December 13, 2016 • 46 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?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
San Francisco, the s Y s K treet Yes, San Francisco, Oakland,
the entire Bay area and dare I say, all of
Silicon Valley. Yeah, we love you. And we're coming back
to Sketch Fest this year in January. Yeah, we're gonna
be there on Sunday, January at one pm, a very
(00:21):
rare afternoon show. Uh, and we will be ready to go.
So you guys better be drunk from the night before
or getting drunk for that evening. Yeah, however it crosses over,
I think it'll be proof positive that uh we endorse
afternoon drinking. You know, yeah, you know, a couple of drinks,
maybe it'd be bloody Mary. What were we talking about.
(00:43):
Oh yeah, we're promoting our show. Oh that's right. So
we're doing that show on January. Uh. You can go
to the s F Sketch Fest website to get tickets
and it's awesome. It's a great, great comedy festival. Lots
of awesome shows that weekend and for the following weeks.
So I I encourage you, like to buy lots of
tickets just by ours first. Yeah, and hurry, hurry, because
(01:05):
they're selling out fast, no joke. That's not a ploy.
That's not as a marketing ploy. They're really selling fast.
We get emails every time. Guys, you told me to hurry,
I didn't hurry. I'm shut out. And since this promos
petered out, it ends right now. Welcome to stuff you
should know. It's from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey,
(01:31):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
Charles w Chuck Bryant. 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
(01:53):
all of our profane tirades. Yeah, it would kill us
if she ever pressed it. That's right, 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.
(02:13):
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,
I see and his he was on Mark Maron's podcast.
It was a great interview in maren he you know it.
It's pure Keith Richards and he was just basically like,
you know, I have a hard time standing upright, like
(02:34):
I can't mess with trying to breast foot pedals. That's
Keith Man. Yep. Very pure. Yeah, and by pure, 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.
(02:57):
I think he drinks and smokes weed. I got you. Yeah,
it's like Christine. Actually, Maron smoked his first cigarette in
a decade in that show with him. Oh that was smart.
That's 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 Richard
(03:20):
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. I know, I'm being judge.
Wagon your finger, So, Chuck, have you ever used energy? Yes? Well,
you know, when you're using energy, most likely you're using
(03:44):
something like a fossil fuel, right, yeah, right, like gasoline
or natural gas or something like that stuff that comes
from decomposing dinosaurs. Okay. The problem with using decomposing dinosaurs
is most people know is that it's essentially an on
renewable resource. There's no more dinosaurs to decomposed any longer,
and even if there were, it would take tens of
(04:06):
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 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
(04:26):
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 Rutger's. So, um, we
we have to come up with energy sources that we
won't eventually run out of. And obviously there's like wind
(04:46):
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
growth potential. The thing is is I also saw that
(05:06):
if we keep growing in 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. The
problem is is even if we harnessed all of the
(05:28):
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,
the stuff that is starting towards the Earth doesn't make
it very frequently. Let's just go to the sun and
(05:52):
and basically strangle the life out of it to get
energy from it. Right, And one of the first proposals
of it, I don't want to say serious proposal, because
although it's been taken seriously over the years and almost
been interpreted like scripture um, it was a thought experiment
(06:12):
to begin with. It's something called the Dyson spear. 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 an old dude. But we're talking about
Freeman Dyson, not to the maker of the vacuum cleaner
(06:33):
or the bladeless fan or the bladeless hair dryer. Is
that really a thing? They have a dyce in hair dryer,
you know what that. I was so disappointed when I
found out what the bladeless fan was. Why have you
seen those? Yeah, you can stick your hand through it.
It's amazing. Well I know, and I was like it
(06:55):
is it magic? Like how in the world isn't doing this?
But it's got a stupid blade. It is 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 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,
(07:15):
where you stick your hand down in there. 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, 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
(07:37):
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 are just rubbing all over every blade. Yeah,
it is gross, believe me, because I walk out is
crying with my hands held in the air every time
I go to the bathroom. Well, you and I have
a very big thing about airport bathrooms. Um, and I
(07:58):
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 stalls none
of them secured. They've been ripped clean off. Well they
(08:19):
were there, but you couldn't you know, the locks didn't work.
It was just 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, how's your poop? Yeah,
that's the Mr. Peeper's model. It's just not acceptible, you know,
(08:40):
in this day and age, to not have complete privacy
in there. I mean, I agree with you. I again,
I'm gonna reiterate. I think there should be one stall
for an entire bathroom so that no one could possibly
sit down next to you. But barring that, the all exactly.
But barring that, though, like the place like we have
in our office is acceptable. It's a good second. There's
(09:04):
like a complete wall in between you. There's a complete
wall in front of you and a door that's securely shut.
It's a water closet. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess
I guess it is O man, I knew we were
going to get distracted by poop. Yeah. This isn't even
the porta pot I know. All right, So sorry. Back
(09:25):
to Freeman Dyson, uh not the vacuum maker. He was
born in England. He worked most of his career. He's
retired now, but worked most of his career as a
physics professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University,
not Rutgers. Uh. He was a civilian scientist with the
(09:47):
r EF in 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
(10:10):
that right? Yeah, and not like a complete skeptic, Like
he does believe that it's I believe where 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
(10:32):
end of the world, 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 gets 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
(10:56):
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
(11:18):
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
(11:41):
he actually it was I think a paper that was
published in Science and in journal 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
(12:03):
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 city, 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
(12:26):
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 stapleed 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 Dyson he it was
(12:50):
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 were some follow up correspondence UM
after the letter first came out, But almost immediately people
started thinking about how you would create one of these things.
(13:12):
This this dicensphere, and the who the whole point we
should say, basically, at its at its basis, a diycen
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 it
(13:32):
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
(13:56):
of these things, you're going to capture 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. That's how
(14:17):
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 the Dyson spear. He he
said that it would be likely that they that this
would be an invention. They came up. Yeah, all right, well,
(14:39):
um let's go should we go to uh this U
Nikolai Karda 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 this idea that
(15:01):
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 smart
(15:23):
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, this where every
bit of Judeo thermal energy, every drop of sunlight, every
um um, every bit of hydro electric power, all that stuff,
(15:46):
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 rosy. 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.
(16:07):
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 spear comes in.
(16:28):
That's what we aspire to do one day, right, maybe
a million or so years from now. And then Type
three is this 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.
(16:49):
I think that the second the second stage, 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
(17:10):
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 jumped 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,
(17:34):
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,
(18:13):
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 Sun podcast was
one of our our biggest struggles and would have been
(18:35):
our biggest achievements had we uh done it right. It's
the biggest pity applause. We get yeah for this sun. No, no,
it was it was fine. You tried, Yeah, good for
you for trying. But uh, let's talk a little bit
about the sun. This stuff I can deal with, at
least as far as its immense power and energy. Um,
(18:59):
and I love of the 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 doesn't make sense.
(19:20):
That's a really small number. Actually, yeah, I agree, it
would be like about horse power. Yeah, that's five times tinted.
It's gotta 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? Superscript? That's what it is, right,
(19:44):
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 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. This is the only article I think
(20:04):
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 there space? I think there's supposed to be a
space on either side technically, Yeah, I've been doing these wrong. Then, well,
don't feel bad. This thing says five times one thousand,
(20:25):
twenty three horsepowers. It's all good, all right. What else?
One trillion one megats on bombs going off every second
if your war like, and then finally, one single second
of son action whatever that is is enough to power
our earth for half a million years. That drives it home.
(20:49):
It does, 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 power the energy use we use currently for
(21:13):
half a million years in one second, ye. 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
amazing stuff if we could capture a significant amount of
(21:35):
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 that, the idea behind the
Diceon sphere is this structure. He originally proposed a hollow
sphere and kind of referred to it as a shell. Um,
(21:59):
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? Take? Yeah,
I guess a little convoluted. He he didn't really go
to the trouble of spelling out because again, remember this
(22:19):
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 what I was looking for. He
was using some vague words were 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 he
(22:39):
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 hole because
the rotational forces, the sheer forces, and the gravitational forces
acting on it, which just obliterate it immediately. Like it's
(23:03):
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
a little more sense. Uh yeah. Our own article points
(23:26):
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
sunshine makes you happy, Like John Denver, did you know
(23:49):
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, Yeah, 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
of it. He was saying it would need to have
a radius, So a radius, not even a diameter half
(24:10):
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,
Like it would be much further spread out, and it
(24:31):
would actually encompass the Earth's orbit within it. Oh, so
it would be like this, this is mine. 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 there that would
would get the old screw job. But but but the
(24:55):
ones inside twice the distance of Earth's orbit would really
benefit from it. That's very selfish. Yeah. But the other
problem is too Chuck, is I imagine it would things
would get pretty hot, Yeah, pretty quickly inside this thing,
So the Earth would be destroyed. Yes, he and to
get around this, and a lot of people I don't
(25:16):
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, right, Well that
makes sense, but what you were saying about just the
sheer size of it there, There literally aren't enough raw
materials on our entire planet to make something this big.
(25:39):
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 in
in Freeman himself, I keep on going to call him Freeman,
like that's his last name, but I just end up
sounding like I know him on a first name base.
(26:02):
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 dicen sphere
um that had the radius twice the distance from the
(26:26):
Earth to the Sun and make a solar array of it.
Must have been some good acid. Ye, good for him,
all right. So I think we're both in agreement, and
most people are in agreement that this sphere idea is
not at all tangible, not as like a cohesive whole. No,
like it just remains in the realm of thought experiment.
(26:47):
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
people have tried to figure out how to do it.
(27:08):
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,
like the swarm and stuff. Well, yeah, I mean, let's
let's get to that. He uh he himself even said
(27:31):
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, uh, 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 initial idea was that sphere, and then what it
came to be was that the sphere was like this
(27:52):
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
they like the swarm, he likens it to bees, like
instead of gathering pollen, they're just around the Sun, moving around,
(28:15):
gathering energy and power. And so those might be habitable too, right,
And they're like they're they're 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
a dicen spear 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
(28:37):
the galaxy or the universe, it would appear is basically
a whole sphere around the Sun. Yea, so it still
falls under that category, right, Yeah, he had to keep
that sphere think because of branding. He didn't want to
lose that. 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.
(28:58):
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 could be the statites. Now, So the what I
saw the difference between the swarm and the bubble was
(29:20):
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 the statites, right, So they're just kind of hovering
outside of the star um not in orbit, just kind
(29:42):
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 on solar sales? Yeah? So, I mean it makes
sense if you a bunch of these solar sales orbiting
the Sun, Uh, you might think that you could harness
(30:06):
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,
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
(30:29):
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
I S s. These things don't need to be like that.
I mean, if we're creating dicense fears, we're gonna be
advanced enough that we could build some really looks um
(30:51):
satellites and stats 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 project that's carried
out by a central global government that's directing the whole thing.
(31:11):
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 one's own life, would
make sure that their orbit wasn't gonna intersect with somebody
else's orbit. He was already up there, and just organically
(31:34):
a dycen's fear 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 he had some far far
thinking thoughts, far thinking, I don't have this. Uh, should
(31:57):
we take another break? I think so 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. Alright,
(32:31):
So earlier you talked about dismantling Jupiter with a socket
set a couple of screwdrivers. Uh. 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,
(32:54):
so it would make it um proximity wise, 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
(33:15):
could disassemble mercury fully in basically what amounted to a
forty year stretch thirty days. I could do it right exactly.
If a contractor tells 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
(33:37):
forty years. Obviously, but um, I think his point. 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 and then start reassembling as you go,
and once you start getting one bit of it online,
(33:58):
it's gonna help power and create better efficiency to harvest
and reassemble mercury the rest of mercury, 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
(34:20):
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, 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
we cannot conceive of the stuff we could do with
that amount of energy yet. But I guarantee it's not
(34:41):
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 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
(35:05):
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, 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
(35:26):
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 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
(35:47):
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 so far uh in such
a relatively short amount of time, something like going from
that first dicense fhere to um colonizing an entire galaxy
(36:08):
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 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
(36:31):
find millions or billions or trillions of them in in
just an one section of the universe. 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
(36:54):
they found a couple of of candidates. Actually in the
last year or so, I think 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,
(37:17):
which I'm pretty sure they call EPIC two oh four
to eight nine one six right, And 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
(37:40):
UM I guess randomly or not necessarily on some sort
of set schedule um around these stars. And you would say, well,
that's probably just a planet or something coming in between it. Well, yes,
they thought about that already. Um. And normally a star
will dim by about one percent when a planet sized
(38:01):
object comes in between you, the observer and that planet.
These things are dipping on the in the case of
K I C 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
(38:25):
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 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
(38:47):
to talk about robots, robots building themselves and them doing
all this work up there. Uh. One of the 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
(39:08):
robots would have to be operating without fail up there
because they would be by themselves or be able to
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
(39:30):
hundred or five hundred years, that's not that far off. Like,
if we can harness all the energy on Earth, we
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
(39:51):
Dyson was talking about dissembling Jupiter, Chuck. He said that
it should take I don't know, roughly eight hundred years
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
(40:11):
years worth of that to disassemble and reassemble Jupiter. So
we we like, not only do we not have the
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 we almost need a
(40:34):
dicens fear to create a dicense fhere at this point,
somewhere Freeman Dison is laughing on acid somewhere in New Jersey. Um.
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, if we want to make it actually
(40:55):
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 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
(41:15):
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 of the easy ones is well, just
inhabit the solar rays go inhabit the dison spear stuff.
Being so precious about living on Earth. Um, which makes sense.
(41:38):
But I like living on Earth. Yeah, but would an
Earth eight hundred years from now be worth living on? Uh?
It depends, Chuck. Will it be skipping skipping to school
and skinning knees and spelling bees and all that still?
Because if so, yeah, I don't know what you're talking about.
(42:00):
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 you think skinning knees and spelling
bees or corny, well, then mr Corny up. That's right.
That's why, uh, I would like to introduce their principal Skinner,
(42:21):
Principal Skimore Skinner Armontaine's area. Um, there's one other thing.
You got anything else? I got nothing else. I got
one more thing. So there's that 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
(42:45):
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 know what,
if you really wanted to, um, make these license fear
is efficient, you'd make them in like the same manner
that those Russian nesting dolls are made Troishka, Right, So
(43:08):
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 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
(43:29):
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, 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.
(43:53):
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,
I 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.
(44:16):
I think she meant page we uh 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 across the podcast after a
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(44:36):
There was something about your kind voices, strong intellect, and
raunchy humor that gave me a thirst for learning and
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do we have raunchy humor? I didn't realize that we.
I think she picks up on the that's like Cheat
and Chong the sideways comments. We're like the new Cheat
and Chong. Thank you a billion times over for just
(45:00):
being who you are. The podcast was a large factor
and saving my life. Don't ever underestimate or doubt what
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(45:22):
If you to take the time to write in to
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(45:44):
You can send us an email to Stuff Podcasts how
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For more on this and sins of other topics, visit
how stuff Works dot com. H m hm
San Francisco, the s Y s K treet Yes, San Francisco, Oakland,
the entire Bay area and dare I say, all of
Silicon Valley. Yeah, we love you. And we're coming back
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(00:21):
rare afternoon show. Uh, and we will be ready to go.
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afternoon drinking. You know, yeah, you know, a couple of drinks,
maybe it'd be bloody Mary. What were we talking about.
(00:43):
Oh yeah, we're promoting our show. Oh that's right. So
we're doing that show on January. Uh. You can go
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and it's awesome. It's a great, great comedy festival. Lots
of awesome shows that weekend and for the following weeks.
So I I encourage you, like to buy lots of
tickets just by ours first. Yeah, and hurry, hurry, because
(01:05):
they're selling out fast, no joke. That's not a ploy.
That's not as a marketing ploy. They're really selling fast.
We get emails every time. Guys, you told me to hurry,
I didn't hurry. I'm shut out. And since this promos
petered out, it ends right now. Welcome to stuff you
should know. It's from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey,
(01:31):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
Charles w Chuck Bryant. 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
(01:53):
all of our profane tirades. Yeah, it would kill us
if she ever pressed it. That's right, 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.
(02:13):
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,
I see and his he was on Mark Maron's podcast.
It was a great interview in maren he you know it.
It's pure Keith Richards and he was just basically like,
you know, I have a hard time standing upright, like
(02:34):
I can't mess with trying to breast foot pedals. That's
Keith Man. Yep. Very pure. Yeah, and by pure, 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.
(02:57):
I think he drinks and smokes weed. I got you. Yeah,
it's like Christine. Actually, Maron smoked his first cigarette in
a decade in that show with him. Oh that was smart.
That's 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 Richard
(03:20):
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. I know, I'm being judge.
Wagon your finger, So, Chuck, have you ever used energy? Yes? Well,
you know, when you're using energy, most likely you're using
(03:44):
something like a fossil fuel, right, yeah, right, like gasoline
or natural gas or something like that stuff that comes
from decomposing dinosaurs. Okay. The problem with using decomposing dinosaurs
is most people know is that it's essentially an on
renewable resource. There's no more dinosaurs to decomposed any longer,
and even if there were, it would take tens of
(04:06):
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 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
(04:26):
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 Rutger's. So, um, we
we have to come up with energy sources that we
won't eventually run out of. And obviously there's like wind
(04:46):
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
growth potential. The thing is is I also saw that
(05:06):
if we keep growing in 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. The
problem is is even if we harnessed all of the
(05:28):
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,
the stuff that is starting towards the Earth doesn't make
it very frequently. Let's just go to the sun and
(05:52):
and basically strangle the life out of it to get
energy from it. Right, And one of the first proposals
of it, I don't want to say serious proposal, because
although it's been taken seriously over the years and almost
been interpreted like scripture um, it was a thought experiment
(06:12):
to begin with. It's something called the Dyson spear. 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 an old dude. But we're talking about
Freeman Dyson, not to the maker of the vacuum cleaner
(06:33):
or the bladeless fan or the bladeless hair dryer. Is
that really a thing? They have a dyce in hair dryer,
you know what that. I was so disappointed when I
found out what the bladeless fan was. Why have you
seen those? Yeah, you can stick your hand through it.
It's amazing. Well I know, and I was like it
(06:55):
is it magic? Like how in the world isn't doing this?
But it's got a stupid blade. It is 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 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,
(07:15):
where you stick your hand down in there. 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, 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
(07:37):
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 are just rubbing all over every blade. Yeah,
it is gross, believe me, because I walk out is
crying with my hands held in the air every time
I go to the bathroom. Well, you and I have
a very big thing about airport bathrooms. Um, and I
(07:58):
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 stalls none
of them secured. They've been ripped clean off. Well they
(08:19):
were there, but you couldn't you know, the locks didn't work.
It was just 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, how's your poop? Yeah,
that's the Mr. Peeper's model. It's just not acceptible, you know,
(08:40):
in this day and age, to not have complete privacy
in there. I mean, I agree with you. I again,
I'm gonna reiterate. I think there should be one stall
for an entire bathroom so that no one could possibly
sit down next to you. But barring that, the all exactly.
But barring that, though, like the place like we have
in our office is acceptable. It's a good second. There's
(09:04):
like a complete wall in between you. There's a complete
wall in front of you and a door that's securely shut.
It's a water closet. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess
I guess it is O man, I knew we were
going to get distracted by poop. Yeah. This isn't even
the porta pot I know. All right, So sorry. Back
(09:25):
to Freeman Dyson, uh not the vacuum maker. He was
born in England. He worked most of his career. He's
retired now, but worked most of his career as a
physics professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University,
not Rutgers. Uh. He was a civilian scientist with the
(09:47):
r EF in 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
(10:10):
that right? Yeah, and not like a complete skeptic, Like
he does believe that it's I believe where 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
(10:32):
end of the world, 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 gets 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
(10:56):
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
(11:18):
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
(11:41):
he actually it was I think a paper that was
published in Science and in journal 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
(12:03):
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 city, 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
(12:26):
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 stapleed 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 Dyson he it was
(12:50):
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 were some follow up correspondence UM
after the letter first came out, But almost immediately people
started thinking about how you would create one of these things.
(13:12):
This this dicensphere, and the who the whole point we
should say, basically, at its at its basis, a diycen
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 it
(13:32):
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
(13:56):
of these things, you're going to capture 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. That's how
(14:17):
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 the Dyson spear. He he
said that it would be likely that they that this
would be an invention. They came up. Yeah, all right, well,
(14:39):
um let's go should we go to uh this U
Nikolai Karda 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 this idea that
(15:01):
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 smart
(15:23):
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, this where every
bit of Judeo thermal energy, every drop of sunlight, every
um um, every bit of hydro electric power, all that stuff,
(15:46):
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 rosy. 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.
(16:07):
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 spear comes in.
(16:28):
That's what we aspire to do one day, right, maybe
a million or so years from now. And then Type
three is this 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.
(16:49):
I think that the second the second stage, 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
(17:10):
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 jumped 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,
(17:34):
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,
(18:13):
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 Sun podcast was
one of our our biggest struggles and would have been
(18:35):
our biggest achievements had we uh done it right. It's
the biggest pity applause. We get yeah for this sun. No, no,
it was it was fine. You tried, Yeah, good for
you for trying. But uh, let's talk a little bit
about the sun. This stuff I can deal with, at
least as far as its immense power and energy. Um,
(18:59):
and I love of the 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 doesn't make sense.
(19:20):
That's a really small number. Actually, yeah, I agree, it
would be like about horse power. Yeah, that's five times tinted.
It's gotta 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? Superscript? That's what it is, right,
(19:44):
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 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. This is the only article I think
(20:04):
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 there space? I think there's supposed to be a
space on either side technically, Yeah, I've been doing these wrong. Then, well,
don't feel bad. This thing says five times one thousand,
(20:25):
twenty three horsepowers. It's all good, all right. What else?
One trillion one megats on bombs going off every second
if your war like, and then finally, one single second
of son action whatever that is is enough to power
our earth for half a million years. That drives it home.
(20:49):
It does, 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 power the energy use we use currently for
(21:13):
half a million years in one second, ye. 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
amazing stuff if we could capture a significant amount of
(21:35):
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 that, the idea behind the
Diceon sphere is this structure. He originally proposed a hollow
sphere and kind of referred to it as a shell. Um,
(21:59):
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? Take? Yeah,
I guess a little convoluted. He he didn't really go
to the trouble of spelling out because again, remember this
(22:19):
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 what I was looking for. He
was using some vague words were 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 he
(22:39):
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 hole because
the rotational forces, the sheer forces, and the gravitational forces
acting on it, which just obliterate it immediately. Like it's
(23:03):
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
a little more sense. Uh yeah. Our own article points
(23:26):
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
sunshine makes you happy, Like John Denver, did you know
(23:49):
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, Yeah, 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
of it. He was saying it would need to have
a radius, So a radius, not even a diameter half
(24:10):
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,
Like it would be much further spread out, and it
(24:31):
would actually encompass the Earth's orbit within it. Oh, so
it would be like this, this is mine. 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 there that would
would get the old screw job. But but but the
(24:55):
ones inside twice the distance of Earth's orbit would really
benefit from it. That's very selfish. Yeah. But the other
problem is too Chuck, is I imagine it would things
would get pretty hot, Yeah, pretty quickly inside this thing,
So the Earth would be destroyed. Yes, he and to
get around this, and a lot of people I don't
(25:16):
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, right, Well that
makes sense, but what you were saying about just the
sheer size of it there, There literally aren't enough raw
materials on our entire planet to make something this big.
(25:39):
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 in
in Freeman himself, I keep on going to call him Freeman,
like that's his last name, but I just end up
sounding like I know him on a first name base.
(26:02):
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 dicen sphere
um that had the radius twice the distance from the
(26:26):
Earth to the Sun and make a solar array of it.
Must have been some good acid. Ye, good for him,
all right. So I think we're both in agreement, and
most people are in agreement that this sphere idea is
not at all tangible, not as like a cohesive whole. No,
like it just remains in the realm of thought experiment.
(26:47):
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
people have tried to figure out how to do it.
(27:08):
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,
like the swarm and stuff. Well, yeah, I mean, let's
let's get to that. He uh he himself even said
(27:31):
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, uh, 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 initial idea was that sphere, and then what it
came to be was that the sphere was like this
(27:52):
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
they like the swarm, he likens it to bees, like
instead of gathering pollen, they're just around the Sun, moving around,
(28:15):
gathering energy and power. And so those might be habitable too, right,
And they're like they're they're 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
a dicen spear 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
(28:37):
the galaxy or the universe, it would appear is basically
a whole sphere around the Sun. Yea, so it still
falls under that category, right, Yeah, he had to keep
that sphere think because of branding. He didn't want to
lose that. 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.
(28:58):
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 could be the statites. Now, So the what I
saw the difference between the swarm and the bubble was
(29:20):
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 the statites, right, So they're just kind of hovering
outside of the star um not in orbit, just kind
(29:42):
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 on solar sales? Yeah? So, I mean it makes
sense if you a bunch of these solar sales orbiting
the Sun, Uh, you might think that you could harness
(30:06):
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,
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
(30:29):
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
I S s. These things don't need to be like that.
I mean, if we're creating dicense fears, we're gonna be
advanced enough that we could build some really looks um
(30:51):
satellites and stats 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 project that's carried
out by a central global government that's directing the whole thing.
(31:11):
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 one's own life, would
make sure that their orbit wasn't gonna intersect with somebody
else's orbit. He was already up there, and just organically
(31:34):
a dycen's fear 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 he had some far far
thinking thoughts, far thinking, I don't have this. Uh, should
(31:57):
we take another break? I think so 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. Alright,
(32:31):
So earlier you talked about dismantling Jupiter with a socket
set a couple of screwdrivers. Uh. 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,
(32:54):
so it would make it um proximity wise, 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
(33:15):
could disassemble mercury fully in basically what amounted to a
forty year stretch thirty days. I could do it right exactly.
If a contractor tells 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
(33:37):
forty years. Obviously, but um, I think his point. 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 and then start reassembling as you go,
and once you start getting one bit of it online,
(33:58):
it's gonna help power and create better efficiency to harvest
and reassemble mercury the rest of mercury, 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
(34:20):
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, 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
we cannot conceive of the stuff we could do with
that amount of energy yet. But I guarantee it's not
(34:41):
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 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
(35:05):
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, 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
(35:26):
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 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
(35:47):
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 so far uh in such
a relatively short amount of time, something like going from
that first dicense fhere to um colonizing an entire galaxy
(36:08):
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 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
(36:31):
find millions or billions or trillions of them in in
just an one section of the universe. 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
(36:54):
they found a couple of of candidates. Actually in the
last year or so, I think 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,
(37:17):
which I'm pretty sure they call EPIC two oh four
to eight nine one six right, And 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
(37:40):
UM I guess randomly or not necessarily on some sort
of set schedule um around these stars. And you would say, well,
that's probably just a planet or something coming in between it. Well, yes,
they thought about that already. Um. And normally a star
will dim by about one percent when a planet sized
(38:01):
object comes in between you, the observer and that planet.
These things are dipping on the in the case of
K I C 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
(38:25):
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 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
(38:47):
to talk about robots, robots building themselves and them doing
all this work up there. Uh. One of the 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
(39:08):
robots would have to be operating without fail up there
because they would be by themselves or be able to
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
(39:30):
hundred or five hundred years, that's not that far off. Like,
if we can harness all the energy on Earth, we
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
(39:51):
Dyson was talking about dissembling Jupiter, Chuck. He said that
it should take I don't know, roughly eight hundred years
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
(40:11):
years worth of that to disassemble and reassemble Jupiter. So
we we like, not only do we not have the
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 we almost need a
(40:34):
dicens fear to create a dicense fhere at this point,
somewhere Freeman Dison is laughing on acid somewhere in New Jersey. Um.
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, if we want to make it actually
(40:55):
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 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
(41:15):
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 of the easy ones is well, just
inhabit the solar rays go inhabit the dison spear stuff.
Being so precious about living on Earth. Um, which makes sense.
(41:38):
But I like living on Earth. Yeah, but would an
Earth eight hundred years from now be worth living on? Uh?
It depends, Chuck. Will it be skipping skipping to school
and skinning knees and spelling bees and all that still?
Because if so, yeah, I don't know what you're talking about.
(42:00):
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 you think skinning knees and spelling
bees or corny, well, then mr Corny up. That's right.
That's why, uh, I would like to introduce their principal Skinner,
(42:21):
Principal Skimore Skinner Armontaine's area. Um, there's one other thing.
You got anything else? I got nothing else. I got
one more thing. So there's that 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
(42:45):
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 know what,
if you really wanted to, um, make these license fear
is efficient, you'd make them in like the same manner
that those Russian nesting dolls are made Troishka, Right, So
(43:08):
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 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
(43:29):
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, 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.
(43:53):
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,
I 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.
(44:16):
I think she meant page we uh 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 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.
(44:36):
There was something about your kind voices, strong intellect, and
raunchy humor that gave me a thirst for learning and
a new purpose in life. Wait a minute, Wait a minute, Waitnue,
do we have raunchy humor? I didn't realize that we.
I think she picks up on the that's like Cheat
and Chong the sideways comments. We're like the new Cheat
and Chong. Thank you a billion times over for just
(45:00):
being who you are. The podcast was a large factor
and 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, Cherry B. Thanks
a lot, Cherry. 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.
(45:22):
If you to take the time to write in to
let us know, um and you can let us know
that you think we're the tops by tweeting to us.
I'm at josh um Clark And there's also an official
s Y s K podcast one. You can hang out
with Chuck at facebook dot com slash Charles W. Chuck
Bryant or Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know.
(45:44):
You can send us an email to Stuff Podcasts how
Stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at
our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com.
For more on this and sins of other topics, visit
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