Space & Astronomy

A full Dyson swarm could boil Earth's oceans, new study finds

By T.K. Randall
March 23, 2025 ·  2 comments

An artist's impression of a Dyson swarm. Image Credit: CC BY-SA 4.0 Archibald Tuttle More than 50 years ago, the late physicist Freeman Dyson put forward the idea that a sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial race may be able to completely surround a star with a huge spherical structure and then live on its inside surface - a concept known as a Dyson sphere.

A Dyson swarm, meanwhile, is pretty much the same thing but instead of building a single large structure around a star, it involves doing so using an array of countless smaller satellites.

Such a setup would make it possible to harness almost the entirety of a star's energy, which would seem to be a good thing... but there is a catch, as highlighted in a recent study.

For the research, physicist Ian Marius Peters, and colleagues, set out to determine what environmental consequences may occur (if any) if we were to ever build a Dyson swarm.The team discovered that placing such a megastructure just outside the Earth's orbit would drastically alter the balance of solar radiation in the solar system - raising our planet's global temperatures by such an extreme amount that it would literally boil off the oceans and cook the Earth.

The only way to avoid this, the researchers determined, would be to place the swarm further away - perhaps beyond the orbit of Mars - where it would be far less effective but would also ensure that the temperature of the Earth did not increase by some disastrous amount.

Even this compromise, however, would come with drawbacks as the amount of rare materials needed to build such an enormous array of satellites would far exceed the quantity available on the Earth, meaning that we would need to start mining asteroids and other planetary bodies on an industrial scale beyond anything seen before.

All things considered, a Dyson swarm is unlikely to ever be a viable option.

Source: Daily Galaxy | Comments (2)

Tags: Dyson Swarm