5 科技：Dyson sphere (3)

Next, we should consider the design of our swarm. Simpler is better. Conventional solar panels are for too intricate and short lives. Our satellites need to operate without repairs or intervention for astronomically long times and they need to be cheap to produce. But they’re most likely going to be enormous mirrors, which refocus sunlight to central, collecting stations like in concentrated solar power on Earth.

To build and launch them efficiently, they must be incredibly light made of little more than polished metal full bound to some supports. And last, we need the energy to build and launch the swarm itself.

Taking a part of planets and launching things into space requires an enormous amount of energy. For example, if we used all the fossil fuels and uranium on earth, and we were perfectly efficient, we could only launch as much mass as Mount Everest into space. A rather meager accomplishment compared planetary disassembly. To get the energy needed to build a Dyson Sphere, it’s almost as if you’re going to need the power output of Dyson Sphere. But that’s okay. There’s plenty of sunlight to be had on Mercury, so let’s get to work.

Humans are expansive to keep alive and are very sensitive to the environment. So, we’d want to automate as much as possible. Ideally, we’d have a small crew of controllers who oversee an army of autonomous machines doing the actual work.

There are four major pieces of technology required solar collectors, miners, refiners, and launch equipment. The solar collectors are going to give the energy we need to disassemble the planet. To start, maybe we deploy something like one square kilometer of them either as mirrors or as traditional solar panels.

They’ll provide the energy to run our miners which strip-mine the surface of the planet. And our refiners which extract valuable elements and fabricate them into our swarm satellites. To get them into space, we need a creative and efficient solution. Rockets aren’t too expensive, and difficult to deorbit and reuse. Instead, we’ll want to use a sort of railgun, a longer electromagnetic track which launches our satellites at high speed. Our swarm satellites will be packed tight for launch unfurling like an enormous origami once in orbit.

From this point, we can take advantage of exponential growth, using the energy of the existing parts of the swarm to build more infrastructure on Mercury and launch new panels faster and faster. Each panel provides the energy to build another, those to work together to build the next two. Within just about 60 doubling times, the Sun would be completely surrounded by solar panels.