Dyson Sphere A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that completely encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power output. Proponents of solar power know that only a tiny fraction of the sun’s total energy strikes the Earth. What if we, as a civilization, could collect all of the sun’s energy? If so, we would use some form of Dyson sphere, sometimes referred to as a Dyson shell or megastructure . Physicist and astronomer Freeman J. Dyson first explored this idea as a thought experiment in 1960. Dyson’s two-page paper in the journal Science was titled Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation because he was imagining a solar-system-sized solar power collection system not as a power source for us earthlings, but as a technology that other advanced civilizations in our galaxy would, inevitably, use. Dyson proposed that searching for evidence of the existence of such structures might lead to the discovery of adv
