Interesting article, thanks for posting.

I am not sure what the benefit of a Dyson sphere would be, unless we were somehow living on the sphere, which even then would be a pretty hellish environment. If we were still on Earth, or anywhere else physically separate from the sphere, how would the energy captured be transmitted to us? No known method, other than as already exists by sunlight, as far as I know.

Would there be a hole in the sphere to allow sunlight to Earth?!?

In theory, with enough intelligent satellites flying around the sun, it would probably be possible to increase the amount of sunlight towards Earth, thus increasing the amount of energy we receive, but that would surely cause extreme global warming, which at the moment we seem to have a problem with.

So I can’t see the point.

The reason Mr Dyson will have directed his extraordinary intellect towards thinking about such a thing is that there would have been generous funding for such an activity, as there was also for the equally impractical Orion project, for which he became infamous.

Why don’t we see significant funding on offer to sort out our immediate and urgent problems on Earth? Like, on the implementation of industrial scale solar energy around the world, to replace fossil fuel consumption?

There is more than enough sunlight to do that. What we seem to be short of is the funding to do it.

With that done, we would have limitless free energy / wealth, and freedom to engage seriously in world scale projects like this one, where concept tested to be possible, for the longer term in space projects.

Humanity has to break out of the loop of working for profit, and start working for life instead, so that we might survive and enjoy life.

Don’t get me wrong, I love science fiction, probably more than anyone. But we should use it to educate ourselves on how best to handle immediate previously un-encountered existential problems, rather than get distracted worrying about things that might happen way in the future, otherwise we probably will not survive long enough as a species to worry about anything at all.