>The outermost layers should be at the background temperature and effectively invisible via infrared, unless they occlude something behind them.
This outermost shell would be the least powerful but also the most materially expensive to construct, due to size.
It is incredibly unlikely that a culture would want to absorb 100% of a suns energy using this method, rather than losing a few shells and not having to spend the exponentially increasing cost of new shells. Only way this works is if a species has figured out how to not have to worry about the laws of physics, in which case, why are they bothering with locating it around a specific star in the first place?
abbersz t1_irw6ljs wrote
Reply to comment by [deleted] in The vast majority of the 150-400 billion stars in the Milky Way haven't been directly detected. Alpha Centauri is the nearest known star to Sol. What is the probability that there are nearer stars that remain undiscovered? by [deleted]
>The outermost layers should be at the background temperature and effectively invisible via infrared, unless they occlude something behind them.
This outermost shell would be the least powerful but also the most materially expensive to construct, due to size.
It is incredibly unlikely that a culture would want to absorb 100% of a suns energy using this method, rather than losing a few shells and not having to spend the exponentially increasing cost of new shells. Only way this works is if a species has figured out how to not have to worry about the laws of physics, in which case, why are they bothering with locating it around a specific star in the first place?