"Dyson sphere? Boooring. Every type 1 baby species always comes up with the same idea, ‘hey lets just surround a star with mirrors and directly harvest the energy! What could possibly go wrong?’ Besides the fact your 80% of the way towards turning the star into a fucking bomb (don’t ask how we found that out), its basic ass vanilla shit.
Look, you don’t progress to a type three civilization by being uncreative hacks. Screw efficiency, the universe is our canvas and this is our art. No, we translocate entire water world planets and ice comets bigger than most moons using manufactured wormholes, hurl them into a designated star and use the steam produced to turn billions of giant turbines locked in orbit around the star. We then convert the mechanical energy to electromagnetic radiation pulses more powerful than neutron star pulsars and reflect them to nearby populated systems with mirrors. Take notes, monkeys."
I put together a thing for a Starfinder session where this one civilization needed a stupid amount of power in order to save their planet from a coming catastrophe. I based it on a laser propulsion method with black holes:
In short, you shoot a laser at a black hole, and it whips around and picks up energy (blue shifting it). When it comes back at you, you get more energy than you put into the original beam (the extra coming from the black hole itself, of course). The original proposal was for propulsion, but you should be able to do it for power, as well.
I guess the only thing missing was making it heat up water to turn a turbine.
When writing the “turning the star into a fucking bomb” bit I was actually thinking about the black hole bomb same process as you describe but instead of extracting the energy or momentum it gets fed back into the system forming a runaway feedback loop leading to super nova level explosion. I doubted that a fellow science nerd on lemmy would see this comment and notice the slight error, but I could also see a real scenario where you completely cover a star with mirrors to the point its own energy is radiated back into itself forming a similar feedback loop causing it to explode.
A type three civilization capable of generating wormholes and changing universal constants within a bubble of localized space light-years in diameter when a type 1er ask them how they do anything:
"Dyson sphere? Boooring. Every type 1 baby species always comes up with the same idea, ‘hey lets just surround a star with mirrors and directly harvest the energy! What could possibly go wrong?’ Besides the fact your 80% of the way towards turning the star into a fucking bomb (don’t ask how we found that out), its basic ass vanilla shit.
Look, you don’t progress to a type three civilization by being uncreative hacks. Screw efficiency, the universe is our canvas and this is our art. No, we translocate entire water world planets and ice comets bigger than most moons using manufactured wormholes, hurl them into a designated star and use the steam produced to turn billions of giant turbines locked in orbit around the star. We then convert the mechanical energy to electromagnetic radiation pulses more powerful than neutron star pulsars and reflect them to nearby populated systems with mirrors. Take notes, monkeys."
I put together a thing for a Starfinder session where this one civilization needed a stupid amount of power in order to save their planet from a coming catastrophe. I based it on a laser propulsion method with black holes:
https://www.livescience.com/65005-black-hole-halo-drive-laser.html
In short, you shoot a laser at a black hole, and it whips around and picks up energy (blue shifting it). When it comes back at you, you get more energy than you put into the original beam (the extra coming from the black hole itself, of course). The original proposal was for propulsion, but you should be able to do it for power, as well.
I guess the only thing missing was making it heat up water to turn a turbine.
When writing the “turning the star into a fucking bomb” bit I was actually thinking about the black hole bomb same process as you describe but instead of extracting the energy or momentum it gets fed back into the system forming a runaway feedback loop leading to super nova level explosion. I doubted that a fellow science nerd on lemmy would see this comment and notice the slight error, but I could also see a real scenario where you completely cover a star with mirrors to the point its own energy is radiated back into itself forming a similar feedback loop causing it to explode.
How would you not move the turbine by hitting it with a jet of million-degree steam?
A type three civilization capable of generating wormholes and changing universal constants within a bubble of localized space light-years in diameter when a type 1er ask them how they do anything:
"Graviton stabilizers, tethers, oh and
Any other questions?"
What. Did. You. Do‽
“We did your mom, in every timeline and parallel universe where you were born too just to flex.”
This almost gave me conniptions