Study Suggests Dyson Swarms May Be Physically Impossible

When an old an distinguished physicist tells you what is possible he is almost cetainly right, when he tells you something is impossible he is almost cetainly wrong -Arthur C Clarke

SO the premise of this paper is if you build the dumbest dyson swarm possible and then don't maintain it it will fail over several thousand years due to kessler syndrome. Sure i can see that. the obvious solution to this is don't do that. have active nodes and maintenance ships problem solved. why would you assume a dyson swarm would be completely passive and not have automated maintenance.

The title is wrong: Dyson Swarms are physically possible but are not passively stable. Which is always to be expected in any system that is fundamentally inhomogeneous. However, the energy harnessed by the swarm would surely be used to measure and correct the positions and relative velocities of all the satellites... robotics and automation being the core property of an advanced civilization.

My problem with these kinds of studies is that we don't know what technologically would be possible if we actually reached the level of building a Dyson swarm. It's like a caveman saying "well even if we could ride our horses into the sky we'd eventually die of suffocation so it's totally impossible to go to the moon".

You might want to look into "statites". They use radiation pressure to remain in a stationary position around a star. No reaction thrusters needed since they can control their position and orientation by altering the reflectivity of their surface.

"The Ringworld is unstable!" On the other hand, I'd expect an extremely advanced civilization would have made the maintenance of basic things like orbits would be entirely automated, possibly for billions of years.

If you have the technology to build a megastructure like a Dyson Swarms, you probably also have the ability to solve the problem that would make you want to build a megastructure in the first place.

Yeah I always wondered how the hell would they ever transfer the energy from the sphere to where it's needed.

Dyson spheres are part of the human imagination.

Most of the time when I hear "Dyson swarm", it's (usually explicitly) implied to not be a swarm of tiny satellites, but a swarm of habitats. Habitats with both inhabitants to perform maintenance and engines to move around/orbit correct.