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

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