[voldacar]

Yeah any civilization capable of building a dyson swarm could probably develop technology to dissasemble a star and use its matter for a more efficient nuclear process. I'm not sure how you would practically go about doing that though, a dyson swarm at least is relatively simple (in principle) to construct

[ajkjk]

"Disassembling a star" has to actually be possible in principle for this line of reasoning to make any sense.

[ceejayoz]

Oh, we've plenty of evidence of that going on.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/03/study-theres-no-blac...

> "Our best interpretation so far is that we caught this binary system in a moment shortly after one of the stars had sucked the atmosphere off its companion star, said co-author Julia Bodensteiner, an ESO fellow in Germany. "This is a common phenomenon in close binary systems, sometimes referred to as 'stellar vampirism' in the press. While the donor star was stripped of some of its material, the recipient star began to spin more rapidly."

[ajkjk]

Well, that's by another star, not by engineering.

[est31]

There are some sources that discuss the idea here:

https://sites.google.com/view/sources-stellar-engines https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3y8AIEX_dU

[voldacar]

the Caplan engine is quite nice! Assuming there is no need to move the solar system, it seems advantageous to dispense with the dyson sphere and just use the mechanism described to siphon out mass from the sun to directly power fusion reactors. Even a perfect dyson sphere captures <1% of the energy released by the sun's nuclear fusion.