I’ve been working on a novel called Enigma Scout for ten years now. The story is too egg-headed to ever get “trad published” but I’m still shopping it around. That said, it took me a long time to realize that not many people are still interested in Dyson spheres, and along this ten-year journey I wrote this text as a rough draft for possible Forward. I think it’s interesting on its own.
Reclaiming Dyson Spheres
“… perhaps the attempt to see our turbulent world against a
background of stars may, after all, increase, not lessen, the significance of
the present human crisis. It may strengthen our charity towards one another.”
(p.4 – of the 2019 Dover edition, Star Maker)
He then proceeds to tell a story of the intellectual development,
not just of a people, or a planet, or galaxy, or even a universe, but instead
of the multiverse. He tells an epic tale of unbelievable scope—complete with
figures! In this tale the narrator sees civilizations rise and fall,
intelligences come and go, and always a tendency for greater and greater good.
Of course, Stapledon is writing from his own time, and many
of his beliefs may not be as widely held today. But it is clear that he introduced
his readers to scores of fantastic ideas. By p.118 we learn:
“Great care was taken by the Symbiotic race to keep its
existence hidden from the primitives, least they should lose their independence
of mind.”
Doesn’t this foreshadow Star Trek’s Prime Directive by thirty years?
A few pages later we encounter a utopian society living on
artificial planets in “orbit after crowded orbit” so numerous that “the whole
galaxy was dimmed” (p.134). This is where we get the idea that was to later be
known as a Dyson sphere.
The name Dyson sphere comes from the English physicist
Freeman Dyson. This is because in 1960 Dyson published a one-page report in the
journal Science we he proposed that any search for intelligent life should
consider the possibility that we might not “see” the lifeform’s star. He
reasoned that the mass of a gas giant like our Jupiter could be redistributed
to create a two-meter-thick shell completely encircling a star. A sufficiently
advanced civilization may want to do this to fully harness the star’s available
energy. The effect of such a shell would be to shift the electromagnetic
emissions of a star into the microwave wavelengths.
From here I went on to start building the logic on my “three
types of Dyson spheres” found here.
No comments:
Post a Comment