SYSK Gets Weird Playlist: Will We Find Evidence of Aliens by Their Engineering Projects?

21:15Alright, so I went, when I said the word son. Yeah, I thought that was odd. No, it's not. You know.

21:22Chuck Bryant:I honestly had no idea where you're going with this. Well, you do. You're being coy. Most people out there, most longtime listeners know that our Sun podcast was one of our biggest struggles and would have been our biggest achievements had we done it right. It's the biggest pity applause we get for the Sun. No, no, it was fine. You tried. Yeah, good for you for trying. But let's talk a little bit about the sun. This stuff I can deal with, at least. Okay. As far as its immense power and energy. And I love that our own article has some of these comparisons. The sun can generate 5 times 1023 horsepower.

22:12Chuck Bryant:I think that that is a typo. I think that it's supposed to be 5 times 10 to the 23rd power. Oh, you think? That's the only explanation I have for that. Yeah, that doesn't make sense. That's a really small number, actually. Yeah, I agree. It'd be like about 5 ,100, 5 ,200 horsepower. Yeah, that's five times 10 to the 23. It's got to be. Someone just got lazy there. Seriously. They're like, I don't know how to do the little 23 thing. Right. 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, I think. So let's put it this way.

22:51And this one is the one that cracks me up. 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.

23:02Chuck Bryant:In a single second. That's pretty good. This is the only article I think I've ever seen an ellipse in. Like the author was like, wait for it. Yeah. In a single second. Yeah. I don't even think they did the ellipse right. Isn't the ellipse supposed to be right after the letter or is there a space? I think there's supposed to be a space on either side. Oh, really? Technically, yeah. I've been doing these wrong, man. Well, don't feel bad. This thing says five times 1 ,023 horsepower. It's all good. All right, what else? One trillion one megaton bombs going off every second. If you're warlike. And then finally, one single second of sun action, whatever that is, is enough to power our Earth for a half a million years.

23:49That drives it home.

23:51Chuck Bryant:It does. But it also gives you an idea of just how primitive we are energy consumption wise. Yeah. Like 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 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. And this is, I think, one of the things, one of the buttons that Freeman Dyson 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.

24:40Chuck Bryant:Even an insignificant amount. Yeah, really. Yeah. You'd keep Iggy Pop going for like another hundred years.

24:49So like you said, the idea behind the Dyson sphere is this structure. He originally proposed a hollow sphere and kind of referred to it as a shell. But I think now, or I think he went on to make it a solid sphere.

25:07Chuck Bryant:So he actually said he was really, what's the opposite of clear? Convoluted? Yeah, I guess a little convoluted. 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. People were like, wait, what are you talking about? What is this sphere? 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.

25:45Chuck Bryant: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. Yeah. Like it'd 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 enclosed some blotter acid, put it on your tongue. You're going to love this. It's dynamite.

26:22And call me in an hour. Might make a little more sense. 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.

26:43Chuck Bryant:Oh, yeah. Like it makes us happy. Yeah. People write entire songs about how sunshine makes you happy like John Denver did. You know? Uh-huh. And that was just on his shoulders. It would be a global bummer if somebody enclosed the sun. That's like supervillain 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 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.

27:19Chuck Bryant:Yeah. So this thing would be massive, which means that it would also enclose the Earth, too. Right? Yeah. 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 is mine. it belongs to the Earth and no one else can get any sun yeah it would block off the stuff outside of two times the distance of the Earth's orbit so there's a couple planets out there that would get the old screw job but the ones inside twice the distance of Earth's orbit would really benefit from it that's very selfish but the other problem is too Chuck I imagine things would get pretty hot pretty quickly inside this thing.

28:12Chuck Bryant:So the Earth would be destroyed. Yes. 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 Sphere, 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 literally aren't enough raw materials on our entire planet to make something this big. In fact, in our entire solar system, there probably aren't enough raw materials to make a structure like this. No. And not still try to inhabit it. There's just no way. Yeah. Some people say, though, in Freeman himself, I keep wanting to call him Freeman like that's his last name.

29:00Chuck Bryant:But I just end up sounding like I know him on a first name basis. He was saying you might be able to build something like this by disassembling Jupiter. That was his suggestion. Oh, really? Yeah. He said disassemble Jupiter and put it back together, and you could build a Dyson sphere that had a 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. Yeah. 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, so why bother?

29:52Chuck Bryant:Oh, well, that's the interesting thing to me. It basically is kind of like he meant it as a thought experiment. 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'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 decent. Oh, like the swarm and stuff? Well, yeah. I mean, let's get to that.

30:31He 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?

30:47Chuck Bryant:Right. So to him, his initial idea was that sphere. And then what it came to be was that the sphere was like this umbrella term for these different, slightly more realistic ideas like the swarm or the bubble. So like, like what's the swarm? Well, the swarm, maybe they they're 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, gathering energy and power. Right. And some of those might be habitable, too. Right. And they're solar arrays that are satellites that are moving around on independent orbits of one another.

31:28Chuck Bryant:That's right. And the way that they would make a Dyson sphere 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 as basically a whole sphere around the sun. Yeah, sure. So it still falls under that category, right? Yeah, he had to keep that sphere thing because of branding. He didn't want to lose that. He's like, the genie's 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. So those satellites are actually, they would be called statites.

32:06Chuck Bryant:Well, no, if they were the bubble, they would be statites. This guy's got it wrong. Oh, really? Mm-hmm. I thought the solar sails could be the statites, no? So 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 in their own orbits, not interacting with each other. Oh, I got you. 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, not in orbit. Okay. Just kind of hovering instead. And then those are the two, and then the third are the solar sails, correct?

32:51Chuck Bryant:Well, you can make a solar sail, or you can make any of them with solar sails, and I don't know where that guy got that. Yeah, did we do a whole episode on solar sails? Mm-hmm. Yeah, so, I mean, it makes sense. If you get a bunch of these solar sails orbiting the sun, 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. 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.

33:30Chuck Bryant:If Earth ever becomes untenable. Right. Right. We can't terraform 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 ISS. These things don't need to be like that. I mean, if we're creating Dyson spheres, we're going to be advanced enough that we could build some really lux satellites and statites as solar rays to go hover or orbit around the sun, right? So they could be huge. So big, in fact, that Dyson was saying 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 sails 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 but he was already up there, and just organically a Dyson sphere 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.

34:49Wow.

34:49Chuck Bryant:I don't know. Guy was – he had some far-thinking thoughts. Far-thinking? Mm-hmm. I don't have those. 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.

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37:01Chuck Bryant:A, B, C, D, in the morning brush your teeth. A, B, C, D, in the morning brush your teeth. E, F, G, H, hurry up and don't be late. E-F-G-H. Hurry up and don't be late. Lingo Kids. Only suitable for kids. If it gets stuck in mom's head, that's not our problem. Lingo Kids! Everything kids love. Download now for free.

37:38All right, so earlier you talked about dismantling Jupiter with a socket set and a couple of screwdrivers. Mercury is another planet that people have talked about as potentially harvesting. The good thing about Mercury, a couple of things. One is that it is near the sun.

37:59Chuck Bryant:Yeah, so who needs it already? Yeah, so it would make it proximity-wise, it makes a little bit of sense. And I think this Oxford University physicist, Stuart Armstrong, is who proposed this. And one of the other great things about Mercury is it has a lot of great raw materials, namely iron, that we could use. Right. And he actually suggested that we could disassemble mercury fully in basically what amounted to a 40-year stretch. I thought you were going to say, 30 days, I could do it. Right, exactly. If a contractor tells you he can take mercury apart in 30 days, don't trust him. Agreed. No, this was in basically four 10-year stretches.

38:44Chuck Bryant:Combined equals 40 years, obviously. But I think his point, Armstrong's point, was that you don't have to disassemble Mercury as a whole and wait until it's fully disassembled to put it together into Dyson to start creating a Dyson sphere. You can disassemble and then start reassembling as you go. Right. And once you start getting one bit of it online, it's going to help power and create better efficiency to harvest and reassemble the rest of Mercury, like we were talking about earlier. Yeah. And not only that, but you could use that energy. All of a sudden you could there would be supercomputing like you've never seen.

39:24Space travel would get faster, like all these technologies that we can't even think about yet would be growing at exponential rates. Right.

39:33Chuck Bryant: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 cannot conceive of the stuff we could do with that amount of energy yet. Yeah. But I guarantee it's not going to be, you know, using fuel like charging our smartphones. It should be for some pretty neat stuff, I guess. So the other cool idea is that, holy cow, how many people would have to take part in this kind of a project? Just literally the labor force you would need. And I think Armstrong is the one who said, well, you could use robots, actually.

40:17And with the same idea that once you get some of these robots going, 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 and doing everything for you.

40:37Chuck Bryant: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 Dyson sphere, 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 this project was carried up by a centralized government, it would spread so quickly and so far in such a relatively short amount of time. something like going from that first Dyson sphere to 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'd be so many of them that they would just basically become self-sufficient and spread over the galaxy.

41:31Chuck Bryant:So the reason this is noteworthy is that if you found one Dyson sphere, you would probably find millions or billions or trillions of them in just one section of the universe, right? Right. You probably are not going to find just one Dyson sphere. You're going to find a Dyson galaxy. Yeah. A Type 3 civilization. And that's what they're looking for by sifting through some of these old sky surveys. And they found a couple of candidates, actually, in the last year or so, I think. Oh, yeah? Yeah, there's a couple of surveys that have found stars, and they have typical star names. One is KIC 8462852, which is a sexy name.

42:22Yeah.

42:23Chuck Bryant:And then the other is EPIC, which I'm pretty sure they call EPIC, 204-278-916, right? Wow. And EPIC was discovered by the Kepler spacecraft in 2014. And the reason these things are noteworthy is because there is some sort of weird transit pattern where the light dims, I guess, randomly or not necessarily on some sort of set schedule 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. And normally a star will dim by about 1 % when a planet-sized object comes in between you, the observer, and that planet.

43:13Chuck Bryant:These things are dipping, in the case of KIC star, 22%. And in the case of the epic star, 65%, 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 spheres. Yeah. I mean, it's possible. Well, you know, it's kind of fun to talk about robots building themselves and them doing all this work up there. 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.

44:10And as this article points out, that you would need – like, it would have to be so advanced. 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.

44:32Chuck Bryant:No, but I mean, even if Michio Kaku is off by 100 or 200 or 500 years, that's not that far off. Like if we can harness all the energy on Earth, we should very quickly improve as far as our technology is concerned. So who knows? Maybe those robots aren't that far off, you know? Yeah. One other thing that I saw from this, though, was when Freeman Dyson was talking about disassembling Jupiter, Chuck. He said that it should take, I don't know, roughly 800 years worth of the sun's energy output to disassemble and reassemble Jupiter. Yeah, well, that's not bad. But do you remember how much comes out of the sun in a second?

45:16Chuck Bryant:We're like, whoa, you know, that's so much. We would need 800 years worth of that to disassemble and reassemble Jupiter. So we like not only do we not have the capability of building a Dyson sphere, 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 chicken or egg dilemma. We almost need a Dyson sphere to create a Dyson sphere at this point. Yeah. Somewhere Freeman Dyson is laughing. On acid. Somewhere in New Jersey. One of the other big issues is, okay, let's say that you could even do something like this and harness this energy.

45:58To get it to Earth is another big problem. If we want to make it actually usable. Um, some people said we could laser it over. Uh, but the problems with laser beams is after about a mile, you're going to lose a lot of, uh, efficiency with it. So good luck with that. Uh, microwaves have been floated out there, but microwaves, even though they're, uh, more effective 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?

46:32Chuck Bryant: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 arrays. Go inhabit the Dyson sphere. Stop being so precious about living on Earth. Yeah, that's true. Which makes sense, but I like living on Earth. Yeah, but would Earth 800 years from now be worth living on? It depends, Chuck. Whether it be skipping to school and skinning knees and spelling bees and all that still. Because if so, then yes. Yeah. I don't know what you're talking about. It's another Simpsons reference. Oh, okay. It's the one where Principal Skinner came back, the real Principal Skinner.

47:15Chuck Bryant:Oh, yeah. Great one. He goes, if you think skin and knees and spelling bees are corny, well, then Mr. Corn me up. That's right. That's when they introduced, we'd like to introduce Principal Skinner, Principal Skimor Skinner. Yeah. Yeah. Arm and Tanzarian. Yep. That's a great one. 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 imprint where there's a lot of infrared radiation but no visible light. Yeah. There's a problem with that because this guy came along. His name was Robert Bradbury.

47:55Chuck Bryant:He's a futurist. I think maybe a science fiction writer. Ray? No, Robert. His little brother. Yeah. Robert Bradbury said, well, you know what? If you really wanted to make these Dyson spheres efficient, you'd make them in the same manner that those Russian nesting dolls are made. Like a Matryoshka, right? Yeah, yeah. So you'd have the internal sphere and then outer spheres going around it, catching all that lost heat energy and turning it into usable power. which is awesome because you'd have basically 100 % efficiency as far as the Dyson sphere 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.

48:41Chuck Bryant:And Freeman Dyson just hung his head, went into his room, shut the door and lay down on his bed for a while. The end. Yep. Well, if you want to know more about Dyson Spheres, you can start with this article on HowStuffWorks.com by typing Dyson Sphere into the search bar HowStuffWorks, as I said. And since I said HowStuffWorks twice, that means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this We Helped the Lady Out. Hey, guys. Hope this email finds you well. been listening for only a short time, but it becomes so addicted. I've already binged about half of your episodes offered on Spotify. I think she meant pinched.

49:26Chuck Bryant:I know. Binged. We're on Spotify, by the way, and you can bing us all you want from that platform. 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 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, wait a minute. Do we have raunchy humor? Sure. I didn't realize that. Oh, I think she picks up on the... That's like Cheech and Chong. The sideways comments.

50:02Chuck Bryant:We're like the new Cheech and Chong. I 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, Cherry B. Thanks a lot, Cherry. That's nice. I like hearing that we help people. It makes me feel good in my belly. Yeah, we appreciate the compliment. It's very nice of you to take the time to write in to let us know. And you can let us know that you think we're the tops by tweeting to us. I'm at Josh Clark, and there's also an official SYSK podcast one.

50:44Chuck Bryant:You can hang out with Chuck at Facebook.com slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant or Facebook.com slash Stuff You Should Know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

51:06For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

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51:39Chuck Bryant:A, B, C, D. In the morning, brush your teeth. A-E-C-D, in the morning brush your teeth. E-F-G-H, hurry up and don't be late. E-F-G-H, hurry up and don't be late. Lingo Kids, only suitable for kids. If it gets stuck in mom's head, that's not our problem. Lingo Kids! Everything kids love. Download now for free. T-Mobile is reinventing business internet with super broadband. Whether you run a small office or a factory of 500, Connection is everything. Powered by America's fastest 5G internet. Plus Starlink. Super Broadband from T-Mobile reaches every zip code in the U.S. Super Broadband. A new era of business internet.

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