So today’s topic is the Nicoll-Dyson Beam,
a great big space gun that can turn a star’s
entire solar output into a laser that tears
into targets with a destructive power equal
to several trillion nuclear bombs a second.
So with that in mind we’re going to explain
how such a device works, talk a little bit
about blowing up planets or even sterilizing
whole galaxies, and talk a bit about why you
might build such a device and what non-destructive
uses it has.
And we’ll finish out with some channel updates.
If you’ve already been following along with
our discussion of Dyson Spheres, or Dyson
Swarms, in the Megatructures Series or the
Dyson Dilemma then you know the basics. If
not I’ll review them quickly but you might
want to click on video link to jump back and
watch those first. And as always, if you’re
not used to my voice you should turn on the
closed caption subtitles down by the subscribe
button.
Okay, a Dyson Sphere is a collection of artificial
bodies surrounding a sun, theoretically that
could be one giant rigid sphere like an inside
out planet if you’ve got the magical technologies
for cheap transmutation and artificial gravity,
but what was originally meant by sphere was
basically a cloud or swarm of smaller satellites.
These could be power gatherers or artificial
rotating habitats like we discussed back in
episode 4, and under known science the only
way to do a rigid sphere around a star or
have components hover in the same place is
if they are ultra thin mirrors, called statites,
floating over the sun from light pressure
like a solar sail or like a sheet of paper
hovering over a floor vent.
For our purposes today it doesn’t matter,
since on the list of difficult tasks involved
in building any Dyson Sphere, rigid or swarm,
keeping all those bodies on the right trajectories
and not bumping into each other barely makes
the list. In fact one of the main uses of
a Nicoll-Dyson Beam, or smaller versions of
it, is to give objects little taps to get
them back on the right path or vaporize dangerous
space garbage.
The concept is pretty simple, once you’ve
got a bunch of mirrors around a sun you’ve
got access to all that power, which is a couple
billions times what Earth receives. That gives
us the sunlight to light a couple billion
more planets, or to push the entire solar
system across the galaxy like we discussed
last time in the Shkadov Thrusters video,
or to use more modest setups to push spaceships
up to interstellar speeds or vaporize asteroids
and the like.
But it also gives you the power to incinerate
whole planets around other solar systems.
And this is also a pretty cheap thing to build.
Like the Shkadov thruster, when you’re only
surrounding your star with thin mirrors even
a single large asteroid or moon probably has
enough matter to make one. It’s sort of
like wrapping your star with tin foil as opposed
to hundreds of feet thick dirt and ocean.
Unlike the Shkadov Thruster you do need a
big lens to focus that beam if you’re planning
to hit Earth-sized targets around other stars,
but you can make lenses much larger when you
can build them in zero-gravity environments
not to mention there being a lot of tricks
for making effectively giant lenses from small
components. It’s worth remembering after
all that a normal glass lens is actually composed
of trillions of tiny atoms that are themselves
mostly composed of empty space. You can also
use a lot of the dynamic support structures
we saw through the series starting with orbital
rings and space fountains up to shell worlds
and discsworlds to make some very giant rigid
lenses you can change focal length and direction
with.
This isn’t a laser or optics video though,
so will suffice it to say that you can get
that energy lined up into a beam with a very
long range. There’s some debate about how
long, but as we’ve already discussed you
can push on things with mirrors on their back
anyway so even if you can’t pinpoint a planet
on the other side of the galaxy you can ram
a giant mirror missile up to relativistic
speeds with some minimal guidance on it to
make corrections to its own trajectory and
just ram your target for the same effect.
And that’s actually the better course of
action anyway as we’ll discuss later.
Great big laser, simple concept. But how much
energy does it actually take to blow up a
planet?
We all remember in Star Wars, unless you’ve
been living in a cave for the last 40 years,
where the Death Star just nukes the Planet
Alderaan in one fast shot. You might also
have seen movie theories where folks wonder
about why when they are going to do the same
thing to the Moon of Yavin they have to wait
till it is out from behind the gas giant to
shoot instead of just blowing up the gas giant
planet then shooting the moon.
Now Star Wars aims for scientific accuracy
the with a level of marksmanship worse than
the storm troopers featured in the films so
wondering about that is pretty pointless,
but here I actually makes sense.
The amount of energy needed to blow up any
object big enough to be held together by its
own gravity has to exceed what we call gravitational
binding energy, or just binding energy. And
generally speaking that way more the doubles
if you double the mass of a planet, closer
to the square of mass. This is one of the
reasons why asteroid are much nicer than planets
for mining and space construction of megastructures,
to extract mass from them and carry it away
just cost way less energy because they have
so little gravity and no atmospheres getting
in the way. One good nuke could explode a
small asteroid whereas even a Nicoll-Dyson
Beam, which as I mentioned could pour out
the equivalent of trillions of nukes a second
and still need a whole week to torch Earth.
To do something like Jupiter, which masses
a few hundred times as much as Earth, wouldn’t
take a few hundred times as long but closer
to a housand times a long, needing a thousand
times the energy. Gas Giants are physically
quite large for their mass since they’re
not very dense which makes them a bit easier
to blow up than an equal mass rocky planet,
but it still takes more juice than just the
increase in raw mass would suggest. Very massive
dense things like white dwarf stars or neutron
stars take insane amounts of energy to rip
apart and a black hole would arguably be impossible
to.
In any event, the Death Star is already on
the stupid side of overkill so engineering
it to blow up gas giants would mean gunning
it up a thousand fold. A Nicoll-Dyson Beam
could rip apart Jupiter for instance but it
would take a week to torch Earth and decades
to do Jupiter, though I can think of a few
reasons why you would actually want to do
that. Especially if you’re in the Transmutation
game and want to turn your gas giant into
construction material for a more robust Dyson
Sphere instead of one composed tin foil.
Of course you don’t actually need to totally
vaporize a planet if you just want to kill
everyone on it. Even just torching off the
crust is serious overkill. There’s an old
episode of Deep Space Nine, “the Die is
Cast” where a combined Romulan and Cardassian
fleet of twenty ships is getting ready to
torch an enemy planet and one of the crews
says the crust will be destroyed within an
hour and the mantle within five.
This is a good indication the Star Trek has
a habit for aiming for scientific accuracy
with all precision Star Wars does, I never
know how Trek got a reputation as the science-focused
of the two, and is pretty tactically crazy
too. First it means your average Star Trek
starship is carrying around the equivalent
of a whole sun in its reactor, and second,
as Chuck Sonnenburg from SFDebris put it,
unless your enemy is the lava people taking
out the mantle of a planet is pretty silly.
Taking out a whole planet of Earth’s Size
requires something like 10^32 Joules of Energy,
again multiple days of our sun’s entire
output, or something like a trillions tons
of antimatter, which is around a million times
how much that whole fleet should mass out
at.
Alternatively you don’t even need a hundredth
of that energy to strip off a planetary crust
and even that is pretty serious overkill.
It’s kinda hard to put an exact figure on
how much energy you’d need to sterilize
a planet since that would vary by planet and
you’d need to decide if you were going for
a 100% certain kill of everything down to
the toughest bunker buried under mountains
or tiniest microbes in the bottom of ocean
trenches or not.
But it’s a lot less than 10^30 Joules. Our
atmosphere is about a millionth of the Planet’s
mass and superheating that till it was hot
enough to evaporate into space ought to do
the trick, and that would require more like
a few seconds of the sun’s output. And you’d
probably want to go maybe an order of magnitude
higher and dribble that in over the course
of the target planet’s day so it can just
rotate around on its axis while you peel it
like an apple.
Key point there though is that you don’t
need anything like an entire Dyson Sphere
to give yourself a planet destroyer, so we’d
have to consider all Dyson Spheres to have
this capability same as they all can so the
Shkadov Thruster trick of slowly moving the
entire solar system across the galaxy. And
if you got big lenses that can target planets
light years away you’ve also got great big
old telescopes that can flat out see planets
with ease on the other side of a galaxy.
So if you happen to be a genocidal race, even
one that doesn’t want to roam the galaxy,
you can pretty much torch every planet in
that galaxy without leaving your home solar
system, because you could devote less than
1% of your solar economy to roasting planet
after planet, targeting hundreds at a time
for whatever their day length was. An even
if there were a hundred billion target planets
in your galaxy, well, that would just be a
billion days, or 3 million years, to get them
all, way way less time than it would take
for any remnant microbe left buried on the
bottom of an ocean trench to respawn complex
life on that planet if all you’d done was
to rip off the atmosphere and boil the surface
of land and sea. And you could get the job
done a lot faster if you used your entire
solar output or annexed some neighboring stars
for this purpose.
Especially a giant. Our sun is not very massive,
while we call it a yellow dwarf it out masses
95% of all other stars and is about 10,000
times brighter than the weakest of red dwarf
stars. But luminosity tends to go at about
the third to fourth power of the mass and
Spica, a nearby giant star only about 250
light years away and only about ten times
our sun’s mass is more than 10,000 times
as bright, and there are stars out there millions
of times as bright that if converted into
Nicoll-Dyson Beam could actually flat out
vaporize Earth in a second, and sterilize
thousands every second. They could torch every
planet in the galaxy, even if every star had
one potentially habitable one, in a very short
time. They could probably sterilize a whole
galaxy in a week and flat out vaporize them
in only a few thousand years of output, and
since the light would need a hundred thousand
years to get to the furthest targets that’s
not exactly a long timetable.
This is one of the reasons why I tend to hand
wave away the notion of xenocidal alien races
creeping across the galaxy attacking everyone
or sending out swarms of self-replicating
machines to do it, things we could conceivably
fight for a nice science fiction story. Sterilizing
a galaxy if you’ve got just a tiny head
start on everyone else is just way too easy.
Now one of the problems with this is that
since there is that really long lag time is
that you not only have no way to call off
the attack once it’s been fired, even if
the shot takes thousands of year to arrive,
but that aiming at something planet sized
might just turn out to be beyond us for any
clever tricks we might play with focal lenses.
That brings up the main non-destructive use
of these devices because you can use smaller
forms to push big ships up to speed. So you
could use these to move ships around your
solar system, you can quarter your light sails
same as a wind sail for lateral motion and
you can stick mirrors out a distance to bounce
light back inward to push ships in, or slow
ships down as they enter your solar system,
or adjust the trajectory of space stations
and so on.
But you could also stick mirrors on the back
of a fairly stealthy giant missile and speed
it up over the course of days or week or months
or years until it had all the kinetic energy
got from the nicoll-dyson beam and then proceed
on with just a little bit of steerage fuel
and simple auto-pilot to go whack its target.
And you can just send a small swarm of them
to impact that place over a few days even
if you spent years dumping energy into them.
They just get up to speed, fold up their light
sails, and cruise in. Incidentally these are
called RKM’s, RKV’s or RKKVs or RM’s
or a few other variations, Relativistic Kinetic
Missile, and basically describes any weapon
whose sheer kinetic energy makes the inclusion
of a bomb, even a warhead made of anti-matter,
basically redundant because they already carry
more energy than a bomb of their mass would
release.
I’ve mentioned on the channel quite a few
times that an invading alien armada doesn’t
need to slow down and park in orbit to bombard
us, they just have to throw some garbage out
an airlock in our direction before slowing
down and we’d get smacked up like it was
World War 3. And if you’re using your Nicoll-Dyson
Beam to accelerate your RKM’s instead of
as a direct beam weapon you can include some
sort of abort procedures in whatever computer
or AI or suicide squad is piloting the thing.
I’ve also heard Nicoll-Dyson Beams and RKMs
in general described as equivalent to MAD,
mutually assured destruction, or even flat
out first use weapons since there’s no defense
against them, no advance warning to get off
a counter strike, but that’s not actually
true.
Like any war scenario where your enemy outnumbers
you or has more tech you are pretty screwed
especially if they are fine with Scorched
Earth styles of warfare, literally Scorched
Earth in this case, since Asymmetric Warfare
tends to be much harder to do if the enemy’s
actual goal is outright genocide, which is
not the case if you want to kill people and
take their land. The main goal is to take
their land. We’re talking about Scorched
Earth, where the goal is killing them specifically
and the land is just in the way.
But if you have rough parity of tech and numbers
Nicoll-Dyson Beams and RKM’s are like anything
else, and the apparent inability to defend
against them is just a lack of imagination.
Like most cases you’ve got 5 defenses against
a weapon. You can prevent anyone ever using
it on you, either by diplomatic means or first
strike, you can blow up the weapon so it can’t
shoot, you can intercept the shot en route
with something else, you can armor yourself
against the thing so it doesn’t hurt as
bad, or you cannot be where it is shooting.
In regard to the latter 3, both of these are
weapons that take years if not millennia to
get to their target. We’ve talked in the
past about moving planets or solar system
and that is itself pretty time consuming but
not so much when you’re just trying to be
one step to the right, as it were. You can
proof a target against a weapon that can’t
change direction – which includes beams
and for the most part RKMs too – by just
jittering you acceleration bit in a random
fashion. It doesn’t take a lot of acceleration
for a lot of time to move something as big
as we tend to envision starship to be so that
it isn’t where you’d expect it to be from
observing its trajectory. It migth make the
crew kind of nauseous, the spaceship equivalent
of seasickness, but that’s okay. Now doing
that to a planet or solar system is a lot
harder but you can do it over years.
Alternatively if you’re a K2 civilization
living in your own Dyson Swarm, trillions
of rotating habitats, well as I discussed
in that video they’re a lot more durable
where life is concerned because while on a
planet the thin shield of air is over you
and the thick shield of stone is beneath you,
it’s reversed on rotating habitats.
To hurt the folks inside you’ve got to burn
through all that armor and shielding, and
you can also shine the outside up like a mirror
to make it more resistant to attacks of this
sort. That also makes it a bit easier to give
a good shove with smaller version of your
own Nicoll-Dyson Beam and lets you keep all
your habitats, which are much smaller targets
then planets anyway, in positions that can’t
be predicted years in advance unlike a planet.
You can also put swarms of mirrors between
you and the enemy system to seriously reduce
the weapon’s power and blow up RKM’s that
ram into them. And while you can give an RKM
a bit of maneuverability they just can’t
be made to go zipping light years out of their
way and steering back on course, and if they
ram into just about anything they’ll be
torn to shreds and scatter like a shotgun
blast.
And you just can’t use one star’s entire
power to torch an entire enemy dyson swarm
since that’s like trying to burn someone
to death with a regular flashlight, all you
can do is focus on a spot and again they will
all be mirror-surfaced and any give spot on
the shell of a dyson swarm is on any given
day composed of millions of different object
moving on millions of different trajectories.
You’d need a much bigger star or many different
stars all firing at once.
So the Nicoll-Dyson beam is a great weapon
if you have first strike ability, having shown
up on the galactic scene with a head start,
and want to stay at home rather than expand
out into the stars, but it’s not likely
to be used for warfare when there’s a lot
of systems that have them too. And it is more
likely to be used to power RKM’s then as
a straight beam I’d think.
And everyone would have them too. They’re
just not that hard to build as an addition
to an existing dyson swarm and you can scale
it up as you add to your Dyson Swarm, and
its simply too useful for other purposes.
It would be great to have fusion powered ships
or black hole powered ships like we discussed
in other videos, but you basically need a
small scale Nicoll-Dyson beam to make the
KugelBlitz black holes we discussed there
and even if you’ve got a fusion reactor
on your spaceship being able to give it a
big boost to speed initially, or slow down
returning ones, with you Nicoll-Dyson Beams,
saves you a ton of fuel allowing a higher
transit speed or more cargo. So you might
as well. You just have some massive thin solar
sail like tinfoil that you spread out when
getting beamed and otherwise fold up front
to serve as extra shielding against radiation
and get smacked by tiny relativistic particles
while in transit to your destination.
So you’d pretty much always have the lensing
device, or devices, hanging around your solar
system anyway ready for some minor reconfiguration
as a weapon that you could jam way more power
through.
So that’s our look at Nicoll-Dyson Beams
and another look at an aspect of Dyson Spheres
that’s pretty much inherent to them all.
As we’ve seen, you can use them to really
increase your effective living area and energy
access, you can use them to move planets and
solar systems, you can sue them for transmutation
of elements to just run great big supercolliders
if you’ve got no better way of turning hydrogen
into useful construction materials, and now
we see you can use them to propel space ships
and as a devastating weapon.
We’ll get to the channel update in a moment,
just as a headsup next week is going to be
the Megastructures again as we take a look
at Matrioshka Brains, another type of Dyson
Sphere where we basically use a star as a
giant computer. After that I’m not sure,
and so we do have a poll this week for the
next video.
Here are the topics to pick from, a return
to the Habitable Planets series with a look
at Panthallassic Planets, also known as Water
Worlds. A trip back to more modern times to
look at Arcologies, the concept for giant
structures on Earth that make Skyscraper look
small, or Ecumenpolises, giant world spanning
cities like we see in Star Wars imperial capital
of Coruscant or Isaac Asimov’s planet of
Trantor from the Foundation Series, these
would probably include arcologies, but I don’t
think we need to cover them first to do it
and I can always wrap them in to this video
if folks prefer.
Or we can hop back to the Faster Than Light
Series for our delayed look at Wormholes.
Last option is to jump way ahead in time to
the end of Universe to look at civilization
after all the star have died and nothing is
left but black holes, in the Black Hole Farming
video. You guys vote, I’ll go with that.
Okay onto the Channel update. I picked this
video and it’s follow up for next week,
Matrioshka Brains, because the megastructures
series in general tends to be my most familiar
ground and usually are shorter videos, and
with all the new things for the channel combined
with me being very busy next week I wanted
to go for videos that I could be sure I could
get done in that time. No risk of getting
writer’s block on the script, and the videos
have been in the queue for a bit and I do
want to clear the queue after skipping one
week then having an unscheduled one after
that.
The response to my request last week for help
and suggestions for the channel was overwhelming,
and from a personal perspective it was very
uplifting.
I know a lot folks say their audience is the
best in the world, and many probably even
mean it, but it is nice to get objective proof,
and the commenting and interaction on this
channel is higher than most channels with
ten times the views and subscribers. So we
win on quantity and we certainly win on quality,
the questions and comments are almost universally
polite and thoughtful, and I genuinely enjoy
reading and responding to them.
You’re a great bunch and you make creating
these videos a lot of fun for me. I don’t
think ‘thank you’ can really express the
level of appreciation I have for that, but
there it is.
Okay so what’s changing? The simple answer
is nothing, I accidentally gave some of you
the impression last week I was thinking about
moving or closing up shop. What is happening
is we’re adding on features, some are definite,
some I’m still considering, and a lot of
them I’ll skip for now until the firm up.
I asked for ideas and I got tons of them sent
in. I asked for volunteers to help implement
them and got those too.
So first, we’ve got a website under construction,
that will be at IsaacArthur.net, and once
that’s up it will be linked in all the video
descriptions. I considered some sort of new
channel name and maybe we’ll go that route
one day but I couldn’t think of anything
accurate or that didn’t sound like a jingo
so I’ll just stick with my name for now.
As that gets built it will have all the videos
on it with FAQs and commentary and other features
as they emerge.
Second, some folks mentioned a preference
for being able to download the videos or just
the audio portion to better accommodate mobile
device and bandwidth and download limits,
and we’ll be doing that sooner than later
but it may be a few weeks and I haven’t
picked a method yet. How fast that gets done
will depend on available time so if anyone
is already familiar with the process for things
like itunes or soundcloud and has some free
time to help, let me know.
Third, I mentioned last time that the channel
has a Patreon account now, and the initial
wave was a very pleasant surprise, but I also
mentioned that they encourage you to do rewards
for patrons and after talking about this with
some of you, a suggestion that came up fairly
often was to raffle off the topic for a video
from among the patrons, where the winner gets
to pick the topic for a video, obviously within
certain guidelines. I’ll work out the details
and hopefully have that first contest before
the end of July. We’d probably do it once
a month.
In the tentative category, and of a similar
concept, I’ve had it suggested I might do
the occasionally sci-fi review and I kinda
like the idea of having a featured author
every so often. There’s already a lot of
great reviewers out there, but books do tend
to get neglected in video formats like this,
so I’m open to the notion of looking at
some of the classics from time to time.
I’m also always looking for graphics and
art submissions to be used on the channel,
that’s something you can never have too
much of, and I kind of like the idea of having
a featured artist every so often where we
can take 30 or 40 seconds out of video to
take a look at those and let you know where
to see more of their work, and maybe host
a gallery of channel art on the website.
If we go that route the first winner would
be Jakub, who kindly volunteered to do some
of the cover art for the channel, and you
can see more of his work by clicking on the
link in the video description.
Volunteer-wise we’re still looking for anyone
with a background in social media, especially
reddit, to help get the videos out there and
to help administrate any sort of forum or
facebook group the channel goes with. And
as always I really appreciate when folks share
the videos around.
Anyway that’s the situation as of now, there
some more but it’s not flushed out yet,
keep sending me ideas because they’ve been
great ones so far. More updates as they develop
in the next month.
As always questions and comments are welcome,
I may be a bit delayed answering them this
week since I need to get the next video ready
before I go off for a few days midweek for
a conference, but I will get to them. If you
enjoyed the video, hit the like button, share
it with others, and don’t forget to subscribe
for alerts for new videos.
Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you next
time!
