeda to Iconia and very little discussion arises from that. The Solanae sphere is the only one that really gets any attention and it is not at all the same as the Jenolan sphere...which necessitates that each sphere was built by a different servitor race and only the Solanae and Andromeda sphere's seem to be anything alike...on the surface.
It could be argued tht instead of being an ark the Dyson Sphere could also be a high security galactic prison of sorts. because where would be the better place to keep all the worst criminals than a place that can only be found by either kowing where it is, managing to get close enough to just barely detect it or crash into it. And it being so big could the suggesst it wasn't just one civilaization who built it but multiple so they could all then use it as a prison.
interesting, but the surface of the sphere also has mountains, oceans, and wildlife, not just buildings. providing planetary comfort for inmates, while it's the most comfortable, it's also the most expensive and resource-demanding. and if that's the prison planet, then where are their colony planets? even if it was built by multiple civilization, that prison planet is big. everyone in the Alpha Quadrant could live there. And if the logic applies that in any civilization a small % are in prisons, the Alpha Quadrant being the small %, then that means the civilizations involved in using it all in one are much bigger than everyone in the Alpha Quadrant.
I think a logical layout for a Dyson Sphere would be habitation around the equator, industry & docking at the poles, and energy generation elsewhere. Also, if they're advanced enough to make this structure, you'd think they'd be advanced enough to be able to maintain the star beyond a normal stellar lifespan
An idea I brainstormed years ago was that you had a "dyson slice" orbiting around the star to give it a proper day and night cycle. The inner surface of this 'slice' would be coated in solar panels to harvest energy while the reverse side would house most of your heavy polluting industry leaving the surface of your sphere solely for habitation, agriculture, and lighter non-polluting industry.
A multi-species civilization, each with its own planetary origins, might find it useful to have latitudes of varying gravity within its spinning sphere.
@@starbishop4916that's what they did in Ringworld
Agreed the pole areas with lower gravity would probably be industrial areas. As for the species who built it, it is possible that they evolved into non corporeal organisms, were laid waste by a pandemic or lost the skills needed to maintain the structure
THATS what i was saying! Everything you said...i mean hell the enterprise saved that one star from going nova in the episode Troys mom had the hots for that big dude that was set to die. Or did they? Now i forgot if that was a failure or not but still if they could fully erect the sphere they could put some gas into the star or somehow repair fix or what ever. But if they were dead set on that id have rote into cannon a race pissed off poisoned the star to make the entire thing unusable which would go. ;)
"Ring World" by Larry Niven is my go-to when looking at Dyson's ideas. I cannot believe that no one has turned his fantastic books into movies...
Big fan of Ringworld and Niven. Great at world building but the best of Niven’s “Know Spaces” and other novels are collaborations with the late Jerry Pournelle and other authors playing with in the universe (Man-Kzin Wars series.) Niven does alright when focused on a single, western male protagonist.
Niven/Pournelle complemented each other well.
Fun fact: The original Dyson Sphere design was never a singular structure. Instead it was really a cloud of habitats and various structures such as energy collection.
Star Trek never does it, but you can keep a star stable for, basically, forever via starlifting - pulling out the heavier elements - and feeding in fresh hydrogen or helium in controlled amounts.
Hopefully the UFP starts doing that with the Dyson Sphere that it found.
That's a rare find that is worth StarLifting for so many reasons.
That would've been handy for the Romulans to have
I think in STO that's a normal operation of the spheres.
Given the sheer size of even a small G-type star vs the size of starships, that would require a hell of a constant convoy operation or the ability for matter transmutation.
Can't remember hearing about that, but with their ability to trave via the Iconian gateway network, they could easily swap an old, dying star for a younger one. @@barrybend7189
Using a sphere for concealment is an excellent idea, except it will re-radiate the interior star's energy as infrared. (Not to mention the waste heat from the occupants inside.) A spot in space glowing in IR with no energy source visible in other wavelengths will no doubt draw the attention of some cadet looking for adventure. And thus another series is born.
There are materials out there that absorb the IR spectrum, we already use it for defense against IR emissions on IRL military vehicles.
They could dump the excess energy/heat into micro black holes or shunt it into subspace.
I can't imagine how hot it would get inside.
@@DarthRagnarok343 That seems very Wasteful.
We already have Thermo-Electric generators IRL.
Imagine the quality & efficiency of TEG's they would have by the 24th century.
All that free excess heat energy converted to electricity to be stored.
If it weren't mistaken for an infrared star.
I'm glad they picked the Kzinti crewmember to be one of the Cerritos crew to visit the Ringworld! :D I really hope Larry Niven saw this episode!
IIRC, “spheres as hidden arks” was exactly how the Forerunners intended their spheres to be used at the end of the war with the Flood. Nice to see that others have considered such a useful function. :D
In regards to the ring world: The idea was first described by Olaf Stapledon in his 1937 novel Star Maker before being popularised in the 1960s by the theoretical and mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson and later in the 70s by author Larry Niven. So Dyson did not "invent" the ring world.
actually dyson is more well known for the sphere and it's idiotic little cousin the dyson swarm, larry niven popularised the humble ring world and another guy entirely popularised a circle within circle within yet another circle design.
@@xyreniaofcthrayn1195you forget that niven make first specific how it is build and the Mit check it and correct it how that Ring can be build working
@@-Gothicgirl- not really and mit is I assume an offshoot of M.I.T which is great and all but they haven't achieved much besides working within others works.
@@xyreniaofcthrayn1195 to make the Ring spezifik and not unstable it was niven and the Mit. That's stand in the books
@@xyreniaofcthrayn1195I don't see how the swarm is idiotic, if anything, it's the much more practical construction regarding energy harvesting.
The term "Dyson Sphere" originally didn't describe a uniform shell around a star, rather it meant a swarm of space structures clustered so densely that between them all basically no direct sunlight reaches the edge of the cloud. But people heard "sphere" and imagined a simple ball - and once popularized it is practically impossible to correct such a misunderstanding.
The funny part is, such a Dyson Swarm is far easier to build than any example we see in Trek. Even our current industrial capabilities would allow us to build spinning cylindrical habitats with the inner surface area on the lower continental scale - each only taking resources from a handful of asteroids at most. We could have dozens of times the habitable area of earth in our planet's orbit, with the only thing you'd notice of it from the surface being the occasional glint of a surface catching the sunlight in the night sky.
Now think how many of those it would take to literally blot out the sun. The surface area of the Sphere in Trek would vanish if compared to the total surface such a Swarm could offer - at a fraction of the material required.
It's worthy of note that none of these are inherently stable and will eventually lose their "orbit" without ongoing work to stabilize them they will eventually crash into their parent star. Of course any civilization that could build them would likely be able to create the necessary systems to correct for these iherent instabilities. This is touched on in Lary Niven's "Ringworld Engineers", a sequal to his book "Ringworld" and middle of the trilogy.
In the epsiode you see a glowing opening on the Ring's outside. Stbailisation engine maybe?
Not really that big a deal. An actual shell as we see it in the show is impossible anyway. In all scenarios.
Instead, a series of (very, very many) orbital rings could be interwoven together, supporting an external shell to live on, and an internal shell to collect power and material from the sun.
Those rings would have very dense fluids forced through them at velocities balanced to equate to the necessary stable orbital velocity of the star at that altitude. The star itself would power those systems. So, as long as they're maintained and robustly constructed to begin with, there should never be any need for other convoluted systems to maintain the structure's stability.
@@DoremiFasolatido1979 The instability is gravitational. Some sort of station keeping will be necessary. It's not about structural stability (that's also a huge engineering challenge requiring Clark-tech).
As a Stellaris player, we have both spheres and rings, but only the rings are used as habitats, while the spheres are massive solar collectors, and they are not stealthy. Quite a few other empires often complain that I've built my sphere around a key star in their favorite constelation.
Which kind of doesn't make sense. It takes about 20 years in game to build a sphere but the light from that star should take thousands of years to arrive at neighboring systems. So it should take them at least a thousand years to complain, one would think.
@jwurnig I guess annoyance travel faster than warp speeds then.
Regarding your theory of the Dyson Sphere being an ark, the major question would be why it was built in such a manner to be as "stealthy" as it was would depend on when it was built and if it was old enough it could have been made by a race attempting to hide from the Slavers empire...
I had always thought the Dyson Sphere had Artificial Gravity generators, which is a simple enough technology that Starfleet has it (as well as most races), and, as you pointed out, spinning doesn't make much sense (but love the 'Ease of Filming' joke, the primary reason AG seems so easy for most Sci-Fi races to come up with in movies and on TV 😂)
I question of the Dyson Sphere is more along the lines of solar winds....I mean would that be a ticking time bomb? The reason we can't put a lot of things into orbits is because our sun pushes them out of place, what's to stop it creating so much pressure it explodes or destroys things from the inside out?
If you had a single gravity generator go bad, all the structure's atmosphere would go exploding up into space. It would likely be the biggest thunderstorm in the galaxy's history.
And why they so rarely fail.
@@s.patrickmarino7289 Still, we are talking about a species that had the technology to build this in the first place, and have it last who knows how many hundreds of thousands/millions of years. They would probably have fail safes for something like that.
@@MrChupacabra555 They might not fail over a year. They might not fail over 100 or even 1,000 years. When you are building on that scale, you are thinking on time scales of millions of years. Something on that scale needs to reliably be able to function long after your civilization ends. It needs to work, even if your great great great... grandchildren no longer know how to maintain it. They need to be as reliable as planets.
One of the producers of Lower Decks said on twitter that the star was indeed artificial.
Would love to know just how big the ring was supposed to be.
Based on the in show visuals, it looks like the ring was only a few km wide. You can even make out individual buildings and roads in some of the establishing shots.
I guess the star at its center was a jumbo sized lightbulb or something
When you first saw Halo, were you blinded by its majesty?
Blinded?
ua-cam.com/video/tDZzj2rSe-w/v-deo.htmlfeature=shared
I prefer this scene
Halo is a ripoff of Ringworld, and a poor one at that.
The Star at the center of the Ringworld can be commanded to eject million mile long solar flares which then lase to destroy incoming meteors.
That’s a fricking weapon.
@@Captain_Tumbleweed Paralyzed? Dumbstruck?
No...
The idea that a Dyson Sphere would be used to hide a civilization within obviously begs the question. From what or Whom were they hiding that necessitated building such a vast structure? Reminds me of when I heard that the white spots on the back of a tigers ears were there to deter predators. What the hell does a tiger consider as a predator?
The Dyson Swarm is the most efficient & flexible structure configuration at these scale.
It allow for change based on the activity of the star & provide all the surface area you need for your civilization.
On top of that, once the "host star" has exhausted, each individual units in the "swam" already behave as their own spaceship...
So it's easier to migrate to another star.
Rings are funs but not at this scale, they would be more useful around planets than around stars.
(because the habitable zone of each star is different so the sizing of the ring will have to change every time you change host star...)
I love the fact that certifiably ingame is a critter I had the same thought too about if it has a twin AI called VAX
It's nice to know that I wasn't the only Critter thinking that when I watched the Lower Decks episode and laughed when Ric mentioned it.
Bidet!
Shame Star Trek never called the ring world a Nivin class megastructure.
I learned from Isaac Arthur that the original concept for a Dyson Sphere was a massive collection of orbital satellites, space stations and other such things that orbited the star, described as a Dyson Swarm while the pop-culture concept would be a Dyson Shell.
Though I can understand why they went with the Shell concept because animating like 15 trillion satellites would have been an utter pain with the budgets and special effects capabilities of 1990s tv shows.
IRL Dr Dyson probably never thought anybody would build a solid sphere
It was more about the principle that eventually any civilization would expand to the point that it used up all it's sun, and that might be a good idea for us to keep in mind when we modern humans see stars that look strange
technically speaking, the spheres should still be emitting a lot of IR radiation, just from waste heat, and still be visible to most sensors. unless, the nutronium is somehow able to negate entorpy somehow...
Remember as well that in the equally non-canonical "Destiny" series, the Caeliar had at least one similar structure.
Dyson swarms with a ring are my favorite go to in Star Trek. Especially since with transporters you can turn solar energy into a new solar collector with some nice automated programming.
How the hell did this channel get a video out so fast about Lower Decks Dyson Ring?! Much respect to the creators for their promptness.
When it's a niven ringworld and niven is a known writer in Star trek that gives the kzinti to Star trek that is on lower decks too. And the Ring was in the trailer for season 4
The funny thing that is always missing from these stories is a sphere with an artificial Star like that of Gene Rodembery's Andromeda
Your theories are great and make a lot of sense.
Reminds me of the Halo Array and the Shield Worlds. Both are dyson structures in a way, but serve different purposes
The Halo array and the Dyson Rings from ST get their reference from Larry Niven's "Ringworld" books. Niven went on to write for Star Trek, and is the one responsible for introducing his race of cat people, the Kzinti, into Star Trek continuity. In his books, they were genetically engineered supersoldiers, in trek, a separate race.
@@TacComControl The Halo array is much more likely inspired by the Orbitals from Iain M Banks's Culture novels. It's hugely too small to be a Dyson structure.
@@TacComControl Yeah, that's true. I just know that kind of structure from Halo more, that's all
To say a halo Ring is dinkhy for a niven ringworld that has the size of earth Orbit around sun
The Dyson Sphere in TNG: "Relics" is stated to have a diameter of 200 million km, not 2 million km.
Corazonia in LDS: "In the Cradle of Vexilon" is a megastructure but it's nowhere near the scale of a Dyson ring (also known as a Niven ring). Based on the speed of rotation vs its apparently Earth-like surface gravity, and based on individual buildings being visible from orbit, it must be around 200km-250km in diameter only, with a surface area of around 3000km². It's more of a large city-state or colony than a whole artificial world. Something this small must surround an artificial luminaire rather than a star (backed up by Vexilon apparently being able to turn it on and off at will). The closest type of superstructure postulated today would be a Bishop Ring.
Yup. Riker says it's almost as big as the Earth's orbit (which it sort of is). Even Mercury is 46-70 million km. Rick just forgot to say 'hundred'.
It’s called a “Bishop Ring”, for Forest Bishop the engineer who first proposed the structure. I recommend looking up Orion’s Arm for a sci-fi property that deals with megastructures extensively.
From what I understand Dyson never postulated a ring because he said it would be mechanically impossible. I think that Larry Niven was the first person to put it out there, albeit as science-fiction, but Larry Niven isn’t as well known so I guess people call it a Dyson Ring even though Dyson would never have.
*edit - according to the director of the episode the sun is artificial. The entire solar system is “bespoke“
That's kinda funny because I have only heard of it referred to as a Niven Ring, never a Dyson Ring.
Likewise. This is the first time I've ever heard someone call such a structure a "Dyson Ring", but I've heard "Niven Ring" many a time. (And I'm British as was Dyson, while Niven is American, so I'm not being nationalistically biased.)
I primarily know of Larry Niven due to the Magic: the Gathering card "Nevinyrral's Disk" being named for him.
@@CtrlOptDel it was also very appropriate that there was a Kizinti on the away team to the ring!
@CtrlOptDel in college here in the US my physics books referred to them as both depending on the book. I think Nevin gets more credit in newer books since 2000, before that Dyson gets most of the credit.
Appreciate the CR/LoVM reference.
another awesome video sir congrats !
I like the arc idea. It was the last push to survive by people from a dieing galaxy. Running grom an unstoppable enemy.
Side-Fact, the Original Idea for the Dyson Sphere was that the Civilisation lives on the Outside, not the Inside, but on the Other End, Living only under a starlit sky might also bit dull so no wonder writers flipped that
to bad we never got an answer why the Sphere Builders (no, not THAT Sphere Builders) didn't have the Technologie to stabilize a star so it would be more an large "open" Fusion reactor ooor that we never got more Episodes with the Dyson Sphere in TNG. While it was nice to see Scotty again, the Sphere was a bit of a waste, but it was nice to Visit one in STO
There were three Dyson Spheres visited in STO: The Solenae Sphere, which was contested with the Voth, the Jenolan Sphere, which jumped to the Delta Quadrant and served as the main waypoint between the Beta and Delta Quadrants for the Alliance and Undine, and the Herald Sphere, which was the main base of operations for the Iconians.
Or a hybrid structure. A ring for habitation, the rest of the sphere just solar collectors.
No Dyson construct is gravitationally stable. Neither rings nor spheres orbit the stars at their centers. Without constant active control they will eventually drift into contact with the star. That would be… bad.
This was pointed out by some MIT students who analyzed the Dyson ring in Larry Niven’s book Ringworld.
And your research is correct, the gravitational field inside either cancels out, and spin “gravity” within a Dyson sphere decreases away from the equator. That leads to some fun consequences if you jump off of the interior surface if there’s no Trek style artificial gravity.
You are correct, the only practical way to manuever such large structures is via some form of "Gravimetric Drive" to keep the orbits stable.
A swarm of elements in coordinated orbits is stable. Arrayed in numerous inclined and interlaced elliptical orbits to approximate a sphere. And can be built incrementally.
I don't like they Solanae tie-in since they're a subspace species and the sphere looked like it was made for normal space species living. Plus, iirc, they could teleport the sphere to move it and if they can move the whole thing why can't they just teleport out the bad star instead of abandoning the whole, presumably expensive and hard to make structure?
Good lord. I love how even without naming it, we associate one thing with another. Two Syfy franchises, without or possibly with, trying compliment one another.
In the episode they say the dyson sphere has a diameter of 200 million kilometres, not 2 million
Which makes it funnier that the Enterprise's collision with the sun is treated like an imminent crisis right after it gets pulled inside.
I renember building one of these in a game. These things are *enormous* !
Are you sure you're not part Vulcan? You make WAY too much sense with your theories.. lolol ;) On the more serious side though I DO SO MUCH enjoy watching your videos... always entertaining and thought provoking! Keep up the good work!!
I too believe it's critical that Vexilon has a twin out there.
What role would such a twin play?
I'm a lifelong Niven fan. So obviously I was delighted by "The Slaver Weapon". 🖖
And the ringworld stand above all constructions
@@-Gothicgirl- the ideal retirement home. 👍 Still not sure about the neutronium alloy, though. 😊
@@grahamturner1290 the mysteriös materials to build a ring.
And I would say the puppetplayers are not the best neightbours.
Ok the ratcats are Bad as neightbour
@@-Gothicgirl- of course in the original Niven tales the centre of the Milky Way is turning into a quasar. Which isn't good either... 😏
@@grahamturner1290 Yeah but to the puppetplayers it's no problem through the blast. Heck even the fleet esvape is not needed. Nike and other of the high of the puppetplayers said the escape is not needed and the radiation doesnt get through to the living. That great escape of the puppetplayers is full fake
If nothing else, the idea of the Dyson ring could help to better explain the design philosophy of the Yorktown Starbase in the Kelvin timeline (assuming they're aware of the Dyson spheres).
One more, and possibly the most compelling reason to build the sphere instead of "just" a ring: "Because we can"
A rotaing Dyson's Sphere to make artificial gravity on the inside would only work at it's equator and gravity would decrease to zero at the poles of the rotation. The sphere would have to have bands that rotate at different speeds to keep the gravity the same throughout the internal surface but it would only work upto a certain lattatude and would be still be zero gravity at the poles.
That's why a massive Gravity Plating Network makes more sense.
@@kamenriderblade2099 Gravity plating could work if you had enough power collectors/sq footage. other wise central band for population and rest for power
The question I had with the Dyson Sphere was, how could a civilization be advanced enough to build the sphere, have infinite resources and energy, but not the ability to stabilize the star when the federation of the Next Gen era had the ability to stabilize stars to a limited degree at least.
bad writing!
The Ring in lower decks is a "Bishop Ring", you can see from the curvature and its surface features that its fairly small in terms of megastructures and the lightsource in the middle is way to small to be a natural Star.
A "Bishop Ring" is esentially a smaller version of the "Banks Orbital" (which servede as the inspiration for the "Halo Array") which is MASSIVE but still orbits around a star not built around it (think of it as a giant ring when a planet would be)
While what you refer to as a "Dyson Ring" is actually a "Niven ring" or more popular a "Ring world". Freeman Dyson never proposed any design besides the Sphere, which he took inspiration from the 1937 novel Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
I see on the Star trek ringworld characteristiccs of a niven Ring like the wall on the side tht in nivens World house the Correct Ur Systems, Meteor defense or docking Systems. And the sun in the middle with day night zyklus
@@-Gothicgirl- So all Ring structures have a wall. and the Day night cycle of a Niven Ring is provided by massive panels that block out the sun this ring is far too small. the "Sun" in the middle is far to small to be natural and makes me question why they did it as a simple tilt on a rotating ring would be enough to make a day night cycle
Dyson spheres don't really hide their stars, at best they shift the energy output of the star to infrared.
I'm surely not the first to point this out, but just in case, the original proposition for a Dyson sphere used "sphere" in much the same way "atmosphere" or "biosphere" do, i.e. some kind of layer around something, in this case a cloud of objects such as solar panels or stations that collectively surround the star, which is a much more practical way to tackle problems such as gravity and material strength limitations.
Alternately, a solid sphere could be constructed like a hollow yarn ball out of many rings at different angles, optionally connected by bridges or even a full shell, provided the rings generate adequate centrifugal force to support everything. The inner surface of the sphere would have negligible gravity, but a large combined surface area would exist on the rings and any rotating internal structures.
Of course, in a setting with technobabble gravity generators, one could simply support the sphere and provide gravity to residents using that technology.
If I remember correctly, one of the dyson spheres in STO performeda subspace jump (or something along those lines) to a different star in a completely different region of space.
The Iconians' Dyson Sphere jumped from its position in the Andromeda Galaxy to the Iconia System via their gateway technology.
If that's right, both spheres must have jumped, as I remember a Starfleet ship being trapped in the sphere while it jumped to the delta quadrant.
@@Janoha17
Rick you are the best!
I seem to recall that in the Star Trek: Destiny novels, the Caeliar (can’t remember the proper spelling off the top of my head) used a Dyson sphere to hide their civilization.
Hi Rick,Now that was educational. 👍
You can also rotate a sphere on multiple axes. That solves your problem of no gravity at the poles. Ideally with a 3-dimenional structure you would want to rotate it along all three axes for greatest coverage.
That's not how that works. Rotating a sphere is essentially just choosing a plane to rotate on which defines the poles. You can't change that plane since it would result in an inconsistent "gravitational" force in both strength and relative direction
As I understand the concept described by Dr. Dyson, it would be better named a Dyson Swarm. A swarm of elements arrayed in numerous inclined and interlaced elliptical orbits to approximate a sphere. And can be built incrementally.
As for a sphere being hard to detect, not likely. Absent some very exotic means of disposing of waste heat the structure has to radiate as much energy as infrared as is absorbed from the star.
The mass of the neutronium sphere would be enough to create the gravity to hold its occupants and an atmosphere.
I believe this was the cause of the crash of the starship that originally discovered it.
The Ring was far more habitable and feasible engineering wise. But a civilization with that kind of technological knowledge could over come issue with northern and southern hemisphere habitability. That episode gave me flashbacks of Larry Nivens - Ring World.
I would go with a sphere, for many reason.
1. When you want this, you want power, and a full sphere is the most power.
2. When you want this you want centrelised K-type civilisation, and you need all the room you can get.
3. A ring/swarm/etc, would need ACTIVE systems to maintain atmosphere and preasure. In a shpere you free up systems and maintenance and energy need as the sun blows the air against the inner hull, preserving warming and pressurise it all in one go. So even if the civilization regress to stone age it would still function without maintenance.
4. As you said, visibility. You don't want a hard to protect structure to be exposed and completelly nullify exposure is needed.
5. There is no reason to make it a perfect sphere, it looks more presentable, but it can still have overlaping swarm of layers, gaining the benifit of those.
If not a ring then perhaps a kind of swarm made of many interconnected pieces that are essentially starships of their own, like a raft city in space
The moment Lower Decks showed the ring world my head began playing epic cello music
No the head would make the Sound of a herd of puppetplayers! This is not that cheap halo knock off rings! These are larry niven ringworlds! Ringworld around a sun! Nivens ringworld has the size of earth Orbit around sun
Spinning the sphere would greatly help it maintain structural integrity through centrifugal force. It might have started out as a rotating ringworld, and was built up from there.
Then you would not have same gravity on All place.
And a ringworld convert to sphere? That's impossible. Because the ringworld that has earth Orbit size take All Ressource of the system where it is build
How would you build something like a ring without folding in on itself while building it.
"the mathematics of a ringworld are the same as a suspension bridge with no endpoints." Larry Niven, "Bigger than Worlds", March 1974
@@rakaydosdraj8405 Halfway through construction, when it is only 50% there it will fold in on itself.
So a fun fact about the gravity of a dyson sphere like structure. While it would certainly produce a huge amount of gravity on the outside, the inside of a hollow sphere actually has virtually no gravitational effect at any point within itself. The closer you are to one side of the sphere the more gravity you feel from it of course, but you also have more and more of the rest of the sphere pulling you in the opposite direction. No matter where you are within the sphere, all of the forces always cancel out.
So yeah it actually makes sense that the dyson sphere would need to provide some means of artificial gravity because otherwise everyone would just float about the inside of the structure.
My own theory about the Dyson Sphere's practicality is that maybe it does spin to provide artificial gravity along the equator and neighboring areas, but then past the point where it'd be impractical to live there, the rest of the sphere may just be solar collectors, as that is the main point of a dyson sphere structure, to harvest as much energy from the star as possible. So they may just be sacrificing a small portion of that energy to create a suitable living area equivalent to a dyson ring, and then the rest of the structure just collects energy to power some absurdly powerful technology of some sort.
The bigger problem with the portrayal in Star trek imo is that there seems to be no mechanism in place for creating an artificial night. Famously in the original Ringworld novel, there were massive solar panels placed between the host star and the ring, which both served as a means to collect energy, while also blocking the sun at regular intervals to provide a simulation of night time. This also would prevent the world from getting too hot from continuous exposure to the sun. Without this mechanism in the Dyson Sphere, at least for the habitable portions of it, there would be no means of possibly supporting life as the internal temperature would rapidly grow to well beyond water's boiling point and then some. Though I guess if we're being generous, maybe they just didn't show said mechanism in the show.
I really like the idea of the Dyson sphere being an ark, like what where you hiding from ancient people's
There was a novel (called "Dyson Sphere") where the Enterprise-D returned to the Dyson Sphere, only to discover that some unknown species had fired a neutron star at it. That goes well with the "hiding" idea.
The Discovery found 10-C and their structures in 2390? Slight correction may be necessary. Great video and Lore, as always Ric!
Yeah, think you meant 3190
I've wondered if minute amounts of Carbon-Neutronium and Dilithium could be included in bird seed for a chicken altering its cellular structure.
TNG, Lower Decks and STO actually get how to use these structures well.
i think both types of dyson structures serve a purpose depending on what they're needed for
also the dyson sphere being an ark could make an interesting supposition what if its an ancient ark from one galaxy to another containing species who came over and seeded life in this galaxy possibly the precursor civilization that left that one message encoded in the dna of various species from that one tng episode.
That Vox Machina reference was smooth
5:12 ahhh a fellow critter out in the wild. *tips hat*
Both spheres and rings have one simple problem: their orbit is hugely unstable. If one side gets a little bit closer to the star, it will get more of a gravitational pull than the other side, which means it will get even closer, so eventually the whole thing just falls in.
For this reason, a Dyson Swarm, basically a number of individual orbiting stations/platforms is a much more sensible construction. It's also nice you could build something like that up gradually, instead of having to put it together all at once for it to be properly stable. And unlike a ring, if you build enough of them you can still catch the entire energy of the star!
No the Mit correct larry nivens ringworld that it work.
The ringworld has size of the Orbit of earth around sun and it rotate and has correct or Systems to make the Orbit stabile.
I would say you should read the ringworld novels where these things are explain.
MIT sung "the ringworld is unstable"! Then niven sat with the mit together and the Correct the World to make it working
I have to ask, and forgive me if I am wrong, but is your channel logo a parody on the Judgement Logo from A Certain Scientific Railgun?
Olaf Stapledon deserves credit for being among the first if not the first to think of megastructures of this sort. Then Dyson.
It's hard for me to think that this particular megastructure was not inspired by Larry Niven's Ringworld but a lot of people might be more familiar with Halo rings or Iain M Banks Orbitals.
The fact that there is a supercomputer running the ring in Lower Decks makes me think of one of the Minds in Banks Culture novels.
In case you haven't read Iain M Banks novels I highly recommend them. Excellent sci-fi!
Given the scale of the ring seen in Lower Decks a Banks Orbital was my first thought.
Before Halo made the concept of a ring world more known and popular, I preferred the book series "Ring World" and thought it a very cool idea. They had a lot of more real world solutions to the types of issues this type of thing would face. Halo hand waved a lot of the real science issues due to Halo tech and the fact the rings had a different purpose than actually being a habitation of sorts. The Dyson sphere is an interesting thing for me also because I don't see it being used on a yellow star like our, but more practical for a red star which is smaller, more abundant, and longer lived.
And a halo Ring is a dinkhy Boar for the niven ringworld
Just wondering is the gravity of a star can keep Neptune in a loose orbit, wouldn’t anything built around a similar star collapse into itself / the star?
Dyson swarms make way more sense for habitation on that scale. Mega rings and the like are fun and all, but they're unstable. Better to have a habitat swarm that can move around if need-be.
A civilization that could construct a sphere might also have the ability to stabilize it long term. The reason for evacuating it could be unrelated to the degradation of the star. If not though, the issue of the reusability of a sphere if you can't remove/replace the star inside has been something I've wondered for decades. As for the ark theory. We have theories already that the universe will eventually tear itself apart when the forces of entropy that spread it apart will overcome the gravity holding anything together. Anyone still alive during this time will likely be researching ways to maybe hop dimensions or universes to save the cumulative history of their universe. So a dyson sphere meant to preserve an entire advanced civilization from some kind of massive local catastrophe would make sense.
it is worth noting that the ring in the episode was *not* a dyson ring. scale wise compared to the ship and buildings it is a Bishop ring ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_Ring_(habitat) ). a much much smaller structure. (and one of the inspirations for the Halo rings of the eponymous game) while it has a star in the center, the description fo the system as being 'bespoke' suggests that the star was artificial. which would help explain why the Vexilon could dim it to make a night cycle.
When I first saw this I assumed that another structure surrounded the sun within the Dyson sphere and was used to absorb all the power from the sun and transferred that power to the rest of the Dyson sphere. Just over time, it was destroyed, and what you see is the end time of the Dyson sphere.
Dyson also makes an excellent vacuum cleaner. 😊👍
The poles of the sphere could be used for energy recovery and maybe for magnetic shielding for the planet. Maybe even a way to vent heat and material into space. Less than one g would also be nice for some people with infirmities. It could also be used for some manufacturing processes. Also, let's be honest. There is no shortage of living space on that thing.
5:49 2390?
Halo Ring: sleep
Larry Nivens Ringworld: *AWAKENED*
Halo rings are cheap dhinky boats to a niven ring
@@-Gothicgirl- agreed
The ring felt far too small to have a real star in the middle.
It was, that star is about as big as the Ceritos itself, so probably just a sustained plasma ball more than a genuine fusion reaction.
The only problem is that it doesn't explain if halo installation's are considered as a Dyson ring.
But I get it, tow different franchisees.
I think those aren't cities in the sphere, it just might not have enough 'natural' to cover the inside, might have originally had deeper oceans or was meant to or it was stopped or still mid-terraform?
The "ARK" idea would work better for a Ring shaped structure than a sphere. As others have mentioned, the Dyson sphere would radiate waste heat, so would show up on a infrared scanner as a big ball of glowing metal. There would no way to 100% absorb the stars energy output - some of it, along with the civilization living on the sphere, would end up radiated into space.
A Ring, on the other hand, could use a network of millions of miles of superconducting coils built into the Ring structure itself - then used the energy absorbed by their solar collectors to power the coils, to create a magnetic lock on the central star. This would allow the Ring to keep the star centered, or even move the star or the Ring up and down to simulate seasons. It could also be used to turn the star into a giant fusion engine and have it emit a beam of plasma energy from one of it's polar regions, pushing the star and the Ring itself eventually up to a good fraction of lightspeed. When you ran out of star to burn, the Ring would be moving fast enough to use it's magnetic shield to pull in hydrogen from space and heat it up, sort of like a giant Bussard Ramjet engine. Which would also keep the Ring warm and habitable. It would make an excellent way to move billions of people around the galaxy, or even travel to another galaxy, assuming you were in no rush.
OR if possible, put warp coils in the Ring, powered by the star, and got FTL to Andromeda in a few centuries. The Sphere would require some kind of external drive system to move - which would give away it's location. A moving Ring would be noticed as well, more so for the Star that is moving at high sub-light speeds. But the energy shielding needed to protect the Ring while traveling in real space at high sub-light speed would also protect the Ring, or the Sphere, from just about anything that could threaten it.
Hmm, the dyson sphere being an arc, that may actually make sense, I forget what they're called but the aliens the TNG crew meet that claim to have seeded the whole galaxy, what if it was them who built it to survive some galaxy wide extinction event similar to say mass effect's? When they emerged the found the galaxy a lonely place, so they seeded new life. I do seem to remember them saying something similar to this at some point.
As for the ring, it's comically small probably due to being part of lower decks, while a dyson sphere would be great for energy generation, a ring makes more sense for habitation.
Yea, I forget the majority of the series TV content only bits and pieces get remembered, lol.
Astronomer here. The gravity inside a spherical shell is zero, regardless of its mass. This is Newton's Shell Theorem. Basically, the gravitational pull from all directions cancel out. So no, the solid-structure Dyson sphere has on gravity on the interior. Of course, it does have gravity on the exterior, but presumably the goal is to live in the interior where you get the Sunlight.
Feel like the only way a sphere is possible is at a range in the thousands of kilometers (as opposed to millions, think the moon's orbit around earth rather than earth's orbit around the sun) around the teeniest tiniest of red dwarves. Even then the material needed for it might just exceed all available material in that solar system, especially if being converted into denser materials for construction.
I can't even begin to imagine the gravitational effects of such a structure either. Like, on itself, on its star, on its inhabitants, or even on nearby systems. I can't even imagine.
I'm so glad to see Hali brought up in the comments lol
Awesome Star Trek, made a reference to halo. I love halo so this is great to see
The gravity field inside a hollow sphere of any diameter, thickness, or mass is nil. The gravitational pull from any part is cancelled out by all the other parts. the same thing happens in a hollow conductor and its electric field. You would just float around no matter where you were inside. close to the inner surface or center doesn't matter.
honesty the Sphere seems to be more of a Shell world. Also if I remember correctly Dyson concieved the idea less as an actual solid Sphere then like a bunch of smaller structures surrounding a star
Must be weird to see the ground above you for a full week and on occasion visit the vacuum of space in a ship or spacesuit.
You can spin a 3D object in more than one axis at the same time. Everyone always forgets that. But the Dyson sphere would almost certainly be using artificial gravity and, given that the Neutronium superstructure would be about as dense as a planet it would likely generate enough of its own gravity that it wouldn't really need much augmentation. The idea of a Dyson is better than a Ring World but, since its about 99 times more expensive to build it hardly seems a viable choice. Plus, while capturing all the energy of a star is a huge amount of energy to have, the lack of night and day, seasons and any variability in that relationship means every CME or solar flare is a potentially extinction level event. When they encounter the sphere in TNG they mention the star has become unstable and we assume that is the reason the thing is abandoned. But its likely the whole thing was abandoned long before after the first instability in the star wiped out the population. Even in Star Trek Online, the Jenolan sphere is not at all commented upon beyond the fact that its jumped from the Alpha Quadrant to the Delta Quadrant. Another sphere jumps from Andromeda to Iconia and very little discussion arises from that. The Solanae sphere is the only one that really gets any attention and it is not at all the same as the Jenolan sphere...which necessitates that each sphere was built by a different servitor race and only the Solanae and Andromeda sphere's seem to be anything alike...on the surface.
5:12 Or a father called Rasilon? ;)
It could be argued tht instead of being an ark the Dyson Sphere could also be a high security galactic prison of sorts. because where would be the better place to keep all the worst criminals than a place that can only be found by either kowing where it is, managing to get close enough to just barely detect it or crash into it. And it being so big could the suggesst it wasn't just one civilaization who built it but multiple so they could all then use it as a prison.
i mean, you need A LOT of Criminals that such an investment pays of, i mean even Star Wars has only Prison Planets and for the Worse there is Shakare
interesting, but the surface of the sphere also has mountains, oceans, and wildlife, not just buildings. providing planetary comfort for inmates, while it's the most comfortable, it's also the most expensive and resource-demanding. and if that's the prison planet, then where are their colony planets? even if it was built by multiple civilization, that prison planet is big. everyone in the Alpha Quadrant could live there. And if the logic applies that in any civilization a small % are in prisons, the Alpha Quadrant being the small %, then that means the civilizations involved in using it all in one are much bigger than everyone in the Alpha Quadrant.