Building an artificial Sun

[happyplayer321]

so imagine in the very far future, either we or another civilization decided to capture the entire output of the sun with a Dyson sphere.

very cool.

but what if you wanted to build your own star? I'm not talking like building a reactor on earth and creating a "mini-star", but rather i mean like collecting the gasses from gas giants and pooling them together onto a gravitational core like a dead planet till you had enough material that it would start the natural process of fusion?

OF COURSE I know it is possible and probably not at all necessary for any purpose realistically, but I can imagine in the far future some super powerful species decides to build its own solar real-estate in the middle of interstellar space.

 

just some shower-thoughts I had 

[kerbiloid]

When you can operate with star scale energies and masses, you need no stars and planets long ago.

[cubinator]

If I was making a star, I'd set up some kind of network of massive galactic leaf blowers around a cloud of interstellar dust, and try to trigger gravitational collapse by inducing shockwaves in the gas and pushing it into itself. It would be pretty much the same as natural star formation, except it would be helped along by artificial triggers. 

The leaf-blower would be some kind of extreme high-output "gas gun" that would probably have to be powered by a star itself. Maybe you could channel the magnetic field of the star into pointing the solar wind in a certain direction, or even induce a nova-like explosion on the surface of the star that would push out an energy burst that could be funneled towards a particular target.

Edited April 2, 2021 by cubinator

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

3 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

When you can operate with star scale energies and masses, you need no stars and planets long ago.

Sounds like 'Q' theory 

 

[Piscator]

Well, why make a star when there are already literally billions of them? Travelling a couple of light years to find a suitable one seems not all that complicated compared to building one from scratch.

[happyplayer321]

3 hours ago, Piscator said:

Well, why make a star when there are already literally billions of them? Travelling a couple of light years to find a suitable one seems not all that complicated compared to building one from scratch.

i was thinking like either so far in the future that we are nearing heat death, or you just want pristine conditions for life or energy gathering or both or whatever a super advanced civilization would want

[kerbiloid]

8 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Sounds like 'Q' theory 

Sounds like basic arithmetics.

[MKI]

On 4/2/2021 at 5:45 PM, happyplayer321 said:

i was thinking like either so far in the future that we are nearing heat death, or you just want pristine conditions for life or energy gathering or both or whatever a super advanced civilization would want

Under this scenario wouldn't it be easier to find and move to a habitable star, rather than build a star where you are?

The issue isn't so much the practicality of building a star where you want it, and more the what the "where" is defined as. If the "where" is as simple as "I need a star", then it makes more sense to move to that where, rather than build that "where" by building a star.

Now if you can't find a habitable star to leverage, your in a whole other problem, IE heat death universe. In this scenario there isn't really any material to build a star, or if there is, it requires a ton of energy to gather all that material to build one. Maybe on a small hypothetical scale it might work, where you throw gas giants together until you get enough mass to support sustainable fusion, but I'd assume you'd have to find these planets and gather them together, which might be a huge pain and cost a lot of energy.

 

The entire idea reminds me of "2010 The year we make contact",

Spoiler

where they increase the mass of Jupiter until it turns into a second sun, which then thaws Europa so it can support non-aquatic life, at the cost of killing the Jovian life forms. 

 

 

 

Edited April 5, 2021 by MKI