DYSON SPHERES FTW!!!

I’m a huge fan of Spiderman 2. Besides it being an absolutely kick ass movie, it was one of the first movies I watched as a young buck where I thought “you know…the villain is kind of onto something here.”

When Dr. Otto Octavius said “the power of the sun in the palm of my hand” he was really onto something. Strip away the robot arms and the fact he went kind of crazy, and you can see Doc Oc was asking the right question: Why shouldn’t we do our best to harness the ultimate energy source?

If you haven’t watched or rewatched Spiderman 2 in awhile you should…totally holds up

What the heck is a Dyson Sphere

Thinking about the sun yet? Now picture this…a vast shell of solar panels that completely encompass our sun, capturing every single photon of its enery output. This megastructure - called a Dyson Sphere (named after physicist Freeman Dyson) - would be, in my humble opinion, humanity’s ultimate energy infrastructure.

I am totally fascinated by Dyson spheres. They’re just so cool to think about. The scale is almost incomprehensible to imagine…in just a second, a Dyson sphere could harvest more power than humanity has consumed throughout all of history. More energy we’ve ever needed to cleanly power every computer, every city, fuel every journey amongst our galaxy and beyond. We could reverse climate change, terraform Mars and Venus, and finally become an internsteller species. The limits are, literally, endless.

What a Dyson Sphere could look like

Do I think we will build a Dyson Sphere in our lifetime? No, probably not. But the point is more about dreaming of what we can do and less of the actual thing itself.

I’m a natural optimist, and thinking about a Dyson Sphere has made me think positively about our future and what we can accomplish. Everyone needs their “Dyson Sphere.” Not literally, but metaphorically. We all need something that seems wildly ambitious and absurdly optimistic to aim for. These dreams are the foundation of human progress.

When Kennedy announced we would go to the moon, rockets barely worked and computers filled entire rooms. At the time, that goal seemed insane. But as a country, we aimed for something incredibly audacious, and along the way, droive innovations in miniaturization, materials science, and systems engineering that we still use today. Your smartphone exists because we decided to shoot for the moon. Star Trek didn’t just entertain - it inspired an abundant, tech-first future that became a blueprint for passionate engineers and bold entrepreneurs.

Star Trek and Dyson Sphere: https://youtu.be/12bU6BFsStU?si=q2xxYxGZwKa4DIu6

This is why I love Dyson spheres. Not because we will build one tomorrow, but because dreaming at this scale changes how we approach our problems today. In my case, Dyson spheres help me dream about a world of energy abundance. Instead of asking how we can use less we should start asking how we create more. Instead of scarcity, engineer plenty. After all, why shouldn’t we dreaam of an energy abundant world? Or a world with high-speed rail, flying cars, or colonizing Mars? Truly, it’s ours for the taking. None of this is impossible.

Once you start thinking about capturing a star’s entire energy output, grand progress becomes clearer, step by step. What’s cool about this grandiose vision is that we don’t even need a Dyson sphere to achieve ultimate energy abundance. A legitimately achievable (with the right focus) step down from a Dyson sphere is a Dyson swarm; instead of a solid shell completely encompassing the sun, we build it piece by piece by sending a “swarm” of millions (or billions!) of independent solar collectors to orbit the sun. This offers the same level of energy harvesting in a much more feasible manner. Here is a good explainer on how we would do actually do it.

Oh, and what’s even cooler than THAT? We’ve made incredible improvements in renewable energy that brings us ever so closer to an clean energy abundant future. Solar panel efficiency has been hitting efficiency record after efficiency record. Battery storage is revolutionizing the grid. Space launch costs have dropped dramatically. It has become more economically feasible than ever to use renewable energy than fossil fuels.

All of these improvements compound towards the bigger vision. Better solar panels build momentum for a renewable, upwing future. Cheaper launches make space exploration easier. Better manufacturing enables space-infrastructure. Advanced batteries enable storage at any scale we need. A Dyson sphere dream doesn’t just inspire these technologies - it creates urgency for them. When you’re working towards solar scale enery capture, improving solar efficiency by just a little bit feels mandatory rather than just incremental.

Being Upwing and Your Own Dream

This mentality is “upwing” thinking - a techno-optimist philosophy that embraces tech innovation and rapid acceleration to create prosperity. This mindset sees technology as a growth engine.

Too often, we like to focus on the injustices of the present or the glory of our past. Instead, it’s important to focus on the beauty of our future and what we can build. That is a future worth fighting for.

This is progress we can achieve. We ABSOLUTELY CAN achieve energy abundance in our lifetimes - maybe not through a Dyson sphere or swarm, but maybe through fission, fusion, nuclear or hyper efficient solar / battery / renwable infrastructure. This is a future that can solve many of our hardest problems and provide an abundant life for all. By thinking and dreaming big, like how we can caputure all the energy of our nearest star, we can push our race to achieve impossible things and beyond.

Find your own Dyson sphere. What is your impossibly ambitious vision - ending aging? Colonizing Mars? Creating AGI or changing climate change? Get excited about building this future - it’s all possible.

Interstellar…the ultimate upwing movie