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You have seen pictures of solar panel farms and large heat sinks that dissipate the “excess” energy produced by a transformer.

Several engineers have proposed placing large solar panel farms, the size of Texas, on the surface of the Moon, in an effort to collect as much “free” solar energy that is otherwise irradiated into the interstellar medium. The energy would then be beamed back to Earth (via microwaves) and used to power our cornucopia of electrical devices.

While the feasibility and practicality of this concept is scientifically doable and economically desirable (which is not the same thing as economically viable), some other far-thinking engineers have an even more grandiose plan.

What if you built a free-floating array of solar panels near the orbit of Venus or Mercury? What if this array was the size of not just Texas, but an entire planet? And what if you built an array that fully enclosed the Sun?

Doable? Well, in order to supply the building materials, you would first need to deconstruct and mine a large asteroid or perhaps parts of another planet. This structure is known as a Dyson Sphere and has several different variations, all of which involve capturing the solar energy and converting it to useful, productive means.

And if this was possible to construct, a more complex structure is something called a Matrioshka brain.

You have undoubtedly seen a Russian Matrioshka doll, it’s the doll-within-a-doll. One doll nested inside another, which is nested inside another.

So, imagine several Dyson Spheres nested inside one another. If done efficiently, the end result is the shell closest to the Sun would be extraordinarily hot, whereas the one furthest out is about as cold as “space” itself (near absolute zero).

In turn, engineers could use the temperature variation to extract energy and convert it into some kind of usable means (e.g. Stirling engines).

The end goal in the minds Matrioshka Brain theorists is that you could set up an elaborate space station on these shells. The space station could house biological occupants or simply a series of computers which would spend their time calculating and communicating with one another — a gigantic server farm called “computronium.”

These ideas are presented in numerous works of Hard SciFi, however their existence becomes more plausible every year. For instance, material such as titanium carbide and aluminum oxide can withstand temperatures in the 2000+ °K. While the surface of the Sun is approximately 5700 °K, a shell, comprised of these metals and located a distance equivalent to the orbit of Mercury or Venus could withstand the intense temperatures radiated from the solar mass.

For more, be sure to read Robert Bradbury’s detailed paper on Matrioshka Brains.