I feel like I’m the only one that thinks this Dyson sphere method is a little dubious. What system is going to be used to collect energy using the captors and send it to Mercury? How will it be received on Mercury? The total power collected toward the end is more than 1024 W. If whatever process is used to disassemble the planet is 90% efficient, the temperature required to radiate the waste heat over Mercury’s surface area is about 7000K. This is hotter than the surface of the sun, and more than twice the boiling point of both iron and silica. In order to keep this temperature below the boiling point of silica, we would either need the process to be better than 99.98% efficient, to attach Mercury to a heat sink may times the size of Jupiter, or to limit power to about 1020 W. If melting the planet isn’t our style, we need to limit power to about 1019 W.
Doesn’t it mean that the last stage of the process takes a few orders of magnitude longer, not the whole process? The process consists of a series of N doublings. For all but the last… 7 or so doublings, the waste heat can be dumped into Mercury itself. Only for those last doublings does waste heat start to overheat Mercury. Right? So it’s just that those last 7 doublings or so need to slow down (or rather, stop growing exponentially)
More interesting proposal: Maybe actually a better strategy would be to just deliberately overheat Mercury at that point, turn it into an expanding cloud of superhot gaseous material, and then scoop up said material as it cools down? Not sure if that’s possible, maybe the cloud wouldn’t expand enough.
Another interesting proposal: Smash Mercury to bits by colliding other objects like Ceres into it.
Another, more practical proposal: Once Mercury is saturated (can’t double any more without overheating it) switch to mining those cold asteroids out in the asteroid belt, with your giant fleet of spaceships you’ve built with the infrastructure that blankets Mercury and orbits the Sun. The asteroids are all spread out, so it’s easier for them to radiate heat… right?
If growth is fast until the last 7 doublings, then things are fast until you get to ~1% of your final output. That’s still a ton of power, at least by our current standards. My guess is you don’t bother doing a dyson swarm until you’ve built a lot of infrastructure in more convenient places (e.g. somewhere closer to Earth’s orbit around the sun). But I dunno, it really depends on what the technology is like and how bottlenecked on energy you are.
Breaking apart Mercury is an interesting idea. Maybe there’s a way to, for example, shoot jets of molten material out, so that they’ll drift in a convenient direction and cool on their way. You’d also need to be careful about all the reaction force, because if you’re doing this on the scale of the entire planet, you could change its orbit. It wouldn’t be too hard to do some basic calculations on the feasibility of this, but I probably won’t take the time for that (yet).
And yeah, starting with smaller pieces like asteroids has less of an issue with waste heat, since they have more surface area.
Doesn’t it mean that the last stage of the process takes a few orders of magnitude longer, not the whole process? The process consists of a series of N doublings. For all but the last… 7 or so doublings, the waste heat can be dumped into Mercury itself. Only for those last doublings does waste heat start to overheat Mercury. Right? So it’s just that those last 7 doublings or so need to slow down (or rather, stop growing exponentially)
More interesting proposal: Maybe actually a better strategy would be to just deliberately overheat Mercury at that point, turn it into an expanding cloud of superhot gaseous material, and then scoop up said material as it cools down? Not sure if that’s possible, maybe the cloud wouldn’t expand enough.
Another interesting proposal: Smash Mercury to bits by colliding other objects like Ceres into it.
Another, more practical proposal: Once Mercury is saturated (can’t double any more without overheating it) switch to mining those cold asteroids out in the asteroid belt, with your giant fleet of spaceships you’ve built with the infrastructure that blankets Mercury and orbits the Sun. The asteroids are all spread out, so it’s easier for them to radiate heat… right?
Just spitballing here.
If growth is fast until the last 7 doublings, then things are fast until you get to ~1% of your final output. That’s still a ton of power, at least by our current standards. My guess is you don’t bother doing a dyson swarm until you’ve built a lot of infrastructure in more convenient places (e.g. somewhere closer to Earth’s orbit around the sun). But I dunno, it really depends on what the technology is like and how bottlenecked on energy you are.
Breaking apart Mercury is an interesting idea. Maybe there’s a way to, for example, shoot jets of molten material out, so that they’ll drift in a convenient direction and cool on their way. You’d also need to be careful about all the reaction force, because if you’re doing this on the scale of the entire planet, you could change its orbit. It wouldn’t be too hard to do some basic calculations on the feasibility of this, but I probably won’t take the time for that (yet).
And yeah, starting with smaller pieces like asteroids has less of an issue with waste heat, since they have more surface area.