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Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury

42 points by indy 4 hours ago | 30 comments

Reading the "endgame" section, and I feel that some serious thought ahould be given to what the replicator colony will do after it has finished dismantling Mercury.

uticus 4 hours ago

> The shell is not merely a strength structure; it is a fixed logistics skeleton. Its purpose is to provide: dense distributed launch/capture corridors large-scale routing geometry attachment points for high-temperature radiator fields buffering volume for material and coolant traffic alignment and vibration-control structure for the mature transport system...

Roger that

mrlonglong 20 minutes ago

"Shellworlds". With just two shells. As described in his books by Iain M. Banks.

rafterydj 2 hours ago

This reads like an LLM plagiarizing this video from Kurzgesagt:

https://youtu.be/pP44EPBMb8A?si=fSwWPOCnCsC1QEny

ethmarks 2 hours ago

Kurzgesagt didn't invent the concept of disassembling Mercury to build a Dyson swarm. Stuart Armstrong proposed it in a lecture in 2012[0].

[0]: https://youtu.be/zQTfuI-9jIo?si=3jwmhoB7zx6rclhb

0xf00ff00f 2 hours ago

Pretty sure the idea predates that lecture, it appears in Charles Stross' novel Accelerando from 2005 (which is based on short stories that were published years earlier).

choilive 3 hours ago

Bootstrapping an electronics supply chain on another planet seems harder than building the dyson swarm itself.

asdff 3 hours ago

Just let Claude figure it out

andrewflnr 4 hours ago

> The mirror fleet does not increase the total power available to the project; Mercury still intercepts only a fixed amount of sunlight.

I think I must be missing something important, because this doesn't make sense to me. If you put your mirrors in orbits where they don't block the dayside surface (sun-synchronous?), then they increase the total surface area receiving solar radiation.

Stefan-H 2 hours ago

Yeah, orbital mirrors essentially expand the radius of Mercury, increasing the sunlight available. Terrestrial mirrors would ensure that light makes it from the sunward side to the dark side of the planet.

restalis 29 minutes ago

Also, the kind of satellites that aren't much more than mirrors, even with today's knowledge, they can be designed to change their profile/surface and thus reduce the absorption of the incident radiation, if they'd had to cross the space between the sun and the sunlight collector areas.

nacozarina 4 hours ago

this seems to ignore the fact that Mercury is way too deep in Sol’s gravity well to be useful, all it’s looking at is Mercury mass.

Stefan-H 2 hours ago

Why does being so deep in the gravity well pose an issue? If you are assuming the Dyson swarm is intended to go back up the well then sure, but that isn't necessary.

ethmarks 2 hours ago

Could you elaborate? Why would being deep in the gravity well be a non-starter? I thought Mercury's proximity to Sol was a huge advantage because of the ample solar power which would make planet-side manufacturing easier.

thot_experiment 47 minutes ago

If someone can't be bothered to write it I can't be bothered to read it.

jmount 4 hours ago

I encourage Dyson sphere enthusiasts to listen to the interesting argument that Dyson spheres they may be deliberately designed as an "sounds neat but is impossible" filter joke, ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLzEX1TPBFM .

MarkusQ 3 hours ago

Sped through that, couldn't stomach the whole thing. Is there more to it than "argument by sneering dismissal"? (Basically, so far as I can tell, her point seems to be "this was intended as a joke to see if you're stupid, so if you believe it, you are, neener-neener!")

dist-epoch 3 hours ago

Somehow I new before clicking that it was going to be Angela.

Two years ago: AI does not exist but it will ruin everything anyway

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUrOxh_0leE

baddash 2 hours ago

1-6 years can't be realistic can it? does someone have a better estimate of how long this would take?

lorenzohess 2 hours ago

50-100 years default, 25-50 with Plan Mode, and down to ~10 if you use Opus 4.6 Max

ossicones 4 hours ago

Stuff like this is why I read HN

pndy 3 hours ago

What about orbital mechanics? Wouldn't that create issues with/for objects in the solar system?

trebligdivad 4 hours ago

Does Mercury not have any useful radioactive material to provide more power?

andrewflnr 4 hours ago

I guess it might. I wouldn't plan on it without a very detailed survey though, to say the least. Whereas solar is definitely right there. (And you still have to worry about cooling either way.)

NoMoreNicksLeft 2 hours ago

Are there reactor designs that could work up there? There's not much water for coolant.

ethmarks 2 hours ago

There are other substances that can be used for reactor coolant. Molten salt reactors are actually substantially more efficient than water-cooled reactors because they have a higher operating temperature. You can also use liquid metal as coolant, such as lead or bismuth.

alhazrod 3 hours ago

Please someone, send grey goo to Mercury.

LoganDark 4 hours ago

I am such a sucker for technical Aspie writing. I've seen it mistaken for LLM output many times but this is not that.

r-w 3 hours ago

> The shell is not merely a strength structure; it is a fixed logistics skeleton.

Ancalagon 4 hours ago

its not? how can you tell?