“n advanced civilization inhabiting a solar system might break up the planets into very small planetoids or pebbles to form a loose shell that would collect all the light coming from the star. The shell of planetoids would vastly increase the available “habitable” area and absorb all of the visible light. “
Moties?
Actually the tech for a dyson swarm is easily within reach for us, all you need is machines that make more power capturing satelites to power the factories that build more more factories to make more power satelites. Several maufacturing bases on Mercury could eventually spread over the surface of mercury and then disassemble the whole planet Mercury to make such a swarm that would surround the sun and capture most all of the sun’s energy output.
Once we figure out automated space mining and fabrication it is pretty much a done deal.
Dyson’s agenda was political (what a surprise) — the stated purpose for such a structure would be to use absolutely every bit of energy coming from the Sun.
No possible rationale is given for needing that amount of, well, lebensraum.
What it does is point to the need for higher-density forms of electricity generation.
When it gets to the point (thousands of years?) where the price of energy can be expected to rise and bring about social collapse (not the artificial rise being engineered by Zero and his Saudi masters) the construction of huge-ass photovoltaic arrays in space — and the needed infrastructure to deliver the electricity to our surface — will have been around a while.