No, but something related to it. A Dyson sphere is a structure built around a star (our sun, for instance) that captures the star’s energy output for the use of the civilization that built the sphere.
Elon Musk, and his SpaceX company, are building a constellation of satellites—some 42,000 of them by the end game—in Earth orbit for the purpose of producing a global Internet, and one that’s separate from the terrestrial net.
Which brings me to my speculation.
Imagine a similar-sized collection of satellites in higher orbit, say just above geosync, so as to avoid interfering with the satellites already there and which have their own critical purposes. Of course, at those altitudes, there’d be room for a much larger constellation of satellites.
These satellites, though, would be solar collectors, whose purpose would be to…capture our sun’s energy output for our use. It’s straightforward and well-established technology to convert the sun’s output to electricity or to microwave energy or to energy of any wavelength we might find useful; although, it’s always useful to increase the efficiency of the conversion.
It is too early to know we can safely beam all that energy to Earth’s surface for terrestrial uses (even neglecting atmospheric- and weather-related losses). We don’t yet have a good handle on the effects of pumping all that energy through the atmosphere on that atmosphere, much less on what it does to animal or plant life that happen to be in or pass through the transmission beams. We also haven’t assessed the effects of those energy transmissions as they pass through orbiting satellites.
However.
We’re returning to the moon, and that body has lots of industrial potential, which will have lots of energy needs. Might it be cheaper to build such a constellation and beam the energy to the moon’s environs than to build collectors on the moon’s surface or in orbit around the moon?
The concept works for Mars, too, only we’d want the constellations in orbit around Mars.
And the asteroid built….
