Dyson Sphere

From Earth Central

It is a type of megastructure hypothesized by physicists in the late 20th century designed to harvest the energy of a star. It marks the transition from a Type I to Type II civilization on the Kardashev scale. Although its primary function is to collect solar output, it can also be used as habitation space or a computing node for higher level AIs. In either case, there would be a tremendous amount of space due to the sheer surface area available, typically 2.72E17 square kilometers (around 550 million times the surface area of the Earth) for a sphere with a radius of 1 AU (149.60E6 km). Of course such megastructure can only be built with extremely strong materials. Recently, the Polity has begun construction of such a project, which may indicate the beginning of apotheosis for an AI such as Earth Central or Jerusalem.