• Question: Do you think we could ever replace the Sun with something man-made?

    Asked by emmab12 to Mark, Matthew, Mike, Paul, Sabina on 10 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Sabina Hatch

      Sabina Hatch answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      I can’t imagine that we would survive long enough as a race to have the technology to do that. Then again there is the question that even if we did get to that stage, where we could create something so powerful and potentially destructive …should we risk it?
      I would think that we would be better off finding some other suitable solar system.

    • Photo: Mike Lee

      Mike Lee answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      I think, from a broad perspective, we need an external source of energy. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to waste any energy which is essential when making a cup of tea. Without tea we could not survive.

    • Photo: Matthew Malek

      Matthew Malek answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      Honestly? It might be possible… but there are far easier solutions to surviving past the life of the Sun (about another 4 – 5 billion years) than building our own. If we reach the technological capability to make our own Sun, we will surely also have the capacity to travel through space and settle new planets in other systems. Exoplanet research is showing that there are LOTS of other planets out there… some Earthlike!

    • Photo: Mark Jackson

      Mark Jackson answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      It’s hard to imagine something more convenient than the Sun: a free source of immense energy for which the Earth’s ecosystem has perfectly adapted.

      But I do think we could make better use of the sun’s energy, and by far the coolest way you could do this is by building a Dyson Sphere. This was an idea imagined by eminent physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960. He realized that a very advanced civilization would not be content to just passively accept the little bit of radiation a planet naturally gets from their sun, but instead would – get this – BUILD A THIN SPHERE AROUND THEIR SUN AND THEN LIVE ON THE INTERIOR SURFACE. This way they could harness almost all of the sun’s energy. But of course the Dyson Sphere would get very hot, and so would radiate energy off into out space but at a lower frequency. He performed a few calculations estimating the frequency since this would be a logical place to search for extraterrestrial life. I’m sorry to say we have never found any such signals, but the idea was awesomely used in an episode of Star Trek: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECLvFLkvY7Y

    • Photo: Paul Coxon

      Paul Coxon answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      Some very clever people in California today are working on something very similar to what takes place in the sun.

      At the National Ignition Facility researchers are trying to recreate nuclear fusion whereby hydrogen atoms are squeezed together to make helium atoms. When that occurs, a lot of energy is released. It could mean the answer to the world’s energy problems, but is very hard to achieve – so far only the Sun can do it.

      Take at look at these links for some really cool science. You might even recognise the big laser machine from the movies – Star Trek Into Darkness was filmed there. They used it for the warp core of the engine room on the USS Enterprise 🙂

      https://lasers.llnl.gov/

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