http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DysonSphere

note i.e. It's huge. Image by AdamBurn Image not to scale.

really advanced planetary civilization. They've used up all their fuels, they depend on solar power. An enormous amount of energy is generated by the local star, but most of the star's light doesn't fall on their planet. So perhaps, they would build a shell, to surround their star, and harvest every photon of sunlight. Such beings, such civilizations, would bear little resemblance to anything we know." Carl Sagan, describing the Dyson Sphere in a nutshell , describing the Dyson Sphere in a nutshell "Imagine the energy crisis of aadvanced planetary civilization. They've used up all their fuels, they depend on solar power. An enormous amount of energy is generated by the local star, but most of the star's light doesn't fall on their planet. So perhaps, they would build a shell, to surround their star, and harvest every photon of sunlight. Such beings, such civilizations, would bear little resemblance to anything we know."

Advertisement:

Big Dumb Object or Planet Spaceship not big enough for you? Look no further. Sci-Fi authors have made solar-system-sized artifacts into a trope of their own. A prime example to illustrate how Science-Fiction Writers Have No Sense of Scale.

The Trope Namer is physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, who theorized in a 1959 scientific paper that, given the ever-increasing demand for energy typical of industrial civilization, Sufficiently Advanced Aliens might need to capture all the energy radiating from a star.

While Dyson himself originally saw his concept as a network of many separate orbiting habitats and solar power-stations, most media depictions show a single continuous solid sphere completely enclosing its star. This misconception is an acute case of Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale. Constructing such an artifact would probably bring a civilization up to at least 2.0 on the Kardashev scale.

Advertisement:

The technologies and resources needed to do it raise the question of whether a race that could build one would still need it. It has been estimated that constructing the sphere would require the energy equivalent of the lifetimes of several stars AND the raw materials of more than the entire solar system, which rather defeats the purpose of the initial construction.note But note that this is based on the assumption that the sphere has a radius of 1 astronomical unit (the distance between the Earth and the Sun). A smaller sphere would require less energy and materials to build.

The Ringworld concept was created by science fiction author Larry Niven as a mid-point between this and a true planet because, as Niven put it in his essay Bigger Than Worlds (a discussion of Ring World Planets, Dyson Spheres, and other possible macrostructures), "I like being able to see the stars at night". Something that a Dyson Sphere prevents.

Advertisement:

This trope doesn't require an object to block all light from the star, but it does require construction on that scale. To be a Dyson Sphere, the artifact must:

Be an artificial structure. Naturally-occuring structures don't count, though a nest built by a Space Whale would. Contain a star inside it. That is, a giant ball of gas lit by stable nuclear fusion initiated by the pressure on its core due to its own gravity, (not some little glowing speck, a mythological god with a lantern, or Bruce Willis, OK?) Contain an inside surface where people can survive (possibly with space suits) without being burnt to a crisp by the star. Be at least the size of a small solar system. Typically we're talking 100 million kilometers or more.

In fiction, Dyson Spheres tend to be abandoned and uninhabited. If they are inhabited, the residents are usually not at a tech level capable of building the sphere. This is because, if your protagonists run into a sphere whose residents are in the full flower of their technological might, they and their petty problems promptly get overwhelmed.

See the Analysis page for more information about how such an object might work in the real world.

Subtrope of Hollow World. Compare Big Dumb Object and Planet Spaceship. Not to be confused with the Dyson Ball, which is part of a vacuum cleaner.

Examples:

open/close all folders

Anime & Manga

Comic Books

New Mutants, an X-Men spin-off from Marvel Comics, featured a Dyson Sphere belonging to Cannonball's then-girlfriend, Lila Cheney. It had actually been built and abandoned by unknown aliens, but Lila (whose power is intergalactic teleportation) found it and claimed it as her base of operations. Since she can only teleport over intergalactic distances, any short-range travel requires a double teleport, with the Dyson Sphere being a convenient transit point. Thought the Dyson sphere is featured in the opening and publicity artworks as a nice, yellow-greenish background

In New Avengers Vol 3, Tony Stark pays aliens to build a Dyson Sphere for him as part of a alternate world destroying weapon he is preparing. Only a very small part of it is constructed before Tony is forced to fire the weapon to take out an invading alien fleet, which destroys the construction.

Guardians of the Galaxy: The modern-day team visits one early on in vol 2., when a fissure in time and space opens up there. They arrive and find that the locals aren't there. And when they do find them, they really wish they hadn't. Note that only the tiniest fraction of the sphere's surface was inhabited, protected from the local star by a shell, which the team had to open to get rid of what they found. The trouble with that started when they wound up a good distance away from the control panel required to re-seal the shell.

Tom Strong supporting character Johnny Future comes from a more realistic one, known as the Crepusculum, a cloud of space colonies orbiting a dying sun.

Transmetropolitan has an inversion: instead of building the sphere around the Sun, the planet Mercury was covered in solar panels in order to supply the gargantuan energy needs of Earth.

Fan Works

In Undocumented Features, the Republic of Zeta Cygni makes its home in a Dyson Sphere (which happens to be home to one of the most blatant Shining Cities in written fiction).

Transcendent Humanity has one for the Sol System in order to make the best use of the sun's energy and raw materials. It's made abundantly clear that materials required for it made it necessary for humanity to take material from the sun itself, turning a G Class yellow dwarf sun into at the very least a K Class yellow (or orange) dwarf in building it.

Glorious Shotgun Princess: This is what Autochthon's worldform jouten

Films — Live-Action

The planet Nidavellir from Avengers: Infinity War is a Dyson sphere surrounding a neuron star whose energy is harnessed by dwarves to make magical weapons.

The MacGuffin in Men in Black: International turns out to be a star compressed into a handheld gun that's capable of destroying solar systems.

Literature

Live-Action TV

In Gene Roddenbery's Andromeda, the Magog Worldship is somewhat closer to the original concept of a Dyson Sphere but even more fantastic in some ways. It consists of twenty inter-connected planets surrounding an artificial sun. If the stresses involved in connecting twenty planet-sized bodies in stable orbits around a sun isn't enough, the entire thing could move.

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Relics", the ''Enterprise' encounters such a sphere note Actually misnamed by the writers, as what they encountered was a Dyson ''Shell'' , also postulated by Dyson, but distinct in that it is a complete shell instead of a spheroid cloud of solar collecting satellites far more advanced aliens, are astonished that anybody would be capable of building such a thing.

far more advanced aliens, are astonished that anybody would be capable of building such a thing. Doctor Who: The episode "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS" reveals that the TARDIS itself is a Dyson Sphere. The TARDIS is Bigger on the Inside, and one "room" contains AN ENTIRE STAR. A massive star frozen in time at the moment it collapses into a black hole. And the TARDIS uses that as a power source. That's what the Eye of Harmony is.

Tabletop Games

Video Games

Web Animation

Discussed in Kurzgesagt.

Web Comics

In Dreamwalk Journal the world of Cyeatea, with its immense jungle housing a peaceful culture of sexually-insatiable anthropoid insects and spiders, is apparently a habitat within a Dyson Sphere called Velveteen. However, there is only one reference to this in a related text piece.

Schlock Mercenary: The F'sherl-Ganni have built several of these. They call them "buuthandi", a shortened version of a F'sherl-Ganni phrase that roughly translates to "This was [expletive] expensive to build" (fully transliterated as "expensive and expensive-expensive [expletive] we built."). At one point, the characters gather a fleet to assault one. The author tried to depict them more realistically then a solid shell build around a star. In this setting Dyson Spheres (there are four, formerly five before one was destroyed) are constructed from a flexible material. They are practically bubbles around a star kept inflated by the solar wind. Habitats are anchored to the interior of the sphere. The setting also has widespread gravity generators, so that's not a problem either. Of course, when we say "more realistic"... the galaxy's general populace assumes the buuthandi to be more like the cloud or network of orbiting satellites envisioned by Dyson. One character goes nearly catatonic upon learning that they are fully contiguous. Much later, the "All-Star" is discovered, which is a massive solid sphere around a star. It is mostly a computer dedicated to holding all the virtual minds of trillions of inhabitants; they could upload every single person in the galaxy without going over forty-five percent capacity — from a starting point of 44%. note Nothing is directly said about the population size of the previously uploaded inhabitants, but at least some of that is 'overhead', and the use of "probability manifolds" It's implied that all the survivors of previous galactic epochs created Dyson spheres of some flavor or another to hide from the rest of the galaxy.

The Sluggy Freelance Punyverse is revealed to be contained in one.

Web Original

Many types appear in Orion's Arm. Most impressive is probably the suprastellar shell , a solid Dyson Sphere (actively supported) that people live on the outside of. The one and only solid Dyson Sphere which people live on the inside of is called "the Impossible Dyson" and exists only in a virtual reality.

Western Animation

Umbra, the Big Bad in the 1984 animated series Mighty Orbots, WAS a Dyson Sphere. He was the core of the Shadow Star, a world so large it contained its own internal sun.

In the Futurama episode, "Decision 3012", Richard Nixon wants to build a Dyson fence to keep alien immigrants out of the solar system rather than collect energy.

Real Life