DYSON SPHERE
A Dyson Sphere is a hypothetical megastructure described by Freeman Dyson in a short paper published in the journal Science entitled "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infra-Red Radiation". It is an artificial hollow sphere of matter around a star designed to capture almost all of the star's radiated energy for the use of industry. Although Dyson is credited with being the first to formalize and popularize the concept of the Dyson sphere, Dyson himself got the idea in 1945 from a science fiction novel titled Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. The original proposal by Dyson did not go into much detail about how a Dyson sphere would be constructed, focusing instead on the more fundamental issue of how an advanced civilization could expand its energy production to the maximum possible for a given solar system.
The Dyson Sphere Paradox
One curious aspect of any Dyson Sphere is the speculation that a civilization capable of creating such a mammoth cocoon would have already developed technology more advanced than the sphere itself. This paradox means that the creation of any Dyson Sphere, aside from being an astoundingly greedy endeavor, would be obsolete even before construction began.
The Dyson Sphere in SciFi
Dyson spheres are popular in science fiction. For example, In the fictional world of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a Dyson Sphere is found in the episode "Relics".
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