[airborne]

In 1960 Dyson suggested that an 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. The stellar energy would be reradiated at a much lower temperature.

But where would we find all this material??

Oh yeah . . . .

[SunkenCiv]

The mass needed for a Dyson sphere *may* be present in the Solar System (though I doubt it), but if a lot of that mass is gas or water (which isn’t unlikely, considering the gas giants are very low density, and Jupiter is more than half the mass of the known satellites of the Sun), even assuming energy exists to gather it all to an orbit untroubled by existing bodies (such as the Earth, which we’ll need in the meantime), there just isn’t enough material. Larry Niven’s estimate of the mass needed to build just his ringworld was equal to Jupiter, and its orbit radius is 1 AU.