24 JAN 2015 by ideonexus

 Dyson VS Sagan on Nuclear Winter

I do not wish here to get into a technical argument about the details of nuclear winter. I will merely summarize my own struggles with the technical issues. I spent a few weeks in 1985 trying to make nuclear winter go away. The phrase "go away" here is used in the sense customary among scientists. To destroy a new theory, you try to find a simple situation where the theory predicts that something happens and you can prove that the same something does not happen. Then you say that the thing pr...
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01 JAN 2012 by ideonexus

 Dyson Spheres

The mathematician Freeman Dyson, of the Institute for Advanced Study, offers a scheme in which the planet Jupiter is broken down piece by piece, transported to the distance of the Earth from the Sun, and reconstructed into a spherical shell – a swarm of individual fragments revolving about the Sun. The advantage of Dyson's proposal is that all of the sunlight now wasted by not falling upon an inhabited planet could then be gainfully employed; and a population greatly in excess of that which...
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A hypothetical sphere surrounding a star, harnessing all of its power.