That’s the face of our star, the Sun, based on a collection of pictures from NASA’s Solar Observing spacecraft, SOHO.

Right now it’s a very turbulent star as it approaches its Solar Maximum in 2025/2026. This is the 25th Solar Cycle since regular observations and recordings began in 1755, and it was expected to be as weak SC 24.

Wrong.

Sol has been going apeshit recently, with solar flares and CME’s (Coronal Mass Ejections) that have been lighting up the skies with the Northern and Southern lights pushing beyond their usual, visual areas. It seems to have effected the Northern Lights more, with them being seen as far south as the Shenendoah Valley in Virginia, in a replay of scenes from 1862 after the Battle of Fredericksburg:

Befitting scene! Who would die a nobler death, or dream of more glorious burial? Dead for their country’s honor, and lighted to burial by the meteor splendors of their Northern home!” – Lieutenant Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

But the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis can be portents of danger, almost as if in the old terrors of primitives who witnessed them.

Suddenly, [British astronomer Richard Christian] Carrington spotted what he described as “two patches of intensely bright and white light” erupting from the sunspots. Five minutes later the fireballs vanished, but within hours their impact would be felt across the globe.

That night, telegraph communications around the world began to fail; there were reports of sparks showering from telegraph machines, shocking operators and setting papers ablaze. All over the planet, colorful auroras illuminated the nighttime skies, glowing so brightly that birds began to chirp…

The impact of such a storm on today’s densely crowded electronic world would be very bad. And it almost happened earlier this year, when a massive CME, was detected escaping from the Sun March 12, 2023.

What happened on March 12 was similar to the 1859 outburst – only worse. Early estimates suggest that this explosion was ten to a hundred times more powerful than the one of 1859. Such events – if not quite so extreme — are not uncommon. One serious difference from 1859 was that this explosion took place on the side of the sun facing away from earth. If it had been facing in our direction, if the earth had borne the full brunt of that blast.

We almost literally dodged a bullet, and judging from that graph there’s plenty more to come.

Of course if Human Civilisation spreads around the Solar System it will increase the odds of getting hit by such a thing, especially when you consider that Mars – which is the number 1 planetary target for a human colony (in more than just the mind of Elon Musk) – doesn’t even have a magnetic field for a shield as the Earth does,

And what of artificial worlds, like the ones described in To rouse the spirit of the Earth, and move the rolling stars? What protection would they have?

Or how about a Dyson Sphere? An artificial structure built to mostly enclose the Sun and capture most of its energy. The idea is named after the physicist Freeman Dyson and it’s played a part in some Science Fiction stories (but not Movies), notably Larry Niven’s Ringworld series: but even that posited only one ring around a star, providing quadrillions of square miles of living space.

Over at ArsTechnica a theoretical cosmologist, Paul Sutter, decided to have a crack at figuring out what it would take to build a Dyson Sphere – admitting that he’s not an engineer and ignoring the non-existent technologies required.

It would require tearing our existing planets apart and, in a sense, spreading them out into these “bands” of rock and metal spinning around the Sun. Knowing his limitations and that of futurology, he looks purely at the basic feasibility in terms of the energy required to pull a planet apart under its gravitational force – the binding energy on each atom – so you can use all the stuff to build that slim ribbon around the star (and assuming it’s in the same orbit):

For the Earth, our binding energy is somewhere around 2.5×1032 Joules. To give you some perspective, every year, the entirety of humanity consumes around a mere 5×1020 Joules—a trillion times smaller.
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If we assume our shell has a thickness of 1 kilometer, that will give us a surface area equal to nearly 2,000 Earths… that’s an enormous improvement from what we can get from a fully bound planet. Our sun blasts out about 3.8×1026 Joules of energy every single second. If we assume that our energy conversion process is 10 percent efficient, capturing even that tiny fraction allows us to recover our binding energy expenditure in only 60,000 years. Considering the scale of mega-engineering that we’re operating at, that’s not so bad.
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If we can shrink the panel thickness to just one meter and increase the efficiency to 90 percent, we can pay back our energy investment in a handful of years. From then on, it’s just gravy.

He runs the numbers on the other planets also, since we likely would not want to tear apart our only home in the beginning. However moving Mercury out is not worth it. Jupiter on the other hand…

Moving Jupiter to the same orbit—or at least the rocky bits at its center; we can leave the hydrogen and helium to drift)—costs an enormous amount of energy, around 1034 Joules. But for our efforts, we could cover almost 20 percent of the sun. It would still take us over a million years to see a positive return on investment, but after that, it would be totally worth it.

Meh. At this stage I’m more into building a Space Ark and heading for planets around other stars, even if we can only get to 10% light speed.

When it comes to resources though, nothing beats a government intent on one thing. The Apollo Program and the Manhattan Project are great examples, but recently I came across another, much smaller example – if you consider billions of dollars to be small, and we seem to do that nowadays.

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990 after more than a decade of development, and billions of dollars. Its core was a huge, 2.4m-wide mirror and a mistake in building that, not discovered until after launch, almost doomed the machine. But a fix was developed, effectively a set of eyeglasses were installed, replacing one of the detectors, and it’s been all good ever since. However, it can’t last too many more years so plans are afoot to replace it. With the even more complex (two decade development) James Webb telescope project done and dusted (Astronomy’s $10 billion Christmas Present), the Hubble replacement is back in scope.

So, another decade and more billions of dollars of spending? Well certainly, but in 2011 NASA got a call they never expected that could save them money. That call came from another US government agency, the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office), the one that builds and operates spy satellites, and boy did they have a deal for NASA:

Sitting in a warehouse in upstate New York were two mirrors, similar to the one on the Hubble Space Telescope, that the NRO seemingly had no use for. The agency offered the mirrors to NASA free of charge.

To give you a sense of just how surreal this is, imagine all of the time, money, and engineering that went into designing and launching the JWST. Now imagine that a spy agency not only had two more JWST-class instruments, but didn’t even need them anymore.

AYFKM? Your government dollars at work. Nice to see that at least they had the sense not to waste it. You also have to wonder what the hell they’ve got now that they can discard tools they’ve spent billions developing.

Other things on such a telescope also cost billions but with savings pocketed NASA is looking at launching the first one in 2026/27 where it will essentially act as “a hundred Hubbles” at a time. 

Funnily enough NASA also has some very basic examples of where money has not been spent, and it’s on the ground of Cape Canaveral, where they’re apparently still stuck with all the results of the spending boom of 1960’s Apollo, even as the growth in launches stretches The World’s Busiest Spaceport:

“We haven’t seen this kind of space activity since the 1960s,” said Col. James Horne, deputy director of launch and range operations for the Space Force’s Space Systems Command… “Everyone knows that launches are increasing,” he said at the Space Mobility conference in Orlando Feb. 21. “What’s shocking is how fast they’re increasing.”
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Those issues extend to mundane, yet important, services like the power grid and sewer lines…. “Our roads are not adequate to support how we transport things back and forth across KSC and the Cape,” Horne said. Some bridges can’t be used, he added, because they can’t support the loads of vehicles transporting rockets or spacecraft.

Mundane stuff, but when you’ve got SpaceX building a Starship-capable launch pad (200m high) it’s a challenge for a place that has long moved at the pace of military and other government contracts, and the whole funding concept is outdated now that commercial business dwarfs government. And there’s a weird gap where there’s Federal funding for all types of transport infrastructure, except space.

As usual with government a breaking point will have to be reached before things change.