Stuff You Should Know - Will We Find Evidence of Aliens by Their Engineering Projects?

Episode Date: December 13, 2016

In 1960 physicist Freeman Dyson suggested that in the hunt for alien life, we should search for evidence of massive engineering projects that encapsulate stars with solar arrays to harness their energy. Could we humans ever make one ourselves? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. San Francisco, the S.Y.S.K. treat. Yes, San Francisco, Oakland, the entire Bay Area, and dare I say, all of Silicon Valley. We love you, and we're coming back to Sketchfest this year in January.

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So we're doing that show on January 15th. You can go to the SF Sketchfest website to get tickets, and it's awesome. It's a great, great comedy festival. Lots of awesome shows that weekend, and for the following weeks. Yeah. So I encourage you to buy lots of tickets

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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 too. 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 just plugs right into the amp.

That's pretty great. Oh, I see. And he was on Mark Marin's podcast. It was a great interview. And Marin is pure Keith Richards, and he was just basically like, I have a hard time standing upright. Like I can't mess with trying to press foot pedals.

That's Keith, man. Yep, very pure. Yeah. And by pure, I mean... Pure heroin. Yeah. Pure China. No, 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 gotcha. I think he drinks and smokes weed. I gotcha. But it's Keith Richards.

But it's Keith Richards. Come on. Yeah, that's like Christine. Actually, Marin smoked his first cigarette in a decade in that show with him. Oh, that was smart. That was 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 was like, sure. Yeah.

I mean, I see that, but at the same time, I also see not smoking. Listen to you. I know, I'm being judgy. Wagon 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 to decompose 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 DNA, 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 it. Oh, sure.

Right. But we don't have that capability. And as far as I know, no one's working on that track right now. I don't think. Just Steven Spielberg. Right. He's someone at Rutgers.

So 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 0.01% of the sunlight that reaches earth to power our world.

So there's a lot of room for growth potential. Sure. The thing is, as I also saw, that if we keep growing and our energy consumption keeps growing at something like 1% a year, within a thousand years, we'll be using more than the entire amount of sunlight that hits the earth 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, the stuff that is starting toward the earth doesn't make it very frequently. Well, let's just go to the sun 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, it was a thought experiment to begin with. It's something called a Dyson sphere. Yes. Well, I guess we should introduce the man.

Not that we have him here. That'd be awesome. 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 hairdryer. Is that really a thing? Mm-hmm. They have a Dyson hairdryer? Yeah. You know what? I was so disappointed when I found out what the bladeless fan was.

Why? Have you seen those? Yeah, you can stick your hand through it. It's amazing. Well, I know. And I was like, is it magic? Like how in the world is it doing this? But it's got a stupid blade.

It's just housed in a casing. Yeah, so that's a terrible name for it. And then it just channels it up and squirts it out the front. The Dyson invention that always got me was the air blade hand dryer. I think we've talked about this before. Oh, yeah, yeah. Stick your hand down in there.

I love 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. Your big meat hooks are just rubbing all over everything. That's gross. Yeah, it is gross, believe me.

Cause I walk out just crying with my hands held in the air every time I go to the bathroom. Well, you and I have a very big thing about airport bathrooms. 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, no, 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 stall. Well, 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. 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 to, but barring that. One stall to rule them all. Exactly.

But barring that though, like the place, like what we have in our office is acceptable. It's a good second place. There's like a complete wall in between you. There's a complete wall in front of you and a door that's securely shut. Yeah, it's a water closet. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

I guess, I guess it is. Like you're fully in close. There's a lot of water flowing there. Oh man, I knew we were going to get distracted by poop. Yeah, this isn't even the porta potty episode. I know. All right, so sorry, back to Freeman Dyson. Not the vacuum maker.

He was born in England. He worked most of his career. He's retired now, but worked most of his career as a physics professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, not Rutgers. He was a civilian scientist with the RAF in World War II. Cool. Went to Cambridge, then Cornell for grad school.

This guy's got some bona fides. 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 what is 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 basically saying like, this is not the end of the world.

And in fact, he thinks that increasing levels of CO2 can be a good thing for humanity ultimately. How so? I don't know. I didn't get that far. He's like, it gives you a pretty good buzz. Maybe. I don't know.

It's pretty interesting though. I think starting about six to 10 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.

Yeah. But then other people are like, no, he's totally right. That's pretty interesting. Anyway, so that's who he is. And he in 1937, well, not 1937, he in the 1960s was reading a book from 1937 called Star Maker from a science fiction author,

Olaf Stapledon. And he saw this thing called a light trap from this book. 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 he said, hey, this light trap sounds like a good idea. I'm gonna rip it off.

Yeah, he did. And he actually, it was, I think a paper that was published in science and then journal science in 1960, and it's really short. Did you read it? Yeah. Yeah, it's like, I think it took up two pages in science out of like a thousand or something like that

in that volume. But 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 city. 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 they came to be called Dyson Spheres because he was the first one to popularize it,

even though he got the idea from Olaf. Yeah, he actually said he thought a Stapledon sphere was a better name, but I guess not good enough to actually use it. Right, right. Yeah, he said it once. Right, very quietly. Yeah.

But so this Dyson Spheres, it was originally created as a, again, a thought experiment. He didn't talk about how to construct it necessarily or anything like that. Although there were some follow-up correspondence after the letter first came out. But almost immediately,

people started thinking about how you would create one of these things, this Dyson sphere. And the whole point we should say basically at its basis, a Dyson sphere is an engineering project, a mega structure 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. Right.

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 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 Dyson sphere?

He said that it would be likely that this would be an invention that they came up with. Okay, gotcha. Yeah. All right, well, let's go. Should we go to this Nikolai Kardashev real quick? I think we can't put it off any longer.

It's pretty interesting. In the 1960s, there was an astrophysicist name, Nikolai Kardashev, and he was a bond villain. And actually he wasn't, but he should have been. He had this idea that there were three classifications of civilization, 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. Really smart dude named Michio Kaku, not a bond villain either. He said in the next 100 years or so, maybe 200 years, we might actually be a type one civilization.

Yeah, and like you said, that's where every bit of geothermal energy, every drop of sunlight, every bit of hydroelectric power, all of 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 Kaku's assessment's a little rosy. Oh, well. And I can say that because he was on our TV show. Sort of. Well, he was. He, yes, he appeared on. But we didn't interact with us in any real way. Exactly.

He has no idea who we are. No, none. 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 Dyson sphere comes in.

Yeah. 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 stage, the type two civilization, would be either the hardest to get to or take the longest to get to. Right. And that's because when you build that first Dyson sphere, your technology and your energy efficiency and your productivity is going to just shoot forward

exponentially from that point on. Oh, yes. 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 fast compared to how long it took you to go from a type one to a type two civilization.

Yeah, I think it's like any product even. That first one is tough, and then you can scale it, and well, we'll get to the robots here soon. Okay, okay. In fact, let's take a break. I'm getting a little psyched, Chuck. And we'll talk a little bit more about the sun, boo, right after this.

Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Stop, you should not go. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast

and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so I went, when I said the word son. 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. Most people out there, most longtime listeners, know that our son 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 this son. No, no, it was fine.

That's what we get. You tried. Yeah, good for you for trying. But let's talk a little bit about the son, this stuff I can deal with at least. 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.

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. Yeah, that doesn't make sense. That's a really small number, actually. Yeah, I agree. It'd be like about 5,200 horsepower.

Yeah, that's 5 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. And 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. 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 it their 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, so 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.

That drives it home. It does, but it also gives you an idea of just how primitive we are energy consumption-wise. Yeah. Like it's crazy because 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 takes your mind, though, too, and this is, I think, 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. Even an insignificant amount. Yeah, really? Yeah. You'd keep Iggy Pop going for another 100 years? Yeah, so 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. 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 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 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, 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 shear forces and the gravitational forces acting on it would just obliterate it immediately. Like it'd just be mechanically impossible to make it like that. So he said, maybe you would make something like a bubble or a swarm or something like that. And he said, in the letter, I've enclosed some blotter acid, put it on your tongue. You're going to love this dynamite.

And 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. 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's just on the 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. 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, 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 of 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. Yeah. But the other problem is too, Chuck, is I imagine things would get pretty hot pretty quickly inside this thing. 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, 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 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. 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? 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 one of those things that's like, yeah, it's theoretically possible. But we're just, it's not at our, we're nowhere near 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. Let's get to that. 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 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. Right. So like, what's the swarm? Well the swarm, maybe they are in different orbits, and they, like the swarm, he likens it to bees, like instead of gathering pollen, they're just around the sun, moving around,

gathering energy and power. Right. And so those might be habitable too. Right. And they're like, they're solar arrays that are satellites that are moving around on independent orbits of one another. That's right. So, 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, it's got to be a sphere. 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? Mm-hmm.

I thought the solar sails could be the statites now. 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. Just kind of hovering instead. And then those are the two, and then the third are the solar sails, correct? So 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, you could use that 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 if Earth ever

becomes untenable, right? Correct. Or we can't terraform Mars. We can go live on these things. 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? Yeah. So they could be huge. So, 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 who 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. Wow. I don't know. Guy was, he had some far, far thinking thoughts. Far thinking.

All right. 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. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? Also leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to HeyDude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so earlier you talked about dismantling Jupiter with a socket set, a couple of screw drivers. Yeah. Uh, 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. 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. Oh, I thought you were going to say, 30 days, I could do it. Right, exactly. If a contractor tells you you can take Mercury apart in 30 days, don't trust him.

Agreed. No, this was in basically four 10-year stretches 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 in a 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, you know, like we were talking about earlier. Yeah. And not only that, but you could use that energy, all of a sudden there would be super computing like you've never seen, space travel would get faster, like all these technologies that we can't even 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 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, 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?

That's literally the labor force you would need, and I think Armstrong is the one who said, well, you could use robots, actually, and 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. Exactly. And that's why that was, 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 II civilization to a Type III civilization pretty quickly, and as a matter of fact, you would also, if this project was carried out 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. 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? You probably are not going to find just one Dyson Sphere, you're going to find a Dyson galaxy, a Type III 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. Yeah. And then the other is EPIC, which I'm pretty sure they call EPIC, 204278916, right? 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. 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. The other 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, 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. As this article points out that you would need, 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. No, but I mean, even if Michio Kaku's off by 100 or 200 or 500 years, that's not that

far off. 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. 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? We're like, whoa, you know, that's so much. We would need 800 years worth of that to disassemble and reassemble Jupiter. So 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, 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. To get it to Earth is another big problem if we want to make it actually usable. Some people said we could laser it over, but the problems with laser beams is after about a mile, you're going to lose a lot of efficiency with it. So good luck with that.

Flows have been floated out there, but microwaves, even though they're more effective farther out than lasers, you're still limited to about 100 miles, which will do us no good. 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 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 skin and knees and spelling B's and all that still, because if so, then yes. Yeah. I don't know what you're talking about. It's another Simpson's reference.

Oh, okay. It's the one where Principal Skinner came back, the real Principal Skinner. Oh, yeah, great one. And he's like, he goes, if you think skin and knees and spelling B's or corny, well, then Mr. Corn Me Up. That's right. That's when they introduced, they'd like to introduce their Principal Skinner, Principal Skimore Skinner.

Armitain's area. Yep, that's a great one. There's one other thing. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I got one more thing. I got 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.

There's a problem with that because this guy came along, his name was Robert Bradbury. He's a futurist. I think maybe a science fiction writer. Ray? No, Robert, his little brother. Robert Bradbury said, well, you know what, if you really wanted to make these Dyson spheres efficient, you'd make them in like the same manner that those Russian nesting dolls are made, like a matryoshka, right?

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 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. Dyson, since I said howstuffworks twice, that means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this, we helped a 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 binged. I know.

Binged. Yeah, 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, to 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? I didn't realize that. Oh, I think she picks up on the... That's like Cheech and Chong. The sideways comments. 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, Cheery B. Thanks a lot, Cheery. 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. You can let us know that you think we're the tops by tweeting to us. I'm at JoshumClark and there's also an official SYSK podcast one. 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 StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com and as always, join us at our home on the web, StuffYouShouldKnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.