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Last entry was a bit of a hoax, as I really didn't go much into traveling through space that much. I guess I needed to clarify the beginnings of something rather important: The Kardashev Scale. Theorized by Nikolai Kardashev back in the 1960s, likely as a supplement to the space race and whatnot. The scale is an early attempt at defining 'levels' of alien life and civilization, based on something very important to the universe: energy. All matter and forces can be traced back to the purest forms of energy, making it... pretty much the ultimate building block of everything. It makes stuff move, blow up, emit light... all that good stuff. And it's the foundational basis of all life as we know it. I'm not going to get into biology much yet, but it shouldn't come as much of a shock that energy is a necessary requirement for life. You get all your molecules and stick 'em together to write up the code for your hampster, but nothing's going to happen if you don't give it a little jolt first. All life requires energy. In fact, death is literally just a body undergoing irreversable entropy (scientifically speaking, anyways). Thus, living things strive to acquire energy as a means of survival. Why is that? Nobody knows. No biologist has ever managed to figure out where all these backwards things - things that actively avoid Newton's Second Law of Thermodynamics rather than ultimately striving towards it - came from. Neither do I, of course; so good thing that has nothing to do with what I'm talking about today! As we understand it, large-scale evolution tends towards increasing energy consumption. Adaptation might increase energy efficiency and decrease usage, but if humanity stands for anything at all, then it's the constant increase of energy consumption. < - - that's what we science-minded folks call "a jump" The Kardashev Scale reflects these massive jumps as tiers of societal complexity. A Type 0 civilization through to Type 1 represents all our time here on Earth. Initial jumps are from hunter-gatherers to agriculture, agriculture to industry, industry to automation, and so forth. Humanity as we know it is currently at the tail end of Type 1, meaning we've just about utilized all our planet's available resources and energy to maximum efficiency. Sure, we're doing it in the worst ways possible, but things like ethics and preservation aren't accounted for on this scale. I started us into Type 2 civilization in the last post, detailing our usage of the local system as defined by our lovely home star. This post should hopefully detail all the way through to the end, taking us to about Type 2.5. This scale is logarithmic in nature, so I probably won't quite get to Type 3 anytime soon (consumption and utilization of the entire scudding galaxy). Last time, we left off on the utilization of all the planets. However, there's still one celestial body left that's worth tapping into - and it's a big one: The sun. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to the Dyson Sphere. Apart from having one of the coolest names in scientific anything, the Dyson Sphere would be the first and greatest megastructure worth building for humanity. Put simply, it's a massive body of solar panels surrounding a star, designed to directly collect the sun's energy. Such a structure wouldn't actually take all that long: if we started now, the lot of us would probably even live to see the completion of it. The most efficient method that them engineers have thought up is not, in fact, a big ol' dome surrounding the sun. That would be dumb, bad, and quite possibly disastrous (eternal night, MASSIVE resource costs; not to mention that a single weakness could send the whole thing careening into the star's surface to be consumed). The most efficient Dyson Sphere would actually be a Dyson Swarm: a HUGE array of satellites orbiting the sun in a lattice, harvesting the energy directly, then beaming it towards our collection points. This would essentially focus all the stellar output of the sun to where we need it, and completely eliminate a huge percentage of its energy that just goes... well, nowhere. In terms of our current civilization, such a battery would complete negate any need for local energy sources. I can't imagine that big oil would be too happy about it, but you'd best believe that the rest of us certainly would be. Suddenly, energy production would be completely automated: we'd never have to worry about it again. This is why a Dyson Sphere likely wouldn't be humanity's last step towards becoming Type 2; it would be a lot easier to make it humanity's first. The energy availability would make colonizing the solar system an absolute breeze, allowing us to shoot our distant interplanetary colonies with concentrated sunlight to supply them with all the necessary energy they could possibly need. And it wouldn't stop there. A Dyson Sphere would certainly be the first megastructure; but it would be far from our only one. The Matrioshka Brain There are a number of frontiers that humanity has only just dipped its toes into; and if you've seen Tron, then you'd know that the Computational World is one of them. If we can't be sending people all across the universe for a week-long vacation, then we'll do the next best thing: create a whole new universe from here. What is the internet if not a massive new realm for us to explore and define? Built out of information, sprawling far and wide across the world--and all to the comfort of our iPhones and laptop computers. Thus, just like energy consumption, humanity is going to improve efficiency; and also increase consumption. I don't think I need to tell y'all that internet has completely skyrocketed in recent time. The trends match our Kardashev Scale types, with increasing consumption and requirements. ^ ^ ^ that is the first personal computer ever built: the IBM PC. It's boxy, chunky, and has that whole massive array to it. It could process a total of 5 Megabytes. And this: Is an apple watch. You can wear it on your wrist. It can process 16 Gigabytes: 3200 times more than that chonky boi up there. So what's your point? I hear you ask; and a good question, too. I haven't the leastest clue about data and software and stuff like that. Heck, I can barely screw up the HTML of a google page with the inspect tool! And, frankly, none of that really pertains to space travel. Which is where the Dyson Sphere comes in. Like anything else, storing and retrieving data requires energy. Your phone doesn't work if you never plug it in, and the more anime you stream, the faster it dies. It takes about 0.2 mJ to store a single bit of information. That's not much, but if you take the 175 Zettabytes of data (projected to be the amount in the so-called 'datasphere' by 2025), then that makes 280,000,000,000,000.03125 Megajoules of energy. That's in the trillions, so considering that our data usage is only ever going to go up, we're going to need something big for processing all that. That's when, in 1997, Robert Bradbury proposed that we build a series of dyson swarms in layers to create the ultimate computational machine: the Matrioshka Brain. It would literally be a star-sized computer (the layers would be to capture all the waste heat coming off from the computation to fuel the next layer, minimizing energy loss). After completing a Dyson Sphere, this would be the natural next step. Imagine outsourcing all your computations to this massive machine: it'd effortlessly take on any lag, bandwidth, and RAM, then simply stream the necessary images to flash up on your screen. Given optimizations and breakthroughs in internet technology, streaming the internet could become the next massive leap in humanity's journey through the Datasphere. The Sunny Meal I'm making this one up as I go along. I was considering other possible implications of a Dyson Sphere, then thought of this: a dyson-powered food factory. Photosynthesis is the reverse process of Respiration: it takes carbon (usually in the form of CO2) and water (H2O), then combines them using the power of the sun to create a hydrocarbon, or ATP (for most plants, this is glucose: C6H12O6), with the added bonus of an Oxygen (O2) runoff. When plants are consumed by an animal (say, a cow), that cow converts that ATP into instant energy, and stores some of it for later use by building up fat and muscle. Then, when us humans ruthlessly murder that animal (say, the cow), we consume its flesh to soak up all the potential energy it had left; which also gets turned into instant energy... and also fat. It all starts with the sun: our planet's ultimate energy source. So why don't we keep on using it? Advancements are being made in artificially growing meat cells - for enough money, you can probably get yourself a 3D-printed burger right now. This, of course, is both more consistent and a lot more ethical than raising and killing animals in nasty meat farms. Imagine what we could do with this technology using the sun's power? And that's not all: glucose, fructose, sucrose, and all the sugars in-between are what we science-minded folks call Hydrocarbons. Turns out they're actually the exact same thing we use to do stuff like fire. When you watch your marshmallow drip off your stick and plunge itself into the flame to be blackened and consumed, what you're seeing is the fire take in oxygen from the air to complete the exact same process that you use to make your own energy: respiration. Humans get the O2 by breathing, fire does it by... existing; it's combined with the hydrocarbons, then harvested by splitting the bonds (thereby releasing energy) to release H2O (usually in vapor form) and CO2. What that means is that humanity has been powering its factories and cars by taking dead sugar and getting energy out of it using nothing but good ol' fashioned breathing... the whole time. Almost makes you wonder if fire is actually alive, and if we've just been enslaving it for our own benefit. Eh. It's not exactly off-brand for us. What I'm saying, ultimately, is that we could start making self-producing food. We make massive energy collectors using the Dyson Sphere (including a lot of CO2 and water), and include photosynthesizing machines to directly convert this energy into storable packets of ATP. These would sit around for a few weeks/days/hours, then ship themselves back to Earth and our other colonies to be manufactured into something more tasty. This could free up land to decrease agricultural requirements, allowing us to more efficiently use our real estate (for important things; like actually putting our massive population somewhere for once). I have no clue if this'd be actually viable or even functional, but with all the crazy scientists adding their two cents to the Dyson Sphere thing... well, I thought I might add some of mine. The Stellar Engine: *Cough* looks like we're all out of time, folks! 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